No silver bullet to addressing the homeless crisis

What’s the best way to tackle the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles? By bringing together the best minds in finance, design, and community development to discuss innovative solutions.

We did just that at the Los Angeles Affordable Housing Development & Finance event hosted by Bisnow.

As a keynote speaker, I shared my experience on delivering multi-pronged solutions to the homeless crisis and how the Weingart Center is helping to meet the housing needs of those most vulnerable in our community.

I’ve always advocated for challenging orthodoxy and delivering solutions, not raising more problems. In the preliminary stages of creating permanent supportive housing, everyone told me I couldn’t build a large project and I kept asking why. But no one gave me a good answer. Then I got some great advice: “Propose the biggest thing you can and wait until someone tells you no.”

And no one said no.

That’s what makes the Weingart Center unique. We are service providers first. We offer interim and permanent supportive housing so that we can serve people. We need allies and advocacy if we are going to make real change happen in our city, and specifically, we need advocates of a multi-pronged approach to move people off the streets.

It’s not enough to build affordable housing — we need to build it and provide services that meet people where they are in their lives, with no judgment about whether their situation is “deserving” of help.