█ INTRODUCTION
The face of homelessness is a harrowing experience that reflects our broken ecosystem and impacts all of us. One of the biggest contributing factors at hand is inaccessibility to housing. The number of homeless people is on the rise as the price of housing becoming increasingly unaffordable.
The homeless population in the city of Los Angeles is one of the largest in the nation with about 70,000 people living on the streets largely due to unaffordable housing. Currently, the average cost of a one-bedroom apartment is about $2,100 which makes it virtually impossible for people to make ends meet and afford to pay rent. LA Mayor Eric Garcetti declared homelessness a state of emergency and that the best solution is sustainable housing.
“Housing to me is the prism through which we refract almost every other issue. So if we’re talking about sustaining life in Los Angeles and California, traffic, the air we breathe, the poverty people experience, homelessness, even things like public safety, they’re all related to whether or not we can house people and house them in decent, clean, sustainable, affordable housing”
– Eric Garcetti
Garcetti has made a proposal to fund new and existing affordable housing on sites owned by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The city has aimed to build 100,000 units of housing by this year, and they have been ahead of schedule in 2018 with 68,000 units already being completed. Garcetti foresees the remaining units to be tiny homes built in the backyards of homeowners.
By using Los Angeles’s 10-year housing plan as a model, this web-case will be highlighting supportive sustainable housing’s role in combatting chronic homelessness in a way that achieves the four conditions just sustainability laid out by Julian Agyeman— where a society meets the needs of both present and future generations, improves our quality of life and well being, justice and equity, and lives within ecosystem limits.
Some other key themes that this web-case will consider are deep-rooted systematic issues such as discrimination towards race, ethnicity, age, disabilities and illnesses, sexual orientation, and gender that influence equal access to housing, as well as anti-homeless views and strategies like stereotyping and hostile architecture that fails to help solve the crisis and ultimately put homeless people in more harm’s way.
ABOUT ME
Hello, my name is Jaclyn Almeida. I am currently studying psychology at UMass Dartmouth after transferring from MassArt as a graphic design major. Both design and mental health are two of my biggest passions, and choosing my web-case project on sustainable housing for homeless people meets both of them; it involves mindfully using design strategies to positively impact the environment while simultaneously benefitting the well-being of homeless individuals by giving them a sense of community and providing them social equity, safety, and opportunity. I strongly believe that people experiencing homelessness should be respected as equal members of society who are just as deserving of basic human needs and quality of life.