According to the California Senate Housing Committee, on any given night in January 2020, there were more than 161,000 people living without shelter across the state, with 40 percent of them living in Los Angeles County. The number of unhoused people in California would only increase, growing to more than 170,000 today.

In its efforts to curb the spread of Covid among that population, which was especially vulnerable, the state found a new way to provide them with housing. Project Roomkey authorized it to lease individual rooms from underused hotels and motels to prevent the illness’s spread in shelters. Later in 2020, following the success of that program, the state evolved the initiative into Project Homekey, an emergency order which specifically endeavored to provide housing to those lacking shelter: Rather than leasing individual rooms, counties would be able to purchase entire motel and hotel properties and renovate them into living units.

Under phase one of Project Homekey, ten motels in L.A. County were repurposed. Round two, which began in 2021, maintained the program’s initial aims, but included at least one significant change. Rather than asking municipalities to be the property managers, the state would open the applications to nonprofit partners and developers.

“We decided that it makes more sense for the county to partner with developers who have expertise around affordable housing development and can share in the responsibilities, and ultimately be the owners,” says Elizabeth Ben-Ishai, L.A. County’s manager of housing and intergovernmental relations. “With round two, we had a competitive process to identify who would be the best partners for us.” They selected Hope the Mission—a local nonprofit working to end hunger, poverty, and homelessness—and as their design partner, Kadre Architects, led by its founder, Nerin Kadribegovic.

This year, two Los Angeles projects by Kadre opened as part of Homekey round two: The Alvarado in Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park, and more recently, The Woodlands in Woodland Hills, a suburb of L.A. Thinking through the tight budgets and deadlines to renovate the two properties, Kadribegovic tapped into his own lived experience: As a teenager, before immigrating to the United States, his family left their home in Bosnia in the midst of the Bosnian War and lived in Croatia, he says, in a former hotel that had been transformed into temporary housing. “I empathize with the families who live in these,” he says.

The projects, each of which only took eight months to complete after being awarded funding, provided a unique set of challenges for Kadribegovic. “The way you’re awarded funds from the programs is they give you a certain amount of money per door,” he explains. “And then it’s your discretion as the architect to decide how to spend the funds.”

Though both The Alvarado and The Woodlands buildings were underused, the Alvarado’s was in bad shape, says Kadribegovic. Without enough funding to do a full rehab, his firm gave less attention to the outdoors, which didn’t have the space for community areas anyway, and instead focused on the interiors of its 45 units, where he and his team created custom furnishings; colorful graphics are superimposed on the site inside and out.

The Woodlands features 100 units of family-friendly interim housing surrounded by an expansive parking lot. The building was much more expensive to acquire than The Alvarado’s, says Kadribegovic, but the interiors were in much better condition to begin with. Kadre focused its efforts on transforming the parking lot, which Kadribegovic says was an eyesore and a heat island. Kadre decided to build a playspace, knowing that many of the families moving in would have young children. Timeline and funding restrictions meant they’d have to make-do with certain elements: Instead of a garden, for example, they added seating and planters, and brightly-colored paint similar to The Alvarado. The property acquisition also included a former Denny’s diner that the firm is planning to turn into a preschool for children living here.

“I would love to make this a real permeable garden,” Kadribegovic says. “Unfortunately, this is where strategy in making these things happen fast is so important, because you have to know the ins and outs of the permitting process. And if you make one decision, that can cause a delay in permitting; if we were to put in a real garden, you’re opening up a can of worms in terms of regulatory procedures. So we either could get people off the street, or take an extraordinarily long amount of time,” he says. Still, he hopes to secure funding for a garden.

These combined 145 units between The Alvarado and The Woodlands are only part of the nearly 560 interim housing beds and 40 permanent units completed by Kadre across the county, with more than 250 interim and permanent units on the way.

Project Homekey isn’t without its gaps: The funding provided is to acquire and renovate buildings, while capital for operations is really limited, says Ben-Ishai. The funding they do receive, she explains, comes from Measure H dollars—a quarter-cent sales tax in L.A. County passed by voters in 2017—which will have to be reapproved by voters in 2027. “One-time funding doesn’t work when you have an ongoing issue—the problem is not going to be addressed in the next five or ten years. We need ongoing funding to support people so that they can stay housed,” she says.

Still, Kadribegovic feels the endeavor is worthwhile. “I think dollar for dollar it’s the best use of money to provide housing simply because building a new unit costs $800,000. In the city of Los Angeles, and on average, Homekey units [cost] about $150,000 [each].” Ben-Ishai also noted that using state funding—a one-source stream for capital—eliminates the need to cobble together myriad funding sources, reducing the timeline from several years to only a few months, providing more people with housing within a shorter time period.

In some ways, the pandemic forced the state to acknowledge that humanitarian crises should be acted upon as such. And, as many large cities across the country struggle to shelter existing unhoused populations, there’s much that those municipalities can learn from Homekey, even if it’s still something of an experiment. “Having a sense of urgency, and learning we can make some major changes really quickly, given the right circumstances, is impactful” says Ben-Ishai. “We don’t want to wait for another pandemic to roll around. We have to treat it like a crisis and this model of converting hotels and motels is an appropriate response.”

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