“We are so delighted to have someone like the Healthy Housing Foundation by AHF—someone with an aspirational mission to meaningfully address the affordable and homeless housing crisis in Los Angeles and elsewhere—be our first California unit,” said Jeff Wilson, PhD, Co-founder of Kasita.
“The housing crisis is at such a fever pitch that we need to utilize a range of unique housing options like Kasita offers if we are ever going to successfully address the issue. There are now 53,000 homeless individuals in Los Angeles and the latest estimates for HHH housing units is closing in on $500,000—for units that will not even be available until the end of 2019,” said AHF President Michael Weinstein. “The advantages of Kasita are myriad: the cost of just $89,000 per unit—five homeless individuals could be housed for less than the cost of one HHH housing unit; the small spacial footprint, the fact that they can be stacked and grouped to house many more individuals in a community in a small area, as well as the speed they can be built at—an average of just 90 to 120 days per unit. We are excited to take delivery of our—and California’s—first Kasita and grateful that Jeff Wilson and his team at Kasita think both outside and inside the box.”
For those who missed the Sunday event, HHF will offer guided tours of the Kasita through the month of July! Details can be found here.
The use of the 352 square foot Kasita home is just one of the many housing solutions the Healthy Housing Foundation Powered by AHF is using to address the affordable housing crisis in Los Angeles. AHF President Michael Weinstein also advocates the adaptive reuse of existing structures for housing, with HHF purchasing and renovating three Single-Room-Occupancy (SROs) hotels with a combined total of 380 units of what is now affordable housing over a period of just six months. Weinstein advocates for addressing the affordable housing crisis with a multi-solution approach including: complimenting the adaptive reuse of existing structures with the speedy design and construction of a residential campus in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, anticipated to break ground by the end of this year, championing the conversion of the now-defunct Parker Center to homeless housing, and the use of innovative and speedy micro homes, like Kasitas.
About Kasitas: A Kasita is home reinvented— a modern micro home designed to fit in the heart of the city or in your backyard. It’s modular, smart, and the future of housing. Harvard researcher Jeff Wilson invented these stackable homes that can be built in under three weeks, measure 352 square feet, and cost as low as $89,000 each.
‘Healthy Housing Foundation by AHF,’ the Madison & King Edward Hotels & Sunrise on Sunset
The launch of the ‘Healthy Housing Foundation by AHF’ was part of a community-based effort to address the exploding housing and homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. Earlier in 2018, HHF opened the doors to a 27-room temporary housing facility re-christened the Sunrise on Sunset (SOS, the former Sunset 8 Motel), the renovated 220-room Madison Hotel on Skid Row (purchased in Oct. 2017), and the historic 150-room King Edward Hotel in the Los Angeles community.
AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), which began as the AIDS Hospice Foundation, has a long history of providing and advocating for secure and affordable housing for the chronically ill. From its start providing AIDS hospice in the 1980s as a place for people to die with dignity to its recent creation of the Healthy Housing Foundation, which in six months has housed nearly 400 previously homeless individuals—more than any housed by the L.A. City-sponsored 2016 Ballot Measure HHH, which will not house its first residents until the end of 2019 at the earliest—AHF has been working to address the housing needs of the chronically ill for more than 30 years.