How About Providing A “Yurt” For Every Homeless Person in L.A.?

That’s what Joseph Mailander, an architectural specialist who also edits the blog MartiniRepublic.com, proposes in an editorial discussion in the Los Angeles Times.

This is what he proposes:

"In my dream city, Peter [the other writer whom Joseph is discussing], we'd stop handing taxpayer money over to developers and contractors for affordable housing projects and jails. We'd simply house whoever needed lodging, for a year or for a night, in New Yurt City, along the banks of the river south of downtown, in yurts—at under $7,000 a unit, a scant $175 million buys an astonishing 25,000 of these, and the city and County have the land. And we'd give them access to 2,000 Echo Park Lake-level secure necessary rooms that can be built for $17,000 a unit, not the $200,000 boondoggle outhouses they've incongruently plunked down on Skid Row. That would add another $34 million to the bill."

I like the “out of the box” thinking. Although setting up squatter villages throughout Los Angeles is not my kind of solution.

But certainly there is a compromise between having to build $300,000 affordable housing units or $7,000 Yurts. For example, we could build less costly affordable housing units, if we could reduce the required parking, build on public land, reduce the required sizes of rooms and units, and even eliminate the living wage requirement--this would be specifically for units that will house homeless people only.

Since there is a housing and homeless crisis, we certainly need new creative solutions…