Los Angeles leads the nation in unsheltered homelessness, with some 70,000 people living outside. The “housing first” movement argues homelessness is a housing problem. But for those experiencing homelessness, the housing crisis is paired with a health crisis rooted in the ineffectiveness of traditional methods of service delivery.

Researchers at cityLAB-UCLA initiated conversations with people experiencing homelessness in L.A., as well as with the people who work closely with them at Venice Family Clinic to provide shelter and services. Listening to how people with lived experience define factors essential to their well-being shaped the transdisciplinary cityLAB-UCLA team’s proposed design of both mobile and brick-and-mortar health centers. They produced the report “Place to Be: Non-Traditional Services for Well-Being among Unhoused Angelenos” to guide public health providers, planners, designers and policymakers seeking new, open-access ways to serve the needs of unhoused Angelenos, based on a more accurate analysis of metrics that reflect how understandings of well-being differ for and among unhoused people.

Panel:

Burton Cowgill, Ph.D., MPH, Adjunct Associate Professor, UCLA Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Equity; Department of Health Policy and Management, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health

Danielle Paulazzo (MURP/MPH ’22), Research Associate, cityLAB-UCLA

Dana Cuff, Ph.D., Director, cityLAB-UCLA; and Professor, Architecture/Urban Design, UCLA

Wendelin Slusser, M.D., M.S., FAAP, Associate Vice Provost, UCLA Semel Healthy Campus Initiative Center; Clinical Professor, UCLA Schools of Medicine and Public Health

Tim Kawahara (Moderator), Executive Director, UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate

This installment of the UCLA Housing, Neighborhood and Health Series was presented by cityLAB-UCLA and the UCLA Ziman Center’s Housing as Health Care Initiative and Levine Program in Housing and Social Responsibility, in partnership with UCLA Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Equity, Department of Health Policy and Management, the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and UCLA Semel Healthy Campus Initiative Center.

Learn more about the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate:
https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/about/c...

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