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BUSINESS NEWS RECOMMENDATIONS ON MITIGATING HOMELESSNESS IN LOS ANGELES BEING IMPLEMENTED BY ULI LOS ANGELES ULI Los Angeles, a District Council of the Urban Land Institute, is coordinating with Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office to help implement key recommendations from its recent report on homelessness. ULI has gathered top-level architecture, landscape architecture, and commercial real-estate leaders to assist in the city of Los Angeles’ “A Bridge Home” program, which is building safe and clean shelters to help homeless people transition to long-term housing. ULI Los Angeles’ leadership met with the mayor and staff to present report findings prior to his State of the City Address in April. The provision of a transitional housing plan, including increased access to shelters as well as transitional and permanent housing, is a key recommendation in the report. ULI’s recommendations informed provisions for homeless shelters that were included in the annual budget presented by the Mayor Garcetti of Los Angeles, including a commitment to provide temporary housing structures in every council district. The city’s annual budget now includes $30 million for the construction program. The city’s supportive housing will be furnished with on-site mental health, employment, addiction, housing placement services, and wellness resources. ULI will soon assist the mayor’s office and some of the city council members with housing design and development of the siting criteria. “With Mayor Garcetti’s acceptance of our

help and key report recommendations, we convened high-level architecture and real- estate leaders,” said ULI Los Angeles Chair and Founder of C+C Ventures Clare DeBriere. “The results of our design charrettes and outreach will help secure greater neighborhood support for the Bridge Home program by identifying site criteria and design solutions. We will soon formally submit them to the Mayor and his senior staff with the goal of building safe, clean, sanitary, and visually attractive bridge housing that will transition people to permanent shelters.” “The work of our leaders in Los Angeles demonstrates the strong commitment of ULI’s members to bring about meaningful, lasting change in our communities,” said ULI Global Chairman Thomas W. Toomey, chairman, chief executive officer, and president of UDR, Inc. “They are setting an example with practical solutions to address one of our cities’ toughest challenges. What we are learning from this experience can benefit every city dealing with homelessness. That is a powerful impact.” ULI held intensive charrettes with three architecture firms – including DLR Group , Studio One Eleven , and JFAK Architects – and with three landscape architecture firms. The teams focused on solving three site challenges: a 50-bed site; a 100-bed site; and a 150-bed site. In addition, ULI Los Angeles is collaborating with CBRE and Gensler to identify sites for the 50-, 100-, and 150-bed needs and a list of all sites in each city council district which are owned by the federal, state, county, or city governments. ULI will then work with the city

council members to determine the best sites in their districts. Homelessness: Recommendations for Local Action is based on a thorough evaluation of Los Angeles’ homelessness problem conducted through ULI’s Advisory Services Program this past December. The report builds on existing efforts to combat homelessness by providing short- and long-term housing solutions and offering guidance on deploying and leveraging the billions in bond proceeds being generated by Measure H and Proposition HHH for homelessness assistance. While ULI’s recommendations focus primarily on the city of Los Angeles, they are applicable to Los Angeles County and can be adapted for other metropolitan regions. The recommendations were made by a panel of housing, architecture, public policy, and housing finance experts convened by the institute through the Advisory Services Program. With rising housing costs and insufficient housing supply as overriding factors, thepanel’swork includedconsideration of how developers and neighborhood leaders could find common ground on land use plans that allow housing to be built in areas where it has typically been blocked; how and where supportive housing and affordable housing can be built at a large scale; the assessment of optimal housing uses tailored to specific needs of different neighborhoods; and ways to avoid concentrating the homeless in specific neighborhoods.

MARK LITTLE, from page 11

the lost productivity and efficiency from using so many different tools to operate their business. “Increasing the margins and profitability of your firm could be as easy as eliminating wasteful software spending and replacing your current band-aid software approach with a cloud-based, easy to use end-to- end solution such as ProjectBoss.” Increasing the margins and profitability of your firm could be as easy as eliminating wasteful software spending and replacing your current band-aid software approach with a cloud-based, easy to use end-to-end solution such as ProjectBoss. MARK LITTLE has nearly 20 years of experience in the technology arena, primarily as a software engineer. He is a co-founder and the chief technology officer at ProjectBoss, a sponsor of the 2018 Hot Firm + A/E Industry Awards Conference. He can be reached at mark@projectboss. net or at 302.521.8065.

Florida, was using at least seven different software programs to manage their projects and their business: ❚ ❚ Sharepoint for sharing and storing drawings and client docu- ments ❚ ❚ Shared hard drive for storing internal company documents and templates ❚ ❚ Dropbox to share contract related documents with clients ❚ ❚ An inflexible custom-built web application to track projects ❚ ❚ A custom-built employee status web application to track the location of employees ❚ ❚ Microsoft Project was used by some project managers to track projects ❚ ❚ Microsoft Excel was used by other managers to track projects ❚ ❚ Excel to manage and forecast resource allocation ❚ ❚ Excel to generate project reports The cost of these programs was in the tens of thousands of dollars per year. Not to mention the costs associated with

THE ZWEIG LETTER September 24, 2018, ISSUE 1265

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