Ending Homelessness through Innovation and Collaboration
Continue to do what you’ve done and you’ll get what you’ve got... We have to do things radically differently… You can’t live a good life in an unjust society. — Gov. Gavin Newsom (6/25/21)
Governor Newsom said this during his visit on Friday to the LifeMoves Project Homekey community in Mountain View, where Connect Homes supplied 88 out of 100 housing units. I felt immensely proud of Connect Homes’ contribution to this impactful project, and of our company’s founding mission to build good design at scale by changing how homes are built.
Connect Homes is an LA-based company that designs, manufactures, transports, and installs modern, green, award-winning single-family homes at a fraction of the cost and time compared to traditional homebuilding. The company was founded in 2013 on the belief that it is possible to have the home you want, in the place you want to live. In 2020, troubled by the already crisis level of homelessness in Los Angeles being exacerbated by COVID-19, the company decided to apply its platform to give the homeless a home.
Launched last year at the height of the pandemic, Connect Shelters is a line of thoughtfully designed and factory-built, rapidly deployable housing that can serve a variety of housing needs, from the temporary to the permanent. Connect Shelters are built using the same design sensibilities and quality as our award-winning prefab homes. Each model includes features like floor-to-ceiling glass and individually zoned heating and air conditioning, and units have optional en-suite bathrooms and kitchens.
They offer a lasting, comfortable, and dignified alternative for housing people.
Connect Shelters are optimized for assembly line production, sustainably built in our San Bernardnio factory, and are delivered to the site 100% complete. Thanks to the radically more efficient construction process,
they are 1/30 the cost of typical permanent supportive housing and are comparable to the total per-door cost of backyard sheds.
The Shelter line repurposes a decade of experience building high-end prefab homes to address the needs of California unhoused.
The product line was recently recognized by San Francisco Design Week where it won the prestigious Social Impact award.
We must not let a failure of imagination prevent us from making lasting change. If we limit ourselves to the solutions found only at the extreme ends of the spectrum — homeless living on the street or building enough permanent supportive housing to house them — we will never be able to build our way out of this crisis. To achieve a different outcome in the homelessness crisis, we must think differently about where and how to provide shelter, embrace new building methods and innovative processes, and most importantly, commit to more collaborative ways of working together.
This type of innovative partnership is not theoretical. It has been proven in the LifeMoves Mountain View project, which took less than 6 months to bring online.
Let us be clear: achieving such a feat will require acting with an unprecedented level of partnership, commitment, and expediency for all stakeholders involved. The status quo of traditional development and conventional construction will not suffice. This is the very principle on which our company was founded and is reflected in how operate every day. We welcome the opportunity to participate and lead such an important and historic endeavor.
