Inside the Revival of One of the Nation’s Most Notorious Housing Projects

You hear four words — “South Central Los Angeles” — and images immediately come to mind. Empty streets of boarded storefronts, riddled with bullet holes. Sidewalks peppered with shattered crack pipes and hypodermics. It’s a place you recognize from the evening news. The birthplace of modern gang warfare and the short fuse that’s exploded into riot after riot. Welcome to Watts.
At one corner of the two square miles that make up the neighborhood looms the large, 700-unit public housing development Jordan Downs. It’s among the country’s most notorious projects and is where Joseph Paul, Jr., and his outreach team from SHIELDS for Families, an organization that provides counseling, education and vocational training services, come to work. They’re out to revitalize the property from a graveyard of crumbling postwar buildings and an abandoned industrial site tainted with lead and arsenic into an Arcadian “urban village.” The plan, created by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA), calls for recreational parks and retail on site and would double the amount of available housing with 700 more units tiered at affordable and market rates. But more importantly, Paul wants to see the residents revitalized, too.
“We don’t just want to toss opportunities onto folks or introduce them to an existing mindset that’s not conducive to really growing or evolving,” says Paul, SHIELD’s project manager at Jordan Downs. “We need a physical change, as well mental and emotional change.”
Service providers have been deployed, but HACLA is still in the early phase of what will be an ambitious, expensive and years-long redevelopment of Jordan Downs. It’s one of L.A.’s largest public works projects. If it succeeds, it could rewrite the nation’s public housing policies.
NOT SOON ENOUGH
Jordan Downs’ 103 buildings (located coincidentally on E. 103 Street) all look identical. The two-story beige structures are distinguished only by signs like “BLDG 67.” Entryways are darkened with black soot and grime, and the doors and windows are crossed with bars. “1940’s vintage” is how HACLA’s former president described it in 2008; “like a federal penitentiary” is what the leader of the development’s tenant group said instead.
Soon, the dilapidated complex will be transformed into gleaming four-story townhouses and a retail center that will host a grocery store selling fresh produce and several shops. At the center of the development will be a 50,000-square-foot community center and gymnasium that will look out onto an 8-acre park.
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For decades, Los Angeles didn’t invest in South Central, funneling money into Hollywood, North Hollywood and downtown instead. “That is why when… HACLA presented the mayor last year with the concept of redeveloping 1950’s-era public housing into mixed-income urban villages, the idea caught the mayor’s attention,” recounts Helmi Hisserich, former deputy mayor of housing and economic development policy.
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OUT OF THE RUBBLE 
Under the clotheslines that connect the yards in Jordan Downs like a tangled game of cat’s cradle, children run after each other playing tag. They swing from the bars in the playground and beat music on the tops of trash cans. But after night falls, a different type of life emerges. Dice. Fights. Shootings.
“You have to be a strong person to live there,” says one resident.
One of the oldest housing projects in L.A., Jordan Downs was built to accommodate an influx of factory laborers and war veterans during World War II. In 1955, the housing authority designated the property for low-income residents, and by the 1980s, crime and poverty became endemic. The buildings themselves were so rundown that city council members debated whether residents should have to pay rent. The Grape Street Crips managed the property as their own, operating seized units as drug dens, brothels and dog fighting arenas. Between 2001 and 2011, 78 people were slain in Watts’s housing projects.
Today, more than 2,600 people call Jordan Downs home, half of whom are 17 years of age or younger. Seven out of 10 are Latino, and the others are predominantly black. The average household income is $14,594 — the equivalent of $40 per day for a family of four.
For all its problems, residents take pride in their home and their neighborhood’s culture and resilience. “Watts up,” they tell each other — a pun that’s become something of a pact and a promise.
“Proud to be from here,” a resident says.
“Always will be home,” replies a second.
“Give these people a chance,” says Betty Day, a community leader, “because there’s such beautiful people here.”
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So far, the wealth of human services that SHIELDS provides — childcare and parenting workshops, youth groups, substance abuse treatment, GED prep, job training, healthcare screenings, and food banks, for example — seem to have made a difference. Even as Paul says he’s still trying “to gain the confidence and trust of people who have been victimized so many times,” a recent report says 34 residents earned the equivalent of a high school diploma and another 113 found jobs. And while anywhere else this wouldn’t have been cause for festivities, the complex recently celebrated three years without a homicide.
BEYOND THE WALLS
Pitfalls abound in employing the residents of Jordan Downs: limited education, criminal records, a language barrier (46 percent of families primarily speak Spanish), among others. Paul’s task is to manage all of these roadblocks, plus translate the opportunities inherent in the redevelopment into paying jobs.
Unlike most real estate deals, Paul participated in negotiations with prospective contractors and lobbied for the highest number of local hires for construction work. He’s also helping local businesses (and Watts residents that work for these companies) prepare their accounting books and other licenses so they can land the contracts for the project. Take Rebel Concrete, for example. The demolition company was on the brink of devastation after the economic downturn, but now the owners are lined up to break ground for the new development and train local, young apprentices on the job at the same time. “Now, it took a year. It’s not overnight,” Paul cautions. “But if you are committed to that process, here is a viable solution.” Not only will the construction work pay decently, but it can also serve as a bridge to future stable employment.

Among the new structures being built is a retail plaza featuring a supermarket, pharmacy, stores and restaurants. That shopping area will be more convenient for current residents and draw wealthier buyers to the market-rate units, but more importantly, it will create 219 permanent jobs.

In another aspect of the redevelopment, workers will pave a Main Street-like thoroughfare through the project. Century Blvd. — a central artery that currently stops short of Jordan Downs — will link residents to prosperous neighborhoods to the west, near the LAX airport and the coast beyond, where members of SHIELD’s nurse-training program, in particular, will benefit from the additional accessibility.
WHO STAYS?
The prospect of losing their apartment frightens many residents of Jordan Downs. It’s why several residents marched to the congressional offices in protest when they first heard that a redevelopment was in the works. They didn’t want to be temporarily relocated out to the San Fernando Valley, or worse, find themselves evicted and possibly out on the street.
That’s because, until recently, official Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) policy had often done just that. Beginning in the 1990s, HUD endorsed mixed-income housing as the best way to fix distressed public developments. Attracting people with a wide range of incomes broke down the walls that trapped residents in the snares of poverty and violence, but usually displaced a portion of existing tenants. Instead of protecting the most vulnerable residents, HUD often funded the razing of dysfunctional projects, staking entire communities on the hope that something better might fill the emptiness.
To ensure no one is forced out, HACLA is planning on multiple phases of development so that housing is built before demolition begins. “Los Angeles is full,” says Rudy Montiel, HACLA’s former president who initiated the project. “We have nowhere for our people to live, for our families to live if we displace them from Jordan Downs.” Because of a vacant 21-acre site next door, the project has the ability to expand without tearing down existing buildings. (Cleanup of that site’s contaminated soil is scheduled to begin this month.) Residents in good standing — meaning those who are up to date on rent, aren’t engaging in criminal activity in the unit and aren’t hosting unauthorized guests — will not be evicted during construction.
What’s more, every public unit now on the property will be replaced with a subsidized unit of new construction. Known as “one-to-one replacement,” it’s a basic idea that’s been missing from other revitalization attempts.
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WHO PAYS?
The redevelopment comes with a massive price tag: $700 million (and that’s revised down from the original $1 billion figure). HACLA has lined up roughly one-third of the funding from state tax credits, L.A.’s community development block grants and private dollars from developers.
Last year, HACLA applied for a $30 million grant under the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, a program run through HUD. The group thought their project was a strong contender, so the denial letter came as a shock.
“I know that sometimes you feel as if you have been abandoned,” Rep. Maxine Waters told residents at a community meeting. “I know that sometimes you feel as if you are being harassed. I know that you feel that somehow the sun doesn’t shine down here at Jordan Downs but I want you to know that even though you don’t see everybody all the time, that we are fighting on public policy to make sure that the federal government understands that no matter what happens there must always be public housing units available for people in this country.”
After revising their application to include better explanations of the residents’ needs and how the project’s benefits will benefit the entire Watts community, HACLA resubmitted it to HUD last month. It expects to hear back in July.
Redevelopment has been promised at Jordan Downs for years, maybe even decades. One after another, managers at the housing authority stepped down amid scandals over law breaking or embezzlement. It’s part of the reason HACLA and SHIELDS are moving slowly and deliberately in their programs: this time, there’s no room for mistakes. But why would anyone in Watts believe that this time is going to be different?
Paul thinks it has something to do with the human spirit. “Our job is to put a mirror in front of these people so they regain a sense of value,” he says. “How do you raise eight kids or five kids in a community that is defeating everyone in their midst? Murder. Dropout rates. Teenage pregnancy. Healthcare issues. And yet you see a mother raise these kids. There’s a resilience in the hearts of these people, a pride in what they are. Our job is to help them see.”
SEE: 15 Images That Reveal the Heart and Spirit of One of L.A.’s Toughest Neighborhoods
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15 Images That Reveal the Heart and Spirit of One of L.A.’s Toughest Neighborhoods

Jordan Downs is one of Los Angeles’s most underserved communities — but that’s about to change.
The 700-unit public housing project is home to nearly 3,000 residents and for decades, it has struggled with high crime rates and crumbling infrastructure. But recently, plans have been made to transform the neighborhood into a thriving “urban village.”
The proposal, created by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA), calls for recreational parks and retail on site and would double the amount of available housing. It also includes plans for vocational training and job creation for current residents of Jordan Downs, where is the current average household income is $14,594.
Los Angeles-based photographer Isadora Kosofsky recently photographed Jordan Downs for NationSwell to capture a snapshot of this community on the brink of change.
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READ MORE: Inside the Revival of One of the Nation’s Most Notorious Housing Projects
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Only 1 in 5 New York City Students Graduates from College. This Nonprofit Is Going to Change That

It’s a sad fact that fewer than one in 10 American kids raised in impoverished neighborhoods will graduate from college. But in two major U.S. cities, one organization successfully has flipped that statistic on its head.
OneGoal, an educational nonprofit geared to low-performing students in low-income Chicago and Houston neighborhoods, has demonstrated its worth: 83 percent of OneGoal fellows have earned or are actively pursuing a college degree.
That’s why the organization’s leadership is ready to take OneGoal’s proven model to New York City, America’s largest school district and the place where education reforms either make it big or fall apart. Once there, they’ll be graded alongside Harlem Children’s Zone, InBloom (which, it should be noted, got an F), Amplify, Knewton and other innovators changing the way classrooms work.
The city has an acute need for OneGoal: 12 years after entering public high school, only one in five New Yorkers will earn a college degree. Plus, a quarter of the city’s high school grads drop out of college during their freshman year.
“We have been in Chicago for the last eight years, and we’ve really proved what’s possible with a set of students. Once we started to see real results, we almost had a moral imperative to work to serve more students,” explains Nikki Thompson, executive director of OneGoal’s New York operation. After the expansion to Houston in 2013, “it became clear that we could replicate it in other cities. And in the world of social justice, there’s no school system like New York.”
OneGoal’s key belief is that students succeed by empowering themselves. The program’s teacher-led model focuses on training educators to boost the lowest achievers by conducting an intervention with the ones who are usually overlooked: OneGoal’s fellows begin with an average GPA of 2.7 (B-) and a 729 SAT score. Half are black, 42 percent are Latino and 90 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch. In contrast, QuestBridge, an organization with a similar mission, tries to pluck out what Thompson calls “the talented tenth,” students most likely to succeed at a selective college.
Pioneering a form of character development, OneGoal’s unique three-year curriculum spans from junior year of high school to freshman year of college and is centered on shattering stereotype disadvantaged students’ carry about themselves so they come to see college as “realistic” and “attainable.” Project directors hone a student’s ability to ace standardized tests, admissions essays and financial aid applications, instilling them with leadership skills of “professionalism, ambition, integrity, resilience and resourcefulness” early — all of which puts them on a path bound for college, and from there, gives them the tools to succeed.
In classes of 25 to 30 kids, “we do actual role-play with the students, not just reading the material,” Thompson says. Analyzing real-world situations, they discuss what actions to take when you and your roommate get into a fight, for instance, or how to manage when there isn’t a teacher saying, “Make sure to bring your homework.” “Once they’re in college,” Thompson says, “it becomes almost muscle memory.”
In New York City, OneGoal is looking to replicate success stories like that of Kewauna Lerma, who was profiled in Paul Tough’s “How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.” Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Lerma was barely pulling in a C- average and already had a rap sheet when she became a OneGoal fellow. “I didn’t really have a family. I was scattered all over the place, no father, with my grandma sometimes,” she says in the book. “It was all messed up. Jacked up.” Through the program, she went from being the girl who scored in the bottom percentile on a practice ACT test to having straight A’s on her report card senior year of high school.
Freshman year at Western Illinois University brought Lerma new difficulties, like a tough biology class that seemed far over her head. She didn’t know half the big words her professor used, but she sat in the front row. After class, she always asked him to definitions the words that stumped her. Money was always tight, and Lerma says she once didn’t eat for two days when she had no cash. But she persisted, as OneGoal taught her to do. Her biology grade? A+.
Like Lerma, OneGoal will face many challenges when it makes the move to the Big Apple, particularly in winning support from key political players and making sure they don’t overstep any boundaries with the powerful teachers union. “New York is just so different when you talk about size and scale and competition. There are 100 high schools in Chicago. In New York, there are over 500 high schools. It’s just a different ballgame,” Thomson says. “The challenge is differentiating ourselves.” Additionally, the New York City pilot will need to navigate through a few changes OneGoal is making to its Chicago model, including a fee structure to help fund the nonprofit’s work and a data systems program to help track academic and non-cognitive progress.
But Thompson, a Teach for America alum and chief of staff while Joel Klein served as NYC’s school chancellor, has a network of connections she can draw on. Her efforts so far are showing results. After a roundtable last year, Acorn Community High School in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Prospect Heights signed on to host one of the seven to 10 pilot classes that are anticipated for fall. And the Arbor Brothers, a philanthropic organization that funds social entrepreneurs in the Tri-State area, gave a $60,000 grant to the expansion efforts.
After New York, the group plans to take on five more school districts by 2017. For all their rapid success, OneGoal’s staff has never lost sight of their mission. Whether for seven students or 7,000, the group’s “one goal” remains the same: College graduation. Period.
LISTEN: To This American Life episode, which features former OneGoal Fellow Kewauna Lerma.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that there are 40 or 50 high schools in Chicago. The correct number is 100.
(Homepage photograph: Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images)
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3 Ideas That Will Give Every Citizen Access to the American Dream

During last month’s State of the Union address, President Barack Obama declared an end to the nation’s economic downturn. “The shadow of crisis has passed, and the state of the union is strong,” he said. But for many, the president’s announcement felt premature.
Currently, 45 million Americans live below the poverty line. Income inequality, stagnating wages and job market volatility make the prospects of upward mobility bleak. According to research by The Pew Charitable Trusts, Americans raised at the bottom of the income ladder are likely to remain there as adults. Two-thirds will never make it to the middle class, and 96 percent will be barred from the top bracket, where household income exceeds $81,700.
Erin Currier, director of Pew’s projects on financial security and mobility, studies the factors that limit economic opportunity. Recently named one of the most influential women in Washington under 35, she has utilized the research to establish nonpartisan agreement on the facts that guide policy decisions. (It’s already helped establish a bipartisan caucus.) “We hold this up to be the national ethos of being able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” she says, “but it doesn’t happen that often.”
During a conversation with NationSwell, she identified three areas lawmakers from both sides of the aisle need to address if they hope to restore every American’s chance at success.
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The Short-Term Benefits of Helping Low-Income Kids Are Apparent. But What About the Long-Term Impact?

Parents often wonder if all the money they pour into their kids will pay off in the end, resulting in productive adults. The federal government could ask the same, considering that it’s provided assistance to children through various programs, including Medicaid, which extended benefits to children back in the 1980s with the formation of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Economist Amanda Kowalski of Yale University decided to find out. Partnering with David W. Brown and Ithai Z. Lurie of the U.S. Treasury Department, she analyzed tax return data and found that giving Medicaid benefits to kids does pay off in the long run. Those who relied on Medicaid as low-income children earned more money and paid more in income taxes when they became adults working than those of a similar income level (during childhood) who did not receive benefits.
Researchers found that, for every Medicaid dollar spent on a child, 14 cents were returned during their first few years as working adults. The amount rose to 56 cents by the time the recipient was 60 years of age. Additionally, they discovered that people who received Medicaid benefits at kids were less likely to die as young adults than people in the non-Medicaid low-income group. Plus, they were more likely to attend college.
The study’s huge sample size of 14.6 million people gives strength to its findings.
“Although it will take years to know the long-term impact of current expansions of Medicaid undertaken as part of the Affordable Care Act,” Kowalski tells the Yale News, “this study shows that the investments that the government made in Medicaid in the 1980s and 1990s are paying off in the form of higher tax payments now.”
MORE: 40 Years Ago, Researchers Sent Half These Children to Preschool. And What an Amazing Difference it Made

Meet the Courageous Man Who Has Housed 1,393 Chronically Homeless Individuals in Utah

Lloyd Pendleton is the most efficient man in Utah. By the hour, he ticks off small achievements in a pocket planner, marking progress toward long-term goals. His mind routinely calculates volumes and outputs; he thinks in returns on investments. When Pendleton speaks, you begin to suspect he’s just sifted through a file cabinet’s worth of data. But then, he tosses in one of his signature colorful aphorisms, and you realize, nope, that’s just Lloyd.
After retiring from high-ranking positions at Ford Motors and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Pendleton began a second career in Utah’s Department of Workforce Services, a seemingly unglamorous government job in Salt Lake City. “I retired on a Friday and went to work with the state on Monday,” he says. As a pet project of sorts, Pendleton set an ambitious goal: To functionally eliminate chronic homelessness across Utah within 10 years. Nine years later, as Utah’s homelessness czar, he’s on track to reach that milestone by year’s end.
“He gets things done” is how his colleague Liz Buehler, Salt Lake City’s homelessness coordinator, describes her state counterpart.
Raised on a ranch at the far western edge of Utah, Pendleton’s early experience working the land gave him a dogged work ethic and a quiet-the-bells directness. He admits he once thought street people panhandled because they were lazy. “I used to tell the homeless to get a job, because that’s all I thought they needed,” he recalls.
But later, through the Mormon Church, he was tasked with restructuring struggling food pantries, emergency shelters and other charities across the country. After working directly with the homeless, including a year on-site at Utah’s largest shelter The Road Home (then known as the Travelers Aid Society), Pendleton had a “major paradigm shift.” Viewing the homeless as his brothers and sisters, he realized that when they suffered, so did the entire community. “We’re all connected,” he now says.
Pendleton’s years of bolstering charities earned him credibility from many nonprofit executive directors. When they knew he was considering retirement, several service providers and then-Gov. Jon Huntsman began lobbying the L.D.S. Church to “loan” Pendleton out to head up the state’s nascent homelessness task force.  The church agreed, and Pendleton did the job part-time for two years before committing to being its full-time director in 2006. “We got Lloyd involved before he realized,” one executive director says.
Described by one Salt Lake City social worker as a “voracious reader and researcher,” Pendleton started by signing up for conferences on the latest strategies. While at one in Chicago in 2003, he learned about the 10-year plans to end homelessness taking shape around the country, and he heard the buzz about an innovative idea called “Housing First.” Two years later, after a conference in Las Vegas, Pendleton started chatting up a fellow passenger on the airport shuttle: Sam Tsemberis, considered the originator of the “Housing First” model.
Tsemberis explained how Pathways to Housing (the organization he founded in New York City in 1992) threw out drug tests and waiting lists — the old trappings of getting someone “housing ready.” Instead, the homeless were moved into apartments in Manhattan and Westchester County, N.Y., within two weeks. “You’re curing the housing problem first. You cure the person later,” Tsemberis explained. After its first five years, 88 percent of tenants had stayed in the program’s housing — double the rate for the city’s step-by-step rehab programs. “Recovery starts when you have something you care about, a place where you can go,” he added. Pendleton took an instant liking to Tsemberis and together, they convinced Utah lawmakers and foundations to take a chance on “Housing First.”
Just because it worked in New York City, however, didn’t mean the program would be a fit for Utah. During one tense early meeting, a contractor worried about his reputation almost backed out of building 100 units. As Pendleton listened, a thought came to him: why not test a small pilot program consisting of 25 of the toughest, most distressed people? The idea partially came from a truism he learned on the ranch while chopping kindling for their wood-burning stove: “Chop the big end of the log first.” In other words, if you can house the most chronically homeless, you can house anybody.
The task force gathered the best case managers, convinced landlords across the city to participate and handed over keys to 17 people. “I felt the sweat on my forehead, and I know others did too,” recalls Matt Minkevitch, the executive director of The Road Home, a Salt Lake City shelter. “You’d give each other a casual smile and say, ‘We’ll work through it, okay?’ But they couldn’t hear your stomach growling, hear you praying under your breath,… and just hoping, hoping that you don’t hurt people and damage all these important programs.”
The first night, Pendleton recounts, one man placed all his belongings on the bed and curled up on the floor to sleep. The following few nights, he dozed outside, near a dumpster. Finally, after several days, he moved in and slept on the bed. Housing isn’t “rehabilitation,” Pendleton noted, “because so many of them were never habilitated to begin with. You are creating new lives for them.” With the exception of one person who died, all the tenants remained in housing 21 months later.
Pendleton isn’t striving for prestige or fame in solving an ill that blights much of urban America. He just likes ideas that work, and he wants to see them take root, regardless of who sows the first seed. “Housing First” isn’t unique to the Beehive State, but Pendleton’s precise methods are a primary reason why Utah’s rates of chronic homelessness are so low. The fingerprints of his orderly approach can be spotted all over the 10-year plan: its clear articulation of vision, its far-reaching collaboration and its experimental pilot projects.
According to Pendleton, every action must answer this question: Does this help the homeless into housing or not? “If you don’t have a crystal-clear vision about the homeless situation, then you just muddle along. You get poor results. You’re not getting people housed,” he says.
For Utah to solve such an intractable social problem, it also had to find support beyond the traditional partnerships. Pendleton’s résumé helped win the involvement of the business community and the L.D.S. Church, one of the most influential forces in the region. Their monetary contributions and participation in programs like job placement meant even “more and more people carrying the load with the county, city and state,” Pendleton tells the Deseret News. And once the strategy had been distilled, all those agencies focused their individual expertise on a specific aspect of the problem.
Despite playing different instruments, “We have been pretty much on the same sheet of music in the symphony,” Pendleton says of the collaboration.
To meet the goal Pendleton first dreamed of a decade ago, Utah still needs to house approximately 539 chronically homeless and 200 homeless veterans, according to the latest comprehensive report — far fewer than the 1,932 chronically homeless on the streets when he first started.
Pretty good for an “encore career,” don’t you think?
READ MORE:
Part 1: Utah Set the Ambitious Goal to End Homelessness in 2015. It’s Closer Than Ever
Part 2: 13 Images of Resilient Utah Residents Who Survived Being Homeless
Part 4: Far From Finished: Utah’s 5-Step Plan to Continue Helping the Homeless

Utah Set the Ambitious Goal to End Homelessness in 2015. It’s Closer Than Ever

Crystal Spencer desperately needed a home for her three little girls. A single mother in her thirties, Spencer had lost her job at a Utah gas station and, in the twilight of the Great Recession, couldn’t find work elsewhere. Notices stacked up from her landlord, utility companies and bank.
“It was overwhelming. I just couldn’t keep up,” Spencer recalls. “I moved out because I knew I couldn’t do it.” She loaded her daughters — just babies at the time — into the back of her Dodge Durango and went to The Road Home, an emergency shelter just west of downtown Salt Lake City. As Utah’s largest shelter, its interior consists of a stripped-down dormitory. Plastic-covered mattresses on bunk beds can sleep more than 200 men each night, and its bathroom stalls, as a safety measure, don’t have doors. Spencer’s family had the small privilege of staying in a room closed off from the main beds, but she said it was “very uncomfortable” not having any privacy. Fearful of who was coming in and out the shelter, she never let her girls wander from her side.
In any number of American cities, Spencer would be required to jump through bureaucratic hoops — prove you’re sober, get a job, never miss a meeting — before her family would receive assistance. But in Utah, “Housing First,” an initiative to place the homeless into supportive housing without any prerequisites, now prevails. Because of it, Spencer quickly moved to a two-bedroom apartment at Palmer Court, an old hotel renovated into 200 units and opened by The Road Home in 2009. In the 13 months since, she’s caught up on all her debts and is on a waiting list for a Section 8 housing voucher. She decorated the apartment with framed pictures of her daughters — Sandra, 4, a nimble athlete fond of doing handstands on the living room recliner; Sierra, 2, a gregarious dancer and singer; and Phoenix, 1, a quiet observer — and the paintings they made at the on-site Head Start classroom.
“It was very difficult being homeless…[My kids] didn’t really understand what was going on. They still don’t,” Spencer says. “Right now, I am trying to go forward with my life, so I can move out and get a place of my own. The only thing I see myself doing is taking care of my kids. Hopefully, in my own house.”
Utah’s initiative isn’t just for hardworking moms like Spencer: it’s helping veterans haunted by war, the mentally ill, alcoholics and drug addicts. “Homelessness itself turns out to be a big barrier to all kinds of things, whether it is trying to get a job or trying to get an education or stop a drug addiction,” Steve Berg, vice president for programs and policy at The National Alliance To End Homelessness, tells Mic.
As the decade-long plan initiated by then-Gov. Jon Huntsman wraps up this year, the Beehive State’s “Housing First” program has already reduced chronic homelessness (those with deeper disabling conditions, like substance abuse or schizophrenia, who had been on the streets for a year or longer or four times within three years) by 72 percent and is on track to end it altogether by this time next year.
Media coverage ranging from The New Yorker to The Daily Show has pointed out that “Housing First” is a no-brainer. In reality, however, it’s been a herculean task 10 years in the making.
When the plan rolled out in 2005, Utah counted 1,932 chronically homeless adults. These individuals composed only 14 percent of the state’s total homeless population, but they were consuming the majority of agencies’ scarce resources. For instance, The Road Home found that the small group of chronically homeless used 60 percent of the shelter’s beds, according to executive director Matt Minkevitch. “Once we saw that, we really wanted to move forward.”
In Utah, a homeless person relying on shelters and soup kitchens costs the community $19,200, while the expenses of permanent housing and case management run just $7,800. For some, the price of law enforcement and medical expenses is astounding: One chronically homeless individual in Salt Lake City, for example, racked up $563,000 in emergency room charges in 2010; another had hospital bills that almost topped $1 million over three years.
Liz Buehler, Salt Lake City’s homeless services coordinator since 2013, says the state jumped into action when service providers realized they couldn’t rely on “diminishing resources” from the federal government. “If you put someone in a house, it’s half the cost of that person receiving services in the shelter. So why not put them in housing?” Buehler asks. “It’s not only giving them security, you can also help more people.”
Housing First’s backers are quick to note that they’re not giving away apartments for free: the new tenants have to abide by lease agreements (a handful have been evicted) and contribute $50 or 30 percent of their income to rent each month (whichever amount is greater).
For every 10 chronically homeless people housed through the program, eight are still in rapid rehousing units and one has moved on to other stable housing.
Minkevitch, a former hotel manager who migrated to the nonprofit sector to help “the weariest of travelers” at The Road Home, says the state’s success has taken even the most experienced caseworkers by surprise. “I know people who have been in this field for years, in this line of work for like 20 years, and as they were talking about clients, their eyes would light up like at Christmas,” he says. “They’d just laugh like it was the funniest, most beautiful joke, sitting here right under our nose all this time: we’d always known if a person has a home, they’re not homeless.”
READ MORE:
Part 2: 13 Images of Resilient Utah Residents Who Survived Being Homeless
Part 3: The Compassionate Utah Official Who Believes in Housing First, Asking Questions Later
Part 4: Far From Finished: Utah’s 5-Step Plan to Continue Helping the Homeless

These ‘Brothers’ Left Wall St. to Make a Difference, and Their Big Bet is Paying Off

NationSwell works to elevate solutions to national challenges both through powerful storytelling on NationSwell.com and its NationSwell Council membership network and events series. Here, we introduce you to some of the innovators who are part of the community.
Over the years, there have been some bad decisions made in the college bars of Ann Arbor, Mich. This is a story about a good one.
Sammy Politziner and Scott Thomas met while students at the University of Michigan when they lived next door to each other as freshmen. The two worked at summer camps together, and after graduation, both served as corps members of Teach for America (TFA). From there, like many of their classmates (even the most idealistic ones), they both decided to pursue careers in finance.
In 2008, nine years out of college, both worked in New York City: Politziner was a vice president at Kildare Capital, and Thomas was an analyst at Neuberger Berman. While in Ann Arbor one weekend for a football game, they got to talking about their lives as they sat before the row of taps at Ashley’s, their favorite haunt. Both decided something was missing.
It had something to do with the year. Recently, the duo had volunteered for the Obama campaign, and the feelings of hope and change that the campaign had infused in so many also struck a powerful chord with the two friends.
They spoke about the difference they hoped to make, the lives they still wanted to lead. When they thought about what they might have to offer, they wondered out loud if perhaps the business skills they had developed during those years in finance combined with classroom experience from their TFA days could help make a positive social impact.
They made a decision to find out.
“We just looked at each other and said, ‘We don’t know what we’re going to do…but we have got to go back to being a part of the solution,’ ” Politziner says of the moment that led him and Thomas to found Arbor Brothers, the philanthropic organization named for their college town.
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Arbor Brothers makes grants to social entrepreneurs focused on education and employment in New York (where they are based), Connecticut and New Jersey. Politziner and Thomas support nonprofits they identify as “second stage,” organizations that have already gone through seed funding but have not yet established a track record that would give them access to larger pools of capital. These groups tend to be two to 10 years old with two to 10 staff members and a budget of less than $2 million a year.
The founders of Arbor Brothers practice the concept of engaged philanthropy, combining financial support with countless hours of consulting. Each of their current grantees receive $250,000 in funding over the course of three years, while Politziner and Thomas spend 200 to 300 hours a year working with the leaders of each organization.
“Our view, one of our guiding principles, is not that we have the answer. It’s our job to build a relationship where we can be helpful in discreet, meaningful ways along that path,” says Thomas.
After the pivotal conversation at the pub, the two returned to their finance jobs. But to learn more about the social solutions they might support, they made a commitment that each week for six months, they would have dinner with various leaders in their fields. These foundation officers, nonprofit heads and social-impact consultants revealed there was a real hole in the funding market.
The friends who would go on to form Arbor Brothers learned that members of various second-stage organizations “were doing really good work with kids, but they had never run an organization before. They had never hired somebody, let alone fired somebody; they were doing their budgets on a napkin,” Politziner recalls. “We thought, these people are so talented, and they’ve got such a great idea, and yet, they’re slowly figuring out how to run an organization. And oh, by the way, they have to spend 70 percent of their time actually going out and raising money.”
Once Politziner and Thomas determined how needed they really were, there was no turning back.
While maintaining their day jobs, the two started with a few pilot projects. They spent 100 hours with Nick Ehrmann, then a Ph.D. student at Princeton University, who founded Blue Engine, a nonprofit that places teaching assistants in public high schools in New York City. They worked with Hot Bread Kitchen, an organization that empowers women and minority entrepreneurs in culinary workforce programs, a loan package that financed a move to a full-time kitchen. Then in September 2010, they quit their jobs and focused all their efforts on Arbor Brothers.
When they first got started, Arbor Brothers raised $15,000 — Politziner and Thomas put in some of their own money, and family and friends also contributed. Last year, the public charity had a budget of over $1 million, resulting from donations from individuals, family foundations and donor-advised funds. Because the nonprofit raises its own money, Arbor Brothers has to prove its value to its donors every year in a quantitative way.
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One organization that has benefited from Arbor Brothers is the Connecticut-based All Our Kin, which empowers child-care providers as business owners, provides parents with safe and stable care for their kids and gives children a strong educational foundation before they enter kindergarten. The organization licenses people to run family child-care programs in their homes, then involves them as part of a professional development network — at no cost to participants.
From 2011 to 2014, Arbor Brothers provided All Our Kin with $190,000 in unrestricted funding (money with no strings attached). While the grant money has had an impact, it’s the guidance and knowledge of Arbor Brothers that has really made a difference. Jessica Sager, executive director of All Our Kin, says the hundreds of hours Politziner and Thomas spent with the team in New Haven, Conn., helped the organization set up systems to manage fundraising and budgeting. Arbor Brothers also helped Sager and her co-founder create a plan to expand their model to a second site, and now All Our Kin is in three cities and considering national expansion. “We are rigorous about evaluation,” Sager says, explaining how Arbor Brothers taught her how to use data to track outcomes. “We put everything on spreadsheets”
Politziner and Thomas talk about the importance of an “outcomes focused culture” and “scale of impact versus scale of number of people served” with as much enthusiasm as they talk about their other shared passion, Michigan football.
“At the end of the day, we’re going to step away, and I hope we’ll be close to these organizations,” Thomas says of the Arbor Brothers’ relationship with All Our Kin and other groups. “But unless the tools we built and the conversations we had become embedded into their organizational culture, they’re not in our view likely to be sustainable and successful over the long term.”
Over the past four years, Arbor Brothers has evaluated nearly 500 nonprofits and made site visits to at least 75. Through experience, they have become better at finding the right fits for their funding and expertise. “We made this mistake a couple of times where we would meet a young entrepreneur with a lot of passion and charisma and an exciting vision for change, but we had this nagging anxiety that they were more style than substance,” Thomas says of one of the lessons he learned the hard way. “They were great marketers, and while that is important and can raise money, if someone does not have a high internal standard for quality, those are not the people we’re equipped to help.”
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They’ve also gotten better at taking cues from the leaders of the organizations they serve, figuring out the best ways to put their analytics background to use. For instance, when Arbor Brothers assisted All Our Kin on its financial model, they worked hard to make the numbers user-friendly, later realizing that the organization’s leadership felt more at ease knowing the ins and outs — no matter the complexity.
Politziner and Thomas believe not only in the importance of learning from their mistakes, but also in promoting transparency, so they conclude each of Arbor Brothers’ quarterly newsletters with a “We Blew It!” section where they detail the ways they can improve moving forward.
In the past five years, Arbor Brothers has funded 3 percent of the 500 high-potential, second-stage organizations located in the tri-state area that work to address the root causes of poverty. While Arbor Brothers is on a path to grow (this year’s budget is likely $1.25 million), they want to remain focused on finding, funding and supporting only the most promising of the organizations that fit this description.
“The lens through which we make grants is the concept that social change is extraordinarily hard and it takes a really long time and it’s messy,” Politziner says. “Those three simple tenets inform how we think about how our small pot of capital can make the biggest difference. That means we invest in organizations that make a deep investment in people over time.”
Another way that Arbor Brothers sets itself apart from other funding groups is that they don’t believe in forcing themselves on to boards or attaching strings to their funding. “We come to understand the organization so that we’re on the same side of the table, and their success is our success,” says Thomas.
Arbor Brothers carefully tracks and reports these successes. Doing so helped the organization settle on its three-year-long funding model, which gives them enough time to get these groups to the next level while also having a time pressure in place to reach organizational targets.
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Last summer, Politziner and Thomas gathered the four organizations “graduating” from three years in their portfolio for a backyard barbecue in Brooklyn, N.Y. “It was a moment that caused me to reflect on how far we’ve come,” Thomas says.
All Our Kin celebrated its expansion to two new cities; Green City Force looked back on the long hours spent vetting and prioritizing service opportunities so they could improve placement outcomes for their corps members; and exalt now had refined performance standards in place and looked forward to doing even more for teens who have been involved in the criminal justice system. The fourth graduate, ROW New York, was able to raise more than $3 million over three years to double their program size and outfit a new boathouse — thanks in part to support Arbor Brothers provided on marketing materials and earned-income strategy.
Last fall, four new organizations joined the Arbor Brothers portfolio: New Heights, Coalition for Queens, Springboard Collaborative and OneGoal. (BRICK Academy, which is transforming failing schools in Newark, N.J., GirlTrek, which NationSwell has featured for its work mobilizing black women to walk their way to better health, and The New American Academy, which brings new models like teacher teams to New York City public schools, will continue receiving their funding.)
So far, Arbor Brothers is walking the talk of engaged philanthropy — and it’s working. “It’s a really tough balance, but they do it well, where they’re supporting the growth of an organization — talking about best practices — but they’re not imposing things,” explains Jukay Hsu, founder of Coalition for Queens, which looks to the tech ecosystem to provide economic opportunity to a diverse community.
“It’s not an outsider coming in saying, ‘Do X, Y and Z.’ … They have a unique level of human empathy and understanding and an ability to listen and digest.”

The Surprising Thing That’s Giving Low-Income Students Internet Access

In the evening, when students are supposed to be at home toiling over their homework, the school buses that carry them to school usually sit idle in a lot. But one school district in Salton City, Calif., is putting these vehicles’ downtime to good use.
How so?
By installing Wi-Fi routers inside the school buses and parking them in neighborhoods where many low-income students lack Internet access. For as long as the battery on the bus lasts, the community can use the free Wi-Fi — something that could have huge outcomes, considering that about half of the low-income students in the U.S. lack home Internet access, according to Nichole Dobo of the Hechinger Report.
The only other choice for these kids is to stay at school and use the Wi-Fi there to complete their homework. Darryl Adams, superintendent of schools of the Coachella Valley Unified District, tells Dobo, “I had kids sitting outside my office yesterday because they want to connect to the Internet at, like, 6 o’clock at night.”
When low-income students stay after hours to hop online — missing the school bus home — it creates difficulties for the parents who must come fetch them, as many of them live an hour’s drive or more away.
Thirteen-year-old Jasmine Jimenez says that she’s looking forward to the day when the district might enable Wi-Fi on the bus during its route. “It won’t be a big bug to ask your parents to pick you up,” she said.
School district officials haven’t completely worked out the kinks of the system. So far they’ve only been able to install routers in two buses out of their fleet of 90. Drivers park the two buses on lots in trailer parks and must obtain permission from the owners to do so. But the biggest problem is that the battery tends to die after only one hour of use, an energy crunch which some have suggested might be solved by installing solar panels on the buses.
Still, the Coachella district is determined to try to make the program work. “Come on. We can do better than that as a nation, especially for our low-income families and our disadvantaged families,’’ superintendent Darryl Adams says.
MORE: Every Kid Needs An Internet Connection to Thrive In School. This District Has A Plan to Make it Happen

How Can One Nonprofit Solve Two Big Problems Facing Both Veterans and Low-Income Kids?

Bob Kincaid, co-founder of the Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Get Veterans Involved (GVI), has found that it’s possible to kill two birds with one stone. His nonprofit helps two groups — veterans who struggle when they return from service, and elementary school kids in need of mentors — at the same time.
How is that possible?
While veterans train for new jobs or attend college, the organization pays them to visit local elementary schools each week.
“They’ve got no mission. No purpose. The hope is to give them purpose,” Kincaid tells the Times Free Press. “If we can have these service members recognize these kids need them, we have a mission for them.”
Kincaid believes the program, which kicked off in five elementary schools this year, will help veterans feel connected to their community as they work to make a smooth transition into civilian life. Additionally, the work will help low-income kids in innumerable ways. “We mentor the kids, who then mentor the vets,” he adds.
Instead of having the vets come to the schools with a lesson to teach or a talk to give, GVI instructs them to simply help out in whatever way the classroom teachers need them to. One basic task the veterans assist with at Calvin Donaldson Elementary, for example, is helping kindergartners learn their ABCs.
Principal Cherrye Robertson says, “Right now all of my kindergartners know all of their letters, which is phenomenal. We’ve never had all the kindergartners in the whole building know all their letters at this time of year.”
With early successes, GVI is aiming to expand through funding and donations. GVI co-founder Ron White says, “The vision is for this one day to be in school districts around the country.”
MORE: For Female Veterans Experiencing Employment Woes, This Organization Offers Strong Advice