North Hollywood supportive housing campus aims to help 10,000 people in-need— every year

A multi-building campus designed to help the homeless find housing and increase their access to services is nearly finished and will be fully open by this fall. Called The Campus at LA Family Housing, the complex is an expansion of the homeless services and housing that were previously available on the site.

When it’s finished in October, The Campus will hold temporary “bridge” housing for up to 250 people, permanent supportive housing, a community health clinic, and offices for case managers and other workers who can help connect people in-need with services and permanent housing.

It’s expected to support more than 10,000 people per year through its combined services, according to LA Family Housing, the developer of the campus.

The project, which broke ground in June 2016, is a combination of adaptive reuse and new construction. On the southern end of the campus, an existing building has been repurposed as bridge housing, the temporary housing that fills the gap between homelessness and being housed.

There is also similar housing specifically for families and a service center on this portion of the site. This part of the campus opened in June 2016.

On the northern portion of the complex, an old motel (and former homeless shelter) called The Fiesta Motel was razed to create new facilities that hold 50 units of permanent supportive housing.

But the rest of the northern campus—a 6,000 square foot health clinic and a service center for the countywide coordinated entry service center, which is expected to speed up the process of housing and providing services for the homeless—is under construction. It’s expected to be complete in October.

Having all the services in one place benefits both service providers and the people who need those services. Before, many of the needed services were available elsewhere. “We were always sending people out” to another place to get what they needed, says Andrea Johnson of LA Family Housing.

With everything in one place, trips are reduced, says Andrea Johnson of LA Family Housing. “It reduces confusion ... makes things a lot easier. We can move people home faster,” Johnson says.

• How a once-seedy North Hollywood motel has become a model for helping the homeless [Daily News]