For more than 20 years, Enterprise’s Southern California market has been a leader in bringing innovative and sustaining solutions to community challenges. With the support and contributions of our valued donors and partners in 2019, we connected Angelenos to affordable homes with supportive services, strengthened historically neglected and rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, and educated communities and conducted conversations on the history and legacy of redlining.
2019 Program Highlights
Sustainable Connected Communities Program
Sustainable Connected Communities is a multi-year initiative that provides technical assistance, training and tools to public, private, nonprofit and community partners to more efficiently produce and preserve affordable housing in historically neglected and rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhoods. In the past year, we supported the development or advancement of 1,570 affordable homes across Los Angeles county. We also increased the capacity of 12 public agency and 27 community partners across Southern California, through peer convenings, capital expertise and joint-development, to help catalyze programs that reflect the voices of the communities we serve.
Permanent Supportive Housing Initiative
Our Permanent Supportive Housing Initiative has made great strides in its focus on implementing system-level improvements on enhancing the complex and inefficient Coordinated Entry System (CES) that pairs homeless candidates with available housing vacancies. During the past year we have provided policy leadership and technical support to all 65 public agencies and nonprofits that operate and use CES. With these partnerships we will continue to help strengthen the systems and partners that are striving to triple production of PSH and more quickly house our unsheltered. This has included high-level policy advisement; the creation of a vacancy-tracking pilot to measure and fix bottlenecks in the system; and a cross-training series for agencies and housing partners to better collaborate.
Spotlight on Innovation: Isla Intersection
Enterprise is a proud partner on the construction of Isla Intersections, a new permanent supportive housing complex made of shipping containers. Developed by Clifford Beers Housing and American Family Housing, Isla Intersections will have 54 one-bedroom apartments each constructed out of three modular containers. Enterprise brought $13 million in housing credit equity to the development and supported research into the development of Isla Intersections’ Living Lung, a public park that provides much-needed tree canopy in a neighborhood highly impacted by climate change and heat islands.
Engaging the Community: Undesign the Redline
Enterprise brought the Undesign the Redline to Southern California, an exhibit that presents a powerful narrative tying the intentional and systematic racial housing segregation policies of the 1930s to today’s political and social impacts. Enterprise is using Undesign the Redline as a tool to look at the continuing effects of the redlining legacy at the national and local level and to work together for more equitable policies and practices. Enterprise has toured the public exhibit across the Southland, hosting hundreds of tours, a symposium and an event with Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law. The exhibit was viewed by more than 20,000 visitors this year.