Space as Social Worker: How the Built Environment Impacts Health and Transforms Lives

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but is its appreciation contingent on the beholder’s social status? Not according to the founders of nonprofit housing developer, Skid Row Housing Trust (the Trust), who believe both that the homeless are no different from the housed and that our innate capacity to respond to beauty can provide a solution to one of society’s most rapidly growing and pressing problems — the swelling number of individuals living on the streets.

More than three decades ago, founders Alice Callaghan and Candy Rupp, working closely with architect Jim Bonar, envisioned a new public housing model based on the idea that beauty in the form of well-designed buildings would transform the most blighted neighborhoods of downtown Los Angeles as well as evoke a sense of home for residents of public housing that would encourage them to stay off the streets.

No easy task. In the late 80s, housing developers worked within tight funding parameters and public…