Housing and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation: Housing the Homeless?

Housing and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (full series)
Pharmaceuticals and Propositions | Housing the Homeless?
The Ideology of Homelessness | Thoughts and Questions

Housing the Homeless?

Proposition 34 explicitly applies only to health care providers that spent at least $100 million on anything other than direct patient care over a 10-year period and also operated multifamily housing units with at least 500 combined high-severity health and safety violations. This is an allusion to the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s significant (and controversial) low-income housing operations. Through its Healthy Housing Foundation, it has purchased and converted at least 18 properties—generally former hotels—across five states (mostly in Los Angeles) into cheap, typically single-room occupancy housing for the homeless. Rent varies by property, but can range as low as $400/mo.

Such conversions are known as “adaptive reuse,” which the foundation argues is “a much faster, much less expensive way of getting people off the streets” compared to new construction. There is certainly logic to this: a private room indoors—even a very rudimentary one—is a major improvement over a tent on the sidewalk. That said, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s approach has been criticized, most notably in a Los Angeles Times investigation from late 2023. That article detailed how the foundation had simultaneously “transformed itself into one of the nation’s most prolific funders of tenants’ rights campaigns and one of Skid Row’s biggest landlords.” It also revealed poor and even dangerous conditions at several of the charity’s properties.

According to the Times, even though many of its formerly-homeless tenants have “severe disabilities, drug addiction and mental health problems,” the AIDS Healthcare Foundation does not directly provide any support services—arguing that the costs of doing so would reduce the absolute number of people it could house. The problem is reportedly serious. As of late 2023, the Times wrote that at least 50 people had died in the foundation’s buildings, most commonly from drug use. Dozens have also been evicted, mostly for unpaid rent. The local news outlet Knock LA published an investigation that found there had been nearly 2,100 calls placed to 911 from five of the foundation’s buildings between October 2019 and December 2022—more than 12 per week on average. The overall picture painted is one of troubled and/or vulnerable residents living in an environment that is far from conducive to stability.

In response, the foundation has countered that its adaptive reuse approach and its policy of keeping resident eligibility requirements to “a drastic minimum” allows it to offer rooms at very low rents and provide basic housing to people who otherwise would be living on the streets. The foundation calls its properties “the low hanging fruit to house people immediately” and criticizes what it views as “making the perfect the enemy of the good.” It called the Times article “profoundly unfair” and lamented that such investigations provide “fodder for the corporate real estate industry to fight our initiative for rent control.”

This reflects both the specific policy priorities and the broader ideological worldview from which the AIDS Healthcare Foundation approaches homelessness, and housing more generally. It operates an activist campaign called Housing is a Human Right, through which it pushes for what it calls “equitable housing legislation and policies.” This has prominently included rent control, but the foundation also supports restrictions on new higher-density housing developments in urban Los Angeles through maintaining extensive single-family zoning. For an excellent explanation of how both rent control and restrictive zoning drive up the cost of housing—and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s role in backing them—see James S. Burling’s 2024 book Nowhere to Live: The Hidden Story of America’s Housing Crisis.

Homelessness, according to the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, is largely the product of greedy developers and corporate landlords who are forcing people onto the streets. Its Healthy Housing Foundation lists four reasons people become homeless: unemployment, lack of affordable housing, a personal financial or health crisis, and lack of a support network. No doubt these are all genuine factors, but they are also not exhaustive. The foundation does not mention substance abuse or mental illness, despite high rates of each among the homeless population broadly and (reportedly) at its own properties. Indeed, it dismisses their impact, claiming that while “politicians and the media often blame the worsening homelessness crisis on drug use and mental health issues,” the real reason is “unfair, inflated rents charged by predatory landlords.”

In the next installment, Housing First emphasizes providing permanent housing immediately without any preconditions or requirements.