Sometime this fall, 32 homeless people will move into a supportive housing project now rising on Colden Avenue, a transitional street of apartments and aging houses in South Los Angeles. Soon after that, another group of people who are not homeless, and in fact quite well off, will also begin receiving benefits from the nine-unit apartment building. Fifty-six equity holders who financed the project will begin to see their first returns, expected to be about 5% annually. The $3.6-million housing project, built from shipping containers, is an experiment in using private investment to create homeless housing. Its backers, led by a family-owned Westside real estate investment company, hope to replicate it to produce thousands of units financed entirely by people willing to accept a modest return on money invested in a socially beneficial purpose. After its completion, the building will function much like the permanent supportive housing that is being constructed with subsidies from the city’s $1.2-billion Proposition HHH bond.
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