Located in the Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, Visioning Hope is an intersectional development that centers alternatives to incarceration.
context
This underutilized lot is located behind The California Endowment building, which sits at the edge of Downtown Los Angeles, Chinatown, and the Twin Towers Correctional Facility.
With the announcement that the Los Angeles Men’s Central Jail would be closing, The California Endowment (TCE), a private health foundation located adjacent to the jail, began a process to transform their underutilized backlot into a resource center for the formerly incarcerated and wider Chinatown community.
The Men’s Central Jail is among the largest prisons in the world and one of the cruelest in the country, with the ACLU and the Department of Justice separately suing the facility for major civil rights violations. In the midst of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests and the growing pandemic, the County Supervisors voted to close the jail, though this directive has not yet been implemented.
Already deeply involved in championing alternatives to incarceration, Dr. Robert Ross, TCE’s President and CEO, committed a long-vacant parcel on the TCE campus to demonstrate what those alternatives could look like.
Neighborhood context. KDI 2021.
process
KDI responded to TCE’s call for planners, organizers, and designers to reimagine the space and assembled a team with nonprofit architecture firm Designing Justice + Designing Space and the community organization Southeast Asian Community Alliance (SEACA).
Our challenge was to envision a space that would meet the needs of the formerly unhoused, low-income Chinatown residents, and formerly incarcerated, with the latter being the main focus. We worked with our partners to create a design process that was accessible to all of the communities impacted by this campus. The team spent three months with formerly incarcerated and unhoused folks, the TCE staff, and Chinatown residents conducting surveys and interviews, facilitating design workshops, and hosting an art activation.
solution
Though the communities involved in the process differed in many ways, we found that their needs intersected more often than not. They envisioned a campus filled with amenities to meet daily needs, build life skills, and uplift their minds, bodies, and spirits.
Taking all that we learned from our partners and residents, our final concept design weaves play elements and healing gardens throughout 100 housing units that sit above a state-of-the-art culinary training facility, multipurpose gathering spaces, and a mail and storage room. This final amenity, the mail room, will provide community members with a permanent address needed to access housing, jobs, and government identification.
impact
In February 2022, the TCE board unanimously voted to approve our design, a crucial milestone for this project on the road to the realization of this vision of hope. As of 2023, TCE is moving ahead with the lot’s design development and construction.
