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Community Matters
Winter/Spring 2012
MHC BREAKS GROUND ON NEW SUPPORTIVE HOUSING IN LOS ANGELES
Mercy Housing California recently celebrated the groundbreaking of its newest affordable supportive housing property in Los Angeles. Caroline Severance Manor features 85 apartments in a mixed use community for families and individuals. More than 50 percent of the apartments will be supportive housing for homeless individuals and families living with severe mental illness.
Located in the Mid Wilshire/Koreatown neighborhood of the City of Los Angeles, Caroline Severance Manor is being constructed adjacent to the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles. The First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles and the Community Foundation Land Trust of the California Community Foundation partnered with Mercy Housing California to assemble the five-parcel property.
Mercy Housing California is working with the Church and the Ketchum YMCA of Downtown Los Angeles to plan a mixed-use community that will include structured parking for the church and a licensed childcare center. Thirty one-bedroom units will be designated for adults living with severe and persistent mental illness and 18 of the larger units will be designated for families with children who are homeless or at risk of homelessness.
In a unique partnership with the Los Angeles County Departments of Mental Health and Children and Family Services, the family units will be targeted to Kincare Families – households in which children are cared for by a relative other than their parent. In order to achieve the best outcomes for children, these families frequently require the extra support that Caroline Severance Manor will provide. Telecare Corporation and Hope Street Family Center will provide on-site Resident Services upon the project’s completion in Spring 2013.
The property is being named after Caroline Severance, a community activist who worked tirelessly for women’s rights, including the right to vote, in the late 1880s to early 1900s. Severance is the only woman listed alongside 18 men on a plaque in Los Angeles City Hall recognizing the original founders of the City of Los Angeles. Virginia Elwood-Akers, the author and former librarian who wrote the biography, Caroline Severance, was one of many speakers at the groundbreaking ceremony and shared that Caroline Severance worked to create a society that made sure “no man, woman or child in our broad, bountiful land shall be homeless and helpless.”