
Monday
morning heat and construction crews didn’t stop ceremonial groundbreaking
of The New Carver Apartments, the first Skid Row Housing Trust Project in Downtown L.A.'s South Park. Inset: Michael Maltzan.
The New Carver Apartments will be a six-story 95-unit complex sitting on a fragmented parcel where 17th Street bends into a part of South Hope that was cut off by the 10 and 110 freeways, a lost corner of Downtown. The plan to provide a first step for
supportive housing solutions for homeless hospital patients released in
Skid Row, making some of the units the first to be designed with the intent to receive patients with a immediate hospital release, also known as "patient dumping."
It was the “patient dumping” and needed
affordable housing adaptable for disabled residents that prompted this
joint City, State, non-profit, and developer project. It since enabled by CRA, seen through by
Jan Perry, and steered by Skid Row Housing Trust, making the complex filled with social and
architectural ambition.
Designed by the firm Michael Maltzan Architecture, the apartments sit in a saw
toothed cylinder on a fragmented parcel next to a bend in
the road. Rather than retreating and hiding the disabled, the introduced project
will engage both building and resident with the rest of Downtown. It gives Micheal Maltzan the chance to answer his own question that he posed just before the ground breaking: “How do
buildings not shrink from their responsibility of being part of the
city?”