A Locked Door Opens a Future

On a vacant parking lot in downtown Santa Barbara, a village of small, private rooms rose during the pandemic, built for $1.7 million. A county supervisor later told DignityMoves Regional Advancement Director for Southern California Jack Lorenz that if the organization had simply handed the County that same $1.7 million, “We would have come back in three years with a lousy dining room, but you came back with a great dining room, 34 private residential units, four private restrooms with showers, a laundry room, and three social service offices. And you did it in eight months.” That gap – between what the government can do and what a nimble nonprofit partner can build – is the entire premise of DignityMoves.

Founded during COVID by Elizabeth Funk, DignityMoves doesn’t just build permanent housing, nor does it just run shelters. It builds something faster and more far reaching. Its model focuses on building interim supportive housing, assembled from modular units, on land borrowed from cities, counties, and the occasional patient private landowner. “As soon as the site’s ready with the infrastructure,” Lorenz says, “boom, we’re ready to go.”

That model also relies on identifying why people refuse help in the first place, then removes every impediment. Lorenz calls it the Four Ps: privacy, pets, possessions, and partners. Every resident gets a room with a door that locks. Pets come, too. A case manager helps sort which possessions fit inside, with the rest going into an on-site storage unit. If an applicant has a partner also on the street, they get a double bed. In exchange, residents work with an intensive case manager toward an exit plan – stable or permanent housing within six to 12 months.

Targeted Expansion, Rapid Results

Behind the simplicity is a deliberate division of labor: DignityMoves builds, social service agency partners serve, and government supplies land and funding for social services while DignityMoves uses philanthropy for construction. The results are striking: three villages open just in Santa Barbara County, two more underway, roughly 800 people moved off the streets in only a few years, with close to 65 percent transitioning into stable housing. Statewide, DignityMoves has touched over 2,000 lives.

Lorenz is candid about who ends up in these villages: by the time people reach DignityMoves, he says, “99.9 percent have some sort of a substance abuse or mental health issue” – the  aftermath of homelessness. Seventy-five percent of homeless adults, he notes, experienced childhood abuse; forty percent of homeless Americans are working poor. The stories bear this out – Genevieve had severely untreated mental illness and eventually reunited with family in Indiana; Sandra, a Stanford MBA who lost her tech job, then her apartment, then her car, rebuilt from a DignityMoves room into a $175,000-a-year offer within a year.

These are only two of thousands of stories showing that interim housing is the bridge that gives people a dignified and safe pathway off the streets and out of homelessness.