Watt Companies Has a Plan to Combat Homelessness

The Watt Family of The Watt Companies has sponsored a homelessness challenge, encouraging private citizens to find a scalable solution to the homeless problem in Los Angeles. Through Common Pool, the family will award $350,000 to implement two winning ideas. This isn’t the first time that a challenge model has been used to find solutions to community problems. In 2017, for example, InnoCentive launched the Emergency Response 2.0 Challenge through an organization called X Prize to find a solution to clean the Gulf of Mexico following the BP oil spill. The Watt Family is hopeful that through open sourcing, citizens will be able to create innovative solutions to homelessness in Los Angeles, which has the largest homeless population in the country. Applications for the challenge opened last week, and will close at the end of the summer. To find out more about the challenge and what motivated the family to get involved, we sat down with Scott Watt and Nadine Watt for an interview.

GlobeSt.com: What was the impetus to launch the homelessness challenge/?

Scott Watt: I have been working with homelessness since 2001, and I am on the board of the Union Rescue Mission, where we serve 3,000 meals a day and we sleep 1,500 people a night. It is the largest rescue mission in the United States. The organization is looking for more emergency relief for these people to get them off the streets and get them fed, but as homebuilders, we have been involved in affordable housing and we are looking for solutions there. Having been on that board and being residential developers, we saw the problem and thought it was getting worse. I thought that we could create a challenge for homelessness, where we could bring people together. Once you start on a solution and open source it, everyone can participate. There will be ideas, and when we start open sourcing the challenge, people will come up with solutions. I am hoping for something outside of the box.

Nadine Watt: Two years ago, we thought we were innovators here, and we were seeing something that a lot of people hadn’t seen or started to address yet. It took a long time to get this challenge off the ground. In the meantime, everyone is coming to the table because they see what a dramatic challenge this is in our city. If this isn’t solved, we cannot go on to be a great regional city.

GlobeSt.com: Why has the homeless problem in Los Angeles become so severe?

Scott Watt: One is the affordability of housing; another is the law that was passed allowing homeless to spend the night on the street; another is the prisons have released so many people who become homeless; there is a drug problem that has increased enormously. And, the NIMBY issue is a problem. That has been one of the hardest things to get resolved. The Union Rescue Mission had a piece of land in Compton, and we went to the council meeting. People showed up and said that they didn’t want it in the city. The problem is pervasive everywhere.

Nadine Watt: It is also a political issue because the barriers to development are so great. We will not be able to build our way out of this problem. Then, a lot of the NIMBYs are forcing the projects that the mayor is trying to implement out of these areas.

GlobeSt.com: Do you think private programs, like this, are the best pathway to a solution?

Scott Watt: We think that, ultimately, the solution is going to be getting some form of housing. That is a partial solution. We also have more than $1 billion committed through HHH and H programs, but they can’t figure out where to put the money. That is another reason why this challenge is an opportunity for someone to come up with an idea of how these companies can distribute this money more efficiently. The Mayor had a $100 million fund, and he couldn’t put any of it out, so there is a lot of frustration.

Nadine Watt: I think the solution will be public-private partnerships. I don’t think the city can do it all on its own. I think somehow they are going to have to empower private developers to be able to build and offer services as well. It is going to have to be a community effort.

GlobeSt.com: What has the responses been like?

Scott Watt: We just sent it out, and we have some people that have already made application. USC had a homelessness initiative, and we have sent applications to these people.

Nadine Watt: We are pushing it out through several different areas, including the USC’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, The United Way and our non-profit relationships. As a chair of the Los Angeles Business Council, this is an issue that we have been addressing for the last several years, and we have been in partnership with Clive Holland and Tom Safran to work at affordable solutions for housing the homeless as well as the people that are a paycheck away.

To find out more, visit lahomelessnesschallenge.org