I came out of Nate ’n Al’s, a deli in Beverly Hills, after a business breakfast. A tall homeless man who smelled bad and wore rags inserted himself in front of me, too close, with his palm up, poking my chest. I was startled, and I dug in my wallet and gave him money. I went off at a fast walk. I sat in my car literally shaking, angry with myself. I thought, How could I be scared and intimidated by a man in rags? I was ashamed. It was ridiculous, but I was. What do we do as leaders? If we are scared of something, we lean into it. If it is not going to kill us, as Nike says in its ads, “Just Do It.”
So I did sixty-five interviews, on my bicycle on the weekends, with unhoused and homeless people. It was not at all scary. I asked them two broad sets of questions: “How do you get money?” and “Where do you sleep?” Eventually, the epiphany came: an old lady said, “Come with me.” And she pulled me by the sleeve. She said, “I’ll show you where I sleep.” She led me into the bushes off the San Diego Freeway on some Caltrans wasteland. And there, hidden, was a gigantic cardboard box: disgusting, smelly after the rain, and with a piece of blue plastic over it. On the side, in foot-high letters, it said Sub-Zero. I thought: Oh, so this is the epiphany: I got the refrigerator, and this poor dear is living in its cardboard box. I knew this picture was wrong.
I tried to design a building. I hired an architect, a space-planner, and a budgeter. I thought we’d build a hundred-bed dormitory. But when we got that priced out, it was $5 million. Which was fine, except if you divided it by one hundred beds, it meant it was costing $50,000 a bed. But there are around a hundred thousand people in Los Angeles County sleeping rough. So that would be $5 billion. $5,000,000,000… that’s a lot of zeros. And it would only take care of Los Angeles. I had no idea how to raise $5 billion, and I knew the taxpayers would never provide it. Furthermore, perhaps some of the unhoused might refuse to be housed; some might not want to live with other people. I thought, Well, let’s reverse engineer it: What would be the best that we could do with $800 each? It’s not going to be a nice fluffy bed in an apartment. But maybe it could be a great deal better than that damp cardboard box on a rainy night. I imagined: It’s got wheels, you push it around, but it unfolds into a seven-foot-long cot at night, with a roof and windows. I took myself off to the emergency room at UCLA Hospital, and I asked the triage nurse at the desk, “When homeless people come in, what kills them?” She said it was mostly pneumonia, because they lie on the ground, get some bacteria or a virus up their nose, and then it travels down into their lungs. Without medical care, then they get pneumonia and die.
I couldn’t design the thing I had in mind. I have the spatial design ability of a newt. But I asked myself where in Los Angeles they would know such stuff. I Googled the Pasadena Art Center College of Design, where they train students to design automobiles and any other kind of mechanical or electronic item. I met with President Richard Koshalek. I asked him, “If I put up a little bit of money, could we have a competition for the best design for this thing I have in mind: in the daytime, you push it around, it’s got four wheels, but then you unfold it at night, and it becomes a single-user shelter, with four windows and two doors.” He was enthusiastic. Teams of students built one-sixth-scale maquettes out of cardboard. The dean asked me, “What do you want to call it?” I had no idea. I thought I couldn’t call it “I see tonight,” even though that would be the next line of the children’s rhyme, “Starlight, starbright, first star I see tonight…” The dean said, “Well, everyone deserves a roof.” I said, “You’re right, that’s it: Everyone Deserves A Roof: EDAR.”
Eric Lindeman and Jason Zasa won the competition, and I’ve been working with Eric on EDAR ever since. We’ve got hundreds of EDARs out on the streets, mostly donated to the homeless in the Sunbelt in the United States. On a ten-scale, if a nice fluffy bed in an apartment is a ten, and the damp cardboard box on a rainy night is a zero, we’re a solid five. But it’s a whole lot better than the cardboard box. Sometimes I meet with the mayor of a city, and they say, “We want them all in housing.” And I say, “Well, God bless. And on the day that you get everyone into an apartment who will come, I pledge we will collect up the EDARs, crush them, and recycle the metal. And we can all join hands and dance in a circle, and won’t that be grand?” I’m not packing for it.
