Should we think big to house homeless?

The pandemic brought with it lots of innovative ideas for repurposing downtown and suburban office buildings no longer filled with commuting workers.

Housing, anyone? We'll see how the plans for changing commercial to residential play out in the long run.

And when it comes to finding homes for the homeless in Southern California, thinkoutside-the-box types have long touted turning disused older buildings into a shelter from the storm — and the heat, and all the elements — for the unhoused.

Is that a good idea, a winwin, even if it were to mean many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of formerly homeless people suddenly moving into a neighborhood — perhaps your neighborhood — all at once?

That's our Question of the Week for our readers.

The latest such idea comes in the form of a proposal for the empty, landmark Sears building in Los Angeles's Boyle Heights neighborhood. Anaheim businessman and philanthropist Bill Taormina proposes to turn the shuttered Sears into what the Los Angeles Times has termed a “giant homeless services hub.”

He would brand the place the Los Angeles Life Rebuilding Center, where he proposes to house as many as 10,000 unhoused people “and provide medical and mental health services, job training, immigration help and drug abuse diversion programs.”

It's a grand scheme, for sure. Do you support it?

The homeless problem is huge. Does that mean we need to entertain equally large responses in order to solve it?

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized,” the architect Daniel Burnham wrote. Is the Sears proposal an appropriate big plan?

At a meeting with neighbors last month, Taormina ran into opposition, with some terming the idea “a crime against humanity,” “irresponsible” and “a threat to the area's children.”

Would housing and providing services to thousands of homeless people create too much of a burden for a neighborhood, and should we consequently be thinking small, not big?

Email your thoughts to opinion@scng.com. Please include your full name and city or community of residence. Provide a daytime phone number (it will not be published).