Call for Action: “House All Angelenos” Panel Discussions

Presented by: AIA LA Government Outreach (GO!) Committee

This is a virtual series of panel discussions. RSVP directly to each zoom link below.

On May 25, 2021 the AIA LA Board put forth a series of concrete recommendations directed at our City’s leadership to facilitate the building of affordable housing and promote social justice. To read the text in full, CLICK HERE.

As a follow up to this “Call for Action,” the AIA LA Government Outreach (GO!) Committee has organized three panel discussions for AIA LA members and the greater LA design community to discuss and clarify the recommendations from the AIA LA board. The three panel discussions will each be led by architects Chava Danielson, AIA, Rick Corsini, AIA, and Tracy Stone, AIA, and will include policy experts, academics, and architects/urbanists.

For more information on each panel, see descriptions below.

Panel #1 = Reinventing Los Angeles’ Boulevards – Finally!
Tuesday, October 26 (8:00am – 9:30am) = RSVP #1 HERE.
Panel #2 = Housing as a Civil Right and Exclusionary Practices: The Way Forward
Monday, November 1 (9:00am to 10:30am) = RSVP #2 HERE.
Panel #3 = Rethinking the Los Angeles Housing Paradigm, or How to Make the System Work For Us, and Not Against Us
Tuesday, November 9 (8:00am – 9:30am) = RSVP #3 HERE.

Housing as a Civil Right and Exclusionary Practices: The Way Forward

Monday, November 1 (9:00am to 10:30am) = RSVP #2 HERE.

Our current housing crisis is national in scope and generations in the making. Widespread public and private exclusionary practices have limited our housing supply and racially segregated our neighborhoods, while the for-profit and non-profit housing sectors have struggled to make a dent in the enormous national housing deficit.

What steps at the federal and local levels are necessary to come to terms with this crisis on a permanent basis? Is it time for new federal civil rights legislation to ensure all Americans have a decent place to live?

Speakers:

Chancela Al-Mansour – Executive Director, Housing Rights Center

Dhakshike Wickrema – Sr. Deputy for Homelessness and Housing, Council District 10

Debbie Burkart – National Vice President, Supportive Housing, National Equity Fund
Rick Corsini, AIA – Partner, CORSINI STARK ARCHITECTS (moderator)
Matthew Glesne – Senior City Planner, Los Angeles City Planning

Gene Slater – Author, “Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America” & Founder, CSG Advisors, Inc.

RSVP #2 HERE.

Chancela Al-Mansour – Executive Director, Housing Rights Center

Chancela Al-Mansour, Executive Director, joined HRC in November of 2010 after having been actively involved in fair housing advocacy for 18 years. For 16 years, Al-Mansour worked at Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County as a Directing Attorney, Supervising and Staff Attorney in the housing unit. She supervised the HPRP (homeless prevention) work with L.A. City and L.A. County and she litigated hundreds of cases involving landlord-tenant, housing element, mortgage fraud and fair housing laws. Al-Mansour has extensive experience litigating fair housing cases involving familial status, disability and race, producing training and resource materials, and training attorneys in state and federal fair housing law. In private practice, she and her law partner filed the landmark Roommates.com case, and litigated cases involving predatory lending and fraudulent mortgage broker practices. She was also an attorney with the Western Center on Law and Poverty. She served as President of the Fair Housing Congress of Southern California. Al-Mansour graduated from Vassar College and University of California at Davis School of Law.

Dhakshike Wickrema – Sr. Deputy for Homelessness and Housing, Council District 10

Dhakshike Wickrema serves as Senior Deputy for Homelessness and Housing, overseeing all policies, programs and advocacy related to homelessness and poverty alleviation. She previously served as Senior Deputy for Homelessness and Mental Health to then-Supervisor Ridley-Thomas and supported his successful efforts in March 2017 to pass Measure H, which funds housing and services to prevent and end homelessness in Los Angeles County. Dhakshike earned her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Illinois Wesleyan University and a Master’s in Urban Studies and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Debbie Burkart – National Vice President, Supportive Housing, National Equity Fund

Debbie is the National Vice President of Supportive Housing at National Equity Fund, Inc. (NEF), a leading non-profit syndicator of low-income housing tax credits. She has overseen the acquisition and/or underwriting of more than $1 billion in tax credit equity for special-needs projects including more than 4,000 units of housing for homeless veterans in 15 states. Debbie founded and directs LISC-NEF’s Bring Them HOMES, a supportive housing initiative for homeless veterans. She serves on the boards of National Coalition for Homeless Veterans and Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH). Debbie received the Corporate Silver Star Award from Volunteers of America Illinois, the Community Hero Award from New Directions, and was profiled by Affordable Housing Finance as one of ten women leading the affordable housing industry. She earned her Bachelor’s degree from Duke University and Master’s degrees in Business Administration and City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Rick Corsini, AIA – Partner, CORSINI STARK ARCHITECTS (moderator)

Rick Corsini’s practice specializes in solving complex problems where contextual relevance and functionality are prerequisites for good design. Whether at the scale of a campus master plan, a new building or a logo for a new restaurant, Rick and his team view the experience of architecture as a fluid, integrated whole, striving to seamlessly integrate building and site, form and space, light and material, style and use. Rick was born in Los Angeles and received his Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University and his Bachelor of Architecture from Cal Poly Pomona. In addition to over 25 years of professional practice, Rick has held faculty appointments at schools of architecture including Cal Poly Pomona, Woodbury University, and the University of Southern California. He serves on the board of Silver Lake Forward, a community-based non-profit organization and is a past president of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design.

Matthew Glesne – Senior City Planner, Los Angeles City Planning

Matthew Glesne leads the housing policy unit of the Los Angeles Department of City Planning. In this position he is responsible for the implementation of various citywide housing-related land use polices including the City’s short term rental ordinance as well as new incentive and streamlining programs for the creation and preservation of affordable housing. He has a Master’s Degree in Urban Planning and Policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Gene Slater – Author, “Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America” & Founder, CSG Advisors, Inc.

Gene Slater has served as senior advisor on housing for federal, state, and local agencies for over forty years. He cofounded and chairs CSG Advisors, which has been one of the nation’s leading advisors on affordable housing for decades. He has advised on housing issues in thirty states. His projects have received numerous national awards, and in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2009 he helped design the program by which the United States Treasury financed homes for 110,000 first-time buyers. He received degrees from Columbia, MIT, and Stanford, as well as a mid-career fellowship from Harvard. He has lived and worked in New York, Boston, rural Wisconsin, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area, where he currently resides.

RSVP #2 HERE.