On any given day in Los Angeles county, the roughly 8,000 frontline homeless workers in the region are desperately trying to help their unhoused clients find a pathway to a permanent home and a new life. 

For those trying to help parents living on the street make the jump, the significant lack of childcare facilities and daycare can make an already challenging effort seem like a Herculean task. 

At a former Denny’s in Reseda, California, a first-of-its-kind experiment in offering on-site childcare to homeless parents in hopes of making the path to recovery that much easier. This new daycare and early childhood education facility will help make the adjacent Woodlands, a former hotel turned transitional housing site for homeless families, into a more holistic service center. 

The preschool and community center—a $3 million renovation project which just held an opening celebration in early August and will begin operations in early September—fills a void in most homeless housing and service centers. Services for children and families remain very hard to come by, preventing many single parents and families that are unhoused from transitioning to a more stable and secure housing situation. The Betty Bazaar Center is the first state-licensed childcare center to open adjacent to homeless housing.

According to a 2023 statewide survey in California by the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, roughly 7% of participants were adults in homeless families, typically with one child with a median age of 7. Ken Craft, CEO of Hope the Mission, a nonprofit that operates 33 housing shelters in and around L.A., and worked with Childcare Resource Center (CCRC) to staff the center adjacent to the Woodlands, said kids in this situation experience real hardships. 

Families at the Woodlands, the former motel turned into a family-centric homeless shelter focused on single moms, is a 100-unit, 400-bed facility that opened in the spring of 2023, also run by Hope the Mission, and designed by Kadre Architects. Families seeking space must go through the traditional homeless intake process and qualify for housing vouchers.

“Studies have shown that kids that become homeless are four times more likely to have developmental problems as they go through school, and that’s because of the instability of their living situation and poor nutrition,” he said. Many homeless shelters will have volunteers come in to watch the kids, but there typically isn’t the budget, staff, or space to create a true preschool environment.

Craft said he was thinking of all the single moms who struggle to work and provide—often taking long trips on public transportation and failing to find reliable, affordable childcare—when Hope the Mission was able to take control of the old hotel that would become the Woodlands. He saw the dilapidated former Denny’s as an opportunity, and reached out to CCRC and the Mary E. Bazar-Robin Foundation to discuss funding and operating a space for kids.

The design of the 4,500-square-foot center reflected the architect’s desire for a vibrant, colorful building on Venture Boulevard, a main thoroughfare, that would create both a landmark for the neighborhood and an inviting place for children. Nerin Kadribegovic, founder and lead architect of Kadre Architects, has deep experience working on homeless housing, transitional homes, and tiny home shelters. 

Designed to reference airplane wings and aviation motifs—the namesake Betty Bazaar’s family fortune came from aerospace and selling aviation antennae—the exterior of the building and roofline contain layers of blade-like pieces of aluminum, painted white and perforated. It creates a layered, almost ghostly facade that wraps the building and gives it an elevated presence. The extensive solar array on the building’s rooftop provides enough power to make it a net-zero facility. 

Kadribegovic’s designs also called for scraping away the fume hoods and HVAC systems on the top of the former restaurant, and creating a roof with a series of skylights and a carved ceiling that offers the appearance of an abstract belly of a plane. 

Add in the colorful walls, filled with blocks of bright paint meant to reference the contours of microchips, and the building offers an engaging space for kids. Open space on the campus between the community center and housing includes outdoor play space for children; roughly half of the 400 residents of the Woodlands are under 18.

These kids aren’t just playing or being babysat during the day, said Craft. There’s important education, reading, social integration, and elementary preparedness taking place with CCRC staff. 

“We’re excited to be on the tip of the spear and help make this happen,” said Craft. “What we’re trying to do is to build really a complete, cohesive center that really addresses all the needs of a mom, of a child, of a teenager.”