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These renovated motels will help homeless veterans start new lives.

L.A. is creating 500 new housing units with this smart plan.

In 2015, Los Angeles declared a state of emergency because of their "unprecedented and growing homelessness crisis."

Since then, L.A. city and county agencies have executed a series of actions, and while homelessness overall has had a slight rise in 2016 — not quite 6% over 2015 figures — the number of veterans without homes has gone down 30%, meaning over 1,200 have obtained places to live.

L.A.'s most recent undertaking is different, though: The city will convert old motels into 500 permanent apartments for veterans who are homeless.

If everything goes according to plan, the 500 units, built with help from Step Up, will be available for veterans to move into by January 2017. Coupled with the 300 units the city already provides to homeless residents, L.A. is on track to create 800 permanent housing units annually.


Image via David Shankbone/Wikimedia Commons.

Repurposing old living spaces as housing for people who are homeless is an unusual idea but not a new one.

The nonprofit homeless housing agency Step Up is helping to facilitate about 400 of L.A.'s motel conversions, and they've been working on developing housing for people on the streets since 1994.

One of Step Up's other transitional apartment conversions — Step Up on Vine in Hollywood — has 34 housing units, and it's been a raging success. Occupants are provided supportive services and may live there as long as they like.

This is the first Step Up on Vine complex in L.A., before and after. Image from Step Up, used with permission.

Images from Step Up, used with permission.

This new housing for homeless veterans in L.A. will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis — hopefully soon.

Step Up plans to use a combination of L.A.'s homeless services registry and their own outreach and engagement team (which actively canvasses the city looking for those in need) to place residents in the new buildings.

This is all part of the city’s plan to achieve a homeless population of functional zero, which means that the number of people who are homeless entering the city every month should be no greater than their monthly housing placement rate.

In addition to the motels, L.A. also has an ambitious 47-point plan for working with the city's ever-growing homeless population in the next few years.

In addition to creating new housing for people on the streets, L.A. has worked to incentivize landlords to make units available those in need. Some of those incentives include guaranteed rent payments and bonuses for holding open housing for someone coming from the streets, too.

"But you can only incentivize so much," said Ben Winters, housing policy specialist for L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti. "The next step is to build more housing."


Photo by Pretzelpaws/Wikimedia Commons.

Building housing isn’t cheap, so the city’s annual budget calls for $138 million to be used to address homelessness.

And there already are encouraging signs that the effort will really work. When the state of emergency was announced, there were approximately 4,362 veterans who were homeless in L.A. In May 2016, the L.A. Homeless Services Authority reported that had decreased to 3,071.

Plus, 500 new units coming soon means 500 more veterans will be off the streets in the months ahead. That’s something you can’t put a price tag on.

A pitbull stares at the window, looking for the mailman.


Dogs are naturally driven by a sense of purpose and a need for belonging, which are all part of their instinctual pack behavior. When a dog has a job to do, it taps into its needs for structure, purpose, and the feeling of contributing to its pack, which in a domestic setting translates to its human family.

But let’s be honest: In a traditional domestic setting, dogs have fewer chores they can do as they would on a farm or as part of a rescue unit. A doggy mom in Vancouver Island, Canada had fun with her dog’s purposeful uselessness by sharing the 5 “chores” her pitbull-Lab mix does around the house.

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Representative Image from Canva

Let's not curse any more children with bad names, shall we?

Some parents have no trouble giving their children perfectly unique, very meaningful names that won’t go on to ruin their adulthood. But others…well…they get an A for effort, but might want to consider hiring a baby name professional.

Things of course get even more complicated when one parent becomes attached to a name that they’re partner finds completely off-putting. It almost always leads to a squabble, because the more one parent is against the name, the more the other parent will go to bat for it.

This seemed to be the case for one soon-to-be mom on the Reddit AITA forum recently. Apparently, she was second-guessing her vehement reaction to her husband’s, ahem, avant garde baby name for their daughter, which she called “the worst name ever.”

But honestly, when you hear this name, I think you’ll agree she was totally in the right.

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An English doctor named Edward Jenner took incredible risks to try to rid his world of smallpox. Because of his efforts and the efforts of scientists like him, the only thing between deadly diseases like the ones below and extinction are people who refuse to vaccinate their kids. Don't be that parent.

Unfortunately, because of the misinformation from the anti-vaccination movement, some of these diseases have trended up in a really bad way over the past several years.

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A beautiful cruise ship crossing the seas.

Going on a cruise can be an incredible getaway from the stresses of life on the mainland. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of danger when living on a ship 200-plus feet high, traveling up to 35 miles per hour and subject to the whims of the sea.

An average of about 19 people go overboard every year, and only around 28% survive. Cruise ship lawyer Spencer Aronfeld explained the phenomenon in a viral TikTok video, in which he also revealed the secret code the crew uses when tragedy happens.

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Joy

Kudos to the heroes who had 90 seconds to save lives in the Key Bridge collapse

The loss of 6 lives is tragic, but the dispatch recording shows it could have been so much worse.

Representative image by Gustavo Fring/Pexels

The workers who responded to the Dali's mayday call saved lives with their quick response.

As more details of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore emerge, it's becoming more apparent how much worse this catastrophe could have been.

Just minutes before 1:30am on March 26, shortly after leaving port in Baltimore Harbor, a cargo ship named Dali lost power and control of its steering, sending it careening into a structural pillar on Key Bridge. The crew of the Dali issued a mayday call at 1:26am to alert authorities of the power failure, giving responders crucial moments to prepare for a potential collision. Just 90 seconds later, the ship hit a pylon, triggering a total collapse of the 1.6-mile bridge into the Patapsco River.

Dispatch audio of those moments shows the calm professionalism and quick actions that limited the loss of life in an unexpected situation where every second counted.

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Joy

Yale's pep band had to miss the NCAA tournament. University of Idaho said, 'We got you.'

In an act of true sportsmanship, the Vandal band learned Yale's fight song, wore their gear and cheered them on.

Courtesy of University of Idaho

The Idaho Vandals answered the call when Yale needed a pep band.

Yale University and the University of Idaho could not be more different. Ivy League vs. state school. East Coast vs. Pacific Northwest. City vs. farm town. But in the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, extenuating circumstances brought them together as one, with the Bulldogs and the Vandals becoming the "Vandogs" for a weekend.

When Yale made it to the March Madness tournament, members of the school's pep band had already committed to other travel plans during spring break. They couldn't gather enough members to make the trek across the country to Spokane, Washington, so the Yale Bulldogs were left without their fight song unless other arrangements could be made.

When University of Idaho athletic band director Spencer Martin got wind of the need less than a week before Yale's game against Auburn, he sent out a message to his band members asking if anyone would be interested in stepping in. The response was a wave of immediate yeses, so Martin got to work arranging instruments and the students dedicated themselves to learning Yale's fight song and other traditional Yale pep songs.

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