The story behind Wellness Housing, in the words of the two men who started it. Why we opened these homes in South Los Angeles and what we are trying to build.
Most people looking for a room in Los Angeles are not looking for a program. They are looking for somewhere to live.
That should be obvious. It is not how the system usually treats it, and the two people who started Wellness Housing know that from the inside.
“No one really had the time to take the time”
Greg is one of the managing partners here. Before any of this existed, he and his business partner Saqib were on the street.
“We felt we had no resources. No one really had the time to take the time to let us know: hey, look, Greg, there is a nice house over here that is safe and clean. We can help you with some food and resources for jobs.”
Read that again, because it is the whole reason this company exists. Not a lack of housing. A lack of anyone taking the time.
Both of us have been at the bottom
“Him and I have been at the bottom. We felt mismanaged, mistreated. We did not have money. We were living on the streets.”
Greg does not soften that part, and we are not going to soften it either. He was treated badly. He remembers it clearly. Most people who end up looking for a room like ours have been treated badly by something too, and they can tell within about thirty seconds of a phone call whether they are about to be treated badly again.
That is why Greg answers the phone the way he does.
So we built the thing we could not find
“I decided, you know what, I want to give back to the community. Saqib and I determined that we want to do this by giving you a nice, clean, safe house to live in.”
Clean and safe. That is a modest promise, and it is meant to be. It is not a mission statement, it is a description of the two things Greg did not have and now refuses to run a house without.
He puts it plainly: taking pride in the cleanliness of the house, and safety as the priority. Everything else here is built on top of those two.
The other half of the story
Saqib Iqbal is a licensed clinical social worker. He also runs Eye Cue Mental Health, a clinic in Cerritos, California. In 2022, the two of them opened the first Wellness Housing home in South Los Angeles.
What that partnership means in practice is that one of us has lived the problem and one of us has spent a career studying it. Both turn out to be necessary. Understanding why people end up without stable housing is not the same skill as knowing what it feels like at 2am, and running a house well requires both.
Today we house adults across our homes in Los Angeles, men and women, including a house that is entirely for women.
What that history decided about how we run
Most of our policies are not policies. They are answers to something one of us ran into personally.
- No credit check. A hard stretch should not follow you into every conversation about housing for the next seven years.
- No security deposit. The people who most need a room are the ones least able to produce several hundred dollars on a day’s notice.
- General Relief through DPSS accepted. Roughly half our residents pay through some form of assistance. Nobody here treats that as a complication.
- All utilities included. No surprise bill in month two that quietly undoes everything.
- A house for women only. Not one room in a mixed house. The whole home.
- Rules held consistently. No alcohol, no pets, single adults only, headphones on. Clean and quiet is not luck, it is maintenance.
What we are, and what we are not
Worth saying clearly, because Saqib’s clinical background sometimes leads people to expect something we do not offer.
Wellness Housing is transitional and shared housing for adults. It is not a treatment program, not detox, and there is no clinical staff working in the houses. Nobody manages your day for you.
What we provide is the part that so often goes missing. Somewhere clean, somewhere safe, and someone who will actually take the time.
If you are looking
Greg said it better than any marketing copy could: if you are looking for a place like what we are providing, let us know, and we will take care of you.
Come and see one of the houses. That is the whole first step.
Call 562-716-4568 or email info@wellnesshousing.org.
