Just The Facts
Customer: LifeMoves
Location: Mountain View, California
Challenge: Securing an interim housing development for the homeless.
Solution: Around-the-clock video surveillance, access control and intercom system.
Results: A modern security system that keeps the residents of this development home safe as they regain stability and work toward permanent housing.
Customer Challenge
Homelessness is a widespread issue in California. In fact, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reports 181,399 people are homeless in The Golden State, accounting for 28% of the nation’s total homeless population. What’s more, according to an article on CalMatters, this number has risen nearly 40% over the past five years.
LifeMoves saw these numbers and aimed to do something about them. The primary goal of this organization is to support the state’s unhoused individuals and families by helping them find stable housing as they work toward permanent housing.
The nonprofit provides a haven for individuals in need by managing 26 facilities in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. Each site offers private units with bathrooms, pet-friendly areas, and fully equipped communal kitchens to promote community engagement and skills development.
The organization’s impact on people continues to expand. In the previous year alone, LifeMoves offered over 288,000 nights of shelter to individuals, couples, and families.
LifeMoves also prioritizes giving its benefactors a feeling of security. To bolster security at specific locations, the organization brought in Safe and Sound Security to install security cameras, access control, and intercom systems.
LifeMoves Mountain View, an interim housing community that offers 124 private units to the homeless, was targeted for the first security installation.
Typically, the Mountain View location serves over 124 people at a time, providing 10 times the number of year-round shelter beds previously available in Mountain View. “In fact, the LiveMoves Mountain View community has the capacity to serve over 50% of the Mountain View homeless population,” says Zachary Palmquist, project manager for Safe and Sound Security.
Even though each family is provided with a self-contained unit, equipped with lockable doors and windows, for 90 to 120 days, LifeMoves had concerns about security, Palmquist adds.
“Before building their site, they approached us to perform a security assessment and develop a security solution,” he says. “We met with their architectural and security teams then designed a security layout for cameras, access control and intercom systems.”
The resulting system used:
- Verkada Video Cameras
- Verkada Access Control
- Aiphone Intercom Systems
“This project went from zero to 100 really fast,” Palmquist adds. “Within three to four weeks, it went from an undeveloped site to having trenches dug and buildings going up.”
Security Cameras
LifeMoves Mountain View is part of Homekey, a program that created 6,000 new housing units at 94 sites in California after the pandemic. While most Homekey sites are transformed hotels and motels, Mountain View is a modular housing project on an industrial parking lot.
Near the completed development entrance, there are family units equipped with private bathrooms and a playground conveniently located nearby. Behind that, there is a communal kitchen offering three meals a day and a small hall where LifeMoves hosts job fairs, movie nights, and other social activities.
The entire development is enclosed by a fence with two pedestrian gates, accessible only to staff and residents. The gates and entrances to common areas needed to be properly secured with security cameras, according to Palmquist.
“We installed a total of 34 cameras here,” Palmquist says. “We used Verkada cameras because they provided facial recognition and person of interest analytics.”
Verkada cameras’ People Analytics feature utilizes edge-based analytics to detect people, faces, and filter results based on clothing, color, apparent sex, and bags. This feature allows Mountain View to perform granular people detection.
For example, Mountain View staff might search for every person who appears to be male and wearing a red shirt and jeans. Once located, the system can track him as he moves across the complex.
Administrators also can use the system to create People of Interest events, according to Palmquist. They simply upload the faces of People of Interest into the system and receive alerts whenever those individuals are spotted on camera.
“The big thing for them was tracking People of Interest,” he says. “Let’s say they had an unhoused person who became disgruntled and was no longer allowed on site. They could create a Verkada profile for that person, and if any of the cameras detected his face, the system would alert the staff immediately so they could be proactive instead of reactive to the situation.”
The cameras also needed to balance tenant privacy and complete coverage during installation, he adds.
“We had to be able to see every single door throughout the entire facility, while maintaining resident privacy,” he says. “They put blinds on every door so the cameras could not see inside. We also did some privacy masking on the cameras themselves to maintain privacy.”
Installation Hiccups
Camera setup became more complex due to the buildings being elevated and resting on composite decking. Running beneath the decking is an intricate maze of underground conduit that spans the entire facility.
Thankfully Safe and Sound Security was involved in the project from the ground up, according to Palmquist.
“We connected with the manufacturer to install conduit inside the walls for our cable systems as they built the prefabricated buildings. That allowed us to get cables to where they were needed,” he says. “Trying to pull cable across an entire building after the fact would have been a challenge.”
Because the Cat6 cable also spanned over 300 feet, Safe and Sound Security also had the manufacturer install three IDF locations, which are network hubs with cabling running through them. They installed a central IDF hub, another toward the back of the development, and a third toward the front.
“In the end we ran roughly 20,000 square feet of Cat6 cabling,” he says. “The advantage to working with the manufacturer to install conduit and place the hubs is we could break the cabling into thirds. It reduced the cabling we needed because if every cable had to run from the front to the back, it would have doubled and even tripled the cable length.”
Conduit design took a while, he adds.
“It was such a tight compact area that we had to figure out how to get all of this conduit and cabling throughout the entire facility. It took several revisions and renderings to meet building codes about how far apart certain conduits can be and the depths they can be buried underground,” he says.
He explains the metal units are similar in design to shipping containers, requiring separate conduits for high voltage and low voltage wires. “It’s against code to run low voltage in the same conduits as high voltage, so it just added to the confusion,” he says. “Whose conduits are these? Where do they go?”
The underground conduits used for cabling also raised concerns about servicing the system.
“In the end we cut access hatches in the decking,” he says. “Beneath those access points, are six boxes that conduits can go in and out of. We installed around 10 of them. This way, if we ever have to replace a cable from end to end, we can pop open those main junction points and pull cable from one junction point to the next.”
Access Control
The access control system didn’t present as many challenges, according to Palmquist.
“There were only five card reader locations to worry about,” he says. “Each access point had a phone intercom and a card reader right below it. The general contractor provided all the conduits and electrified hardware. We just had to get our cables there and install our devices.”
Inside the administrative office of the housing development, there is a master station that allows authorized users to unlock doors and grant access. Key fobs are also provided to guests for accessing their living quarters and common areas during their stay.
“The reason they chose key fobs over PIN codes is PIN codes can be passed along to anyone. They also could not use smartphone access because not every resident has a mobile device,” he says. “They wanted to make sure only guests could access the development and it was determined a key fob was the best option.”
Administrators use the Verkada platform to grant tenants access by issuing a key fob and setting an expiration date simultaneously.
Administrators in the master station also rely on a commercial-grade, ruggedized intercom system from Aiphone. This system operates a little differently in that it’s not a multi-tenant intercom, where you can dial any tenant that lives there. “It’s peer-to-peer,” Palmquist explains. “All calls are directed to the main station, where administrators can choose to unlock the doors for entry.”
Servicing the System
LiveMoves decided against entering a comprehensive Service Level Agreement (SLA) with Safe and Sound Security.
With this agreement, Safe and Sound Security offers training, and its technicians come out to do maintenance, updates, and repairs on the security system. But LifeMoves preferred to do the work themselves.
“Normally, with SLAs, we can get into the systems remotely to do this work,” he says. “But we are not allowed remote access to their security system. They self-monitor and when LifeMoves needs service, we dispatch a technician to the site.”
Since the initial site at MountainView, Safe and Sound Security has been tapped to do LifeMoves Half-Moon Bay, Redwood City, and the San Jose sites as well.
But only their work on the original site made headlines, adds Palmquist. “We were part of a news broadcast with Gov. Newsom. That was kind of cool. This was a real feel-good project. One that will keep the residents of these communities safe and secure for some time to come.”
Safe and Sound Security
75 E Santa Clara St 6th floor, San Jose, CA 95113, United States
+1 408-560-4799
https://getsafeandsound.com/locations/san-jose/
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