Hope for Home, and What Comes Next
Earlier this month, the Gunn Jerkens team came together for a morning centered on optimism at the Hope for Home event hosted by HomeAid Orange County / Los Angeles aboard the Queen Mary. For us, the day carried a special sense of proximity. Not only was the event held close to home in Long Beach, but our own Senior Vice President, Jennifer Stoddard, served as a Committee Chair for the event.
For an industry that spends so much time talking about homes, the morning offered something bigger: a hopeful, forward-looking conversation about housing and the role we all play in shaping it.
An Industry Gathering That Felt Different
The room included many familiar faces: builders, developers, community partners and leaders from across the housing industry. Yet Hope for Home felt different from the typical industry gathering.
Rather than focusing on projects, pipelines or market performance, the morning centered on the growing housing challenges facing Southern California. It highlighted the urgent need for stable housing and supportive services for individuals and families who are currently unhoused across Orange, Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
One of the clearest takeaways from the event was simple but powerful: being unhoused is not a choice. It can happen to anyone. Job loss, health challenges, unexpected financial strain or natural disasters can quickly place people in situations they never imagined. The language we use matters, and so does the understanding behind it.
This wasn’t simply a gathering around a worthy cause. It was a room full of people asking a harder question: What will it take to get more housing delivered in California?
Turning Conversation into Action
At Hope for Home, attendees heard from speakers working across housing, policy and community service. A key moment of the morning was the unveiling of the new Builders Alliance portal, a platform created to help support rebuilding efforts following the devastating Palisades Fire.
The portal is designed to make rebuilding more accessible by connecting industry expertise with community needs and guiding affected families toward trusted resources.
For a closer look at how the Builders Alliance portal came together and how it’s supporting recovery efforts, read more in our dedicated blog post, Builders Alliance: A New Model for Rebuilding.
Expanding the Role of a Homebuilding Marketing Agency
Attending Hope for Home and contributing to the Builders Alliance initiative reflects something we’ve been thinking about more deeply as an agency.
Yes, Gunn Jerkens is a marketing agency. We help builders and developers bring communities to market and connect buyers with homes. But increasingly, our role sits within a much larger conversation.
Housing today is not just a sales story.
It is also a policy story, an economic story and above all, a human story.
“At our core, we’re strategic thinkers and creative problem solvers who help bring big ideas to life while connecting people to the information and resources they need.”
—Jennifer Stoddard, SVP at Gunn Jerkens
Communicating about housing often means helping clients navigate complex issues, align diverse stakeholders and build shared belief around solutions that matter. Events like Hope for Home sit right at that intersection.
Caring About Homes, and About Housing
At Gunn Jerkens, we spend our days thinking about homes. But events like this remind us that we also have to think about housing.
In Southern California, the need for housing is clear. What often slows progress is not a lack of demand or even a lack of vision. More often, it’s the complexity of the path forward. Process, delay and fragmentation can make it extraordinarily difficult to deliver the housing our communities need.
Even as communities work to move people into stable housing, the region continues to face a severe housing shortage. Estimates suggest Southern California is short hundreds of thousands of affordable homes, a gap that continues to widen as population growth and housing production fall out of balance.
Whether market-rate, affordable or supportive, housing of every kind faces similar barriers.
That’s why events like Hope for Home matter. They create space for conversations that go beyond awareness, bringing together the people, partnerships and ideas needed to move housing forward.
Because at the end of the day, housing is more than an industry issue. It’s about ensuring that more people have a place to feel safe, supported and at home.
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