By Ruben Vives, Doug Smith / Los Angeles Times / June 14, 2023
More than 14,000 people experiencing homelessness have been moved off the streets during the first six months of her administration, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass reported Tuesday.
About 30%, or 4,332, acquired permanent housing. An additional 10,049 people were placed in interim housing through city and county programs from December through May, Bass said — a 27% increase over the same period the year before.
Of those in permanent housing, about a third moved into new housing units, with the rest using subsidies to obtain rental units.
Bass said the housing placements resulted from executive directives she enacted upon entering office, including a state of emergency on homelessness and the launching of the Inside Safe program, which is designed to clear street encampments by moving unhoused people indoors. “We believe the emergency obviously continues, but we do see a way forward,” Bass said at a press conference at City Hall.
Since Bass took office in mid-December with a promise to house 17,000 people in her first year, homelessness has been at the forefront of her agenda.
In April, she announced that $1.3 billion of her $13 billion proposed budget would go to addressing homelessness, including about $250 million for Inside Safe. Previously, the program had been leasing rooms around the city. Bass’ team has shifted the strategy to purchasing property and is looking to acquire at least eight motels or hotels.
Bass said Tuesday that in her first six months, Inside Safe cleared 19 encampments, with 1,323 people voluntarily moving into temporary housing such as hotels — a slowdown from her first 100 days.
A handout distributed at the City Hall briefing showed photos of streets in Hollywood, Venice, Harbor City and South L.A. before and after they were cleaned. More than 262,000 pounds of waste were said to have been removed. The handout detailed several challenges to Inside Safe, including the cost of motel rooms, the difficulty of clearing RV encampments and limited capacity to provide services in part because of a lack of healthcare personnel and access to drug treatment as well as homeless service providers already being stretched thin.
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Hope Todd Gloria sees this…. Rachel, will you make sure he does?
I think she sent 13,999 of them to Ocean Beach. Feeling like I am in a live-action Walking Dead episode as of late…
Fact: Most of the homeless people on California’s streets are Californians. While conservative pundits love to scream about lazy homeless people flocking to the state for easy living, – it’s not true. Three-quarters live in the same county as where they most recently had a place to live. This from a recent survey of over 3,000 unhoused Californians.
I guess that doesn’t include living in a vehicle on the street, unless the license plate state doesn’t count.
We have begun to parrot a very false and misleading narrative with the last homelessness count 2023, dividing the city up by district in order to imply that there are just 3,000 or so unsheltered San Diegans.
There are 3,000 unsheltered San Diegans just in the DOWNTOWN AREA ALONE!
The counts account for more than 13,000 unsheltered San Diegans CITYWIDE. And those are conservative estimates. Advocates say that number is considerably larger when unsheltered San Diegans sleeping in vehicles are taken into account.
Daniel Ellsberg in a speech once explained how those who are charged with keeping secrets become convinced that they are smarter and more capable than those who don’t have that information. He discussed how secrecy creates a feedback loop in which officials inside a secrecy bubble start to believe that they are invincible. They become subject to groupthink and so are increasingly unwilling to recognize legitimate criticism or concerns from those outside the bubble. He made clear the dangerous and corrosive power of governmental secrecy, something he had experienced, and then rejected, in himself.
Dan also was unflinching in asserting that most governmental secrecy is not necessary. “Most secrecy is not directed at keeping secrets from external nations, enemies, allies, or otherwise. It’s to keep secrets from Americans, Congress, and public courts. They’re the ones that have the votes and write the budgets,” he said at a Harvard Law School Human Rights Clinic event in 2011. “They’re the ones whose blame is to be feared.”
Our City Council declared Housing a Human Right. Then just weeks later made homelessness illegal. All the while profiting hand-over-fist from the corporate monopolization of housing that incessantly dumps more and more and more San Diegans into the streets to die on the 5th of each month. The City has never had a metric to measure deaths that are the result of San Diegans being forced into homeless due to reckless, misleading, duplicitous Build-to-Rent housing policies implemented, and soon to be imposed through the adoption of SB10 by the corrupted California Democratic Party.
You nailed it, Mateo. Our electeds are all about “acting” to solve problems, not the “actions” needed to solve them. They think donors are their constituents not voters, so that’s for whom they work.
Regarding homeless issue, I recommend reading an Op-Ed I recently wrote for the Times of San Diego in which I articulated how San Diegans are feeling about the City/County/State approach to homelessness. You can read it here: https://timesofsandiego.com/opinion/2023/06/19/camping-bans-passage-reflects-increasing-fatigue-over-homelessness/
You’ve got to the heart of the matter: how much we spend matters less than how we spend it. Without transparency or accountability, it disappears down the rat-hole of the nonprofit industrial complex, https://truthout.org/articles/beyond-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/