Homelessness in our City
It’s the top priority for LA voters. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/02/12/los-angeles-homelessness-crisis-tops-voter-concerns-mayoral-race/6691500001/?gnt-cfr=1 But what exactly do you do about it?
Advocates for the police want more police. Advocates of mental health want more mental health funding. Advocates for housing want more housing built. Neighborhood advocates say not in my back yard (NIMBY). The county says it’s the cities’ fault; they should build more housing and temporary shelters. The city says it’s the county’s fault they should provide more mental health, drug treatment and other supportive services. Advocates for women want more funding for battered women’s services. Advocates for children want more services to homeless youth and transition age youth. There are kernels of truth in each. Oh, and I forgot, others claim it’s the progressive social policies and warm climate that make LA a magnet for the nation’s homeless, and this is causing the problem. (Inaccurately, I might add).
About a quarter of LA’s 60,000 homeless have severe behavioral health issues like a serious mental illness or substance abuse. https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=726-2020-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count-results Mental health programs depend on an individual being on time for weekly visits to a therapist or timely taking one’s prescribed medications; they are simply not well-designed to meet the mental health needs of someone who is homeless and living on the streets. We must have better models of delivering behavioral health care to this category of homeless individuals; that is why development of permanent supportive housing is so imperative.
We miss the point by our caricatures of the homeless as seriously mentally ill individuals or substance abusers, forgetting that 3/4ths of the homeless are not seriously mentally ill. All of the homeless just don’t have enough income to pay rent and utilities and feed themselves. That is because high rents make housing particularly unaffordable in LA. https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=726-2020-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count-results The rents are high because for many decades we have not built enough affordable housing. https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/understanding-homelessness-city-los-angeles We have a shortage of at least 500,000 units. https://la.urbanize.city/post/california-los-angeles-county-affordable-housing-shortage-2021 The shortage is partially self-inflicted with quite restrictive planning, zoning, and building policies at the local, regional, and state levels that have for many years hampered the development of affordable housing. https://calmatters.org/commentary/2021/12/california-housing-crisis-both-wide-and-deep/
During the same time frame, we have also allowed many of our public and private safety nets to badly deteriorate -- public housing, rental assistance, federal, state and local welfare programs, food assistance programs, treatments for behavioral health like serious mental illness and substance abuse, unemployment insurance, and the like. The deterioration is particularly hurting low wage, less educated workforces, and working-class men in particular. https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/98812/the_nature_of_work_adn_the_social_safety_net_6.pdf The homeless are the canaries in the coal mines of the widespread deterioration of safety net programs and the increasingly unaffordable housing markets in LA. We witnessed across the nation during the pandemic exactly how badly these programs had deteriorated when so many lost their jobs, their incomes, their ability to feed themselves and their families, to pay their rent or utilities or mortgages, and social safety net programs just broke down. But now the economy has bounced back, and there is a severe shortage of workers. There are much better job opportunities available for those with the right skills and qualifications. This is a time where there should be good job training and placement programs put into place to help the homeless, the underemployed, and others find jobs and stable employment with good benefits.
There is a cycle from homelessness, to arrest for being homeless, to conviction, to jail, to back on the streets with ever declining opportunities to get a job. https://www.urban.org/features/five-charts-explain-homelessness-jail-cycle-and-how-break-it We must break that cycle and afford job opportunities and training to those exiting county jails and state prisons.
The homeless do sleep in public parks or on streets or under freeways, on hillsides, in vacant buildings, in tent cities, on couches, in subway systems, in shelters, or in cars or vans. https://pitinoshelter.org/seven-places-homeless-people-sleep/ Yet some budding politicians are now preparing to once again to criminalize those seeking a safe place to sleep at night or to keep their belongings during the day. We should be asking them questions “exactly what’s the point of that”, “where do you want them to sleep”, “have you ever actually been there”, “what have you done to solve the problem”, “where would you like them to bathe or use a toilet” and “how would you reduce rents or build more affordable housing”.
Most of the homeless are men. Disproportionate numbers are African American men. The concentration is highest on Skid Row in downtown LA, which has for well over 100 years been the dumping ground for the unhoused in LA. https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/understanding-homelessness-city-los-angeles Homelessness has become the issue de jour in the LA Mayor’s race not because of Skid Row, but because the growing numbers of homeless are now living and highly visible throughout the city and county and are no longer simply constrained to and cordoned off in the narrow confines of Skid Row.
What programs actually work to help a homeless individual? There is a fierce debate between the advocates for the Housing First model, which emphasizes getting an individual off the street and into housing, and the advocates of the abstinence model, which emphasizes getting an individual with substance use issues to commit to no use of drugs or alcohol before getting housed and then evicting them from their housing if they relapse. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4833089/ The research shows there is no single model that always works best, but instead there are multiple models; each have their advantages and disadvantages; success depends on using the right model for the right individual, not on any one size fits all policy solution. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4833089/
It is important also to keep in mind the differences between the chronically homeless and the temporarily homeless. Many of the homeless self-resolve – i.e. they find housing in a few days or weeks. https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/september/HomelessQandA.html About 1/6th are the chronically or long term homeless. We have to be aware of these differences and tailor our solutions to them. Our city’s problem is not that we have no solutions to homelessness (we do, and they have been working and people are getting housed), it is the fact that there are more people entering homelessness than there are people exiting homelessness. So we have a growing problem; there is growing public awareness of it and a desire for a solution to it. We need to capture the moment to act, but to do so effectively and accountably.
As the politicians plead their cases to be elected this year to municipal offices in LA, listen carefully to their proposals to end homelessness and vote for those individuals who combine genuine compassion and realistic solutions, not for those uttering empty rhetoric, threats and promises with little real understanding of the complex issues involved. There is no simple, easy, ready-to-implement, solution, or at least that’s my opinion.
Building enough more affordable housing units is a costly and long process, involving many different players and levels of public and private decision making. Better delivery of mental health and substance abuse treatments requires well-trained practitioners and a better and far more effective delivery system for behavioral care to the homeless; this cannot be done overnight. We have already seen how fiercely many neighborhoods resist siting homeless shelters and drug and alcohol treatment centers in their backyards. (Malibu’s City Council, for example voted to fund a shelter for Malibu’s homeless, provided it was located outside of Malibu. https://www.smdp.com/city-of-malibu-seeks-to-shelter-its-homeless-population-outside-of-malibu/216440) People, whether housed or unhoused, are quite simply resistant to rapid change, even when it is necessary and in the community’s and/or an individual’s best interests. These are not excuses for our inaction, but acknowledgement of need for concerted, sustained and continuous efforts to rebuild a better safety net and to develop far more affordable housing. This will benefit almost all of us, our friends, families, neighbors and colleagues. We need to hold ourselves, our elected officials, and our institutions accountable to make the necessary changes and to stick with it, to fund, tweak, adjust and redesign as conditions require, to actually create a healthy, habitable living environment for every Angeleno.
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 4/22/22