LA mayor Karen Bass is using the return of congressional earmarks to get creative with homelessness:
Bass asked every member of the House and Senate who represents Los Angeles to use one of their allotted 15 annual earmark requests on a project relating to the homelessness and housing crisis that her team had identified in their district. The $40 million in requests, according to Bass’ office, amounts to crumbs in the multitrillion-dollar federal budget.
Bass is right that $40 million is a drop in the federal ocean. The problem is that it's a tiny drop in the ocean of homeless funding too.
Across the entire state, California has 115,000 unsheltered homeless and a budget of about $4 billion per year to deal with them. Even at Los Angeles prices, this could rent a nice one-bedroom apartment for every single one of them and still have $1 billion left over for social services, mental health, and drug rehab. It's simply not a question of money.
Rather, it's a question of housing supply. It's a question of regulations, consent decrees, and agency foot dragging. It's a question of too many rules governing anyone who agrees to live in public housing. It's a question of too many homeless who don't want to leave the streets. And above all, it's a question of middle-class residents who are willing—even eager—to pay to "clean up" homeless encampments but will fight tooth and nail against building even a small shelter within a thousand yards of where they live or where their children go to school. Purely mathematically, this leaves almost nowhere the homeless can be sheltered.
So good luck to Bass. $40 million will refurbish some old apartments and move a handful of the homeless into indoor housing. That's a good thing. It really is. But it's just money, and we already have plenty of that. Real solutions for homelessness require much harder work than begging members of Congress for a few more table scraps.
"to use one of their allotted 15 annual earmark requests on a project relating to the homelessness"
On a project related to = politically connected nonprofit with no need to produce results.
Right this is another thing, most of the time this stuff is just about vibes.
Aside from conflating street people and homelessness which is done throughout this discourse, your point is sound. People don't want street people around because they are either drug users or preyed upon by drug pushers.
But the "housing" problem is one of supply. Fix that and your normal person down on their luck can move out of their sister's backyard or whatever.
The street people issue is connected but different. Until people admit this it's not going to be fixed.
+1
I think that's right. It's not money. It's the political willpower to build more affordable -- either higher-density or smaller-spaced -- housing in cities across the state. And do so in a way that doesn't simply concentrate poor or formerly homeless persons in one single area. Building a massive shelter just for homeless people is what gets NIMBY pushback. But building a lot of affordable, middle-income housing for working families opens up apartments or backyard units for poorer people (who aren't serious addicts and have credit can hold down basic jobs) who would otherwise end up on the street.
Jte21, I assure you NIMBYers do push back at those other options! I’ve seen them rebel against “workforce” housing, moderate income housing, and really, any kind of multi family developments.
You can win policies at the state level that lead to denser housing in suburbs, but at the local level it's definitely a never-ending fight.
And that's not surprising, either, because housing is a collective action problem if decided locally. Every community has a strong incentive to make low-income housing some "other" community's problem.
Yep. I watched a suburb rise up against an in-patient treatment program for young women with eating disorders. It's hard to fathom what they were so afraid would happen when a dozen underweight young women moved in.
If I had to hazard a guess, it's not the young women but their friends/family that worry the neighbors. Most people are decent neighbors by themselves (I said most, not all, there's a bunch of nightmares out there for sure). My experience living in working class neighborhoods was that it's the friends and family who make noise, park badly, throw trash, get into arguments at 4 am, etc... The worst was young men showing up to court the daughters in crappy vehicles and showing off.
Agree totally it’s two different issues
There was a letter to the LA Times the other day from a Hollywood producer detailing a two-year long slog through the red tape of LA's housing authority trying to get a homeless friend sheltered. It was completely mind-boggling, Kafka-esque nightmare. And this was for a wealthy, white guy with no addiction or mental health problems to negotiate, a cell phone and a reliable car.
I'm curious, couldn't the Hollywood producer who probably is quite well off simply open his/her wallet and find a place for his friend? Did he/she simply let their friend live on the street for 2 years?
The undercurrent is that our general culture despises these creatures even as individually we say we care. And that's why it can't be resolved in way that could objectively be considered positive. Regulations, paperwork, requirements?!
It's satisfying sometimes to think that other people, especially people who disagree with us, are monsters. But I sincerely don't think that is what is going on here.
Re "will fight tooth and nail against building even a small shelter within a thousand yards of where they live"
I lived for 5 years with a homeless camp (under the freeway) literally 1,000 feet away and during that time there were 4 shootings, people passed out on the street and on lawns of homes with young children, shouting at the sky, and breaking in apartments to steal bicycles and other items. (I managed security cams for one apartment.)
Some homeless want to get better. They will use housing or counseling and are rarely disruptive.
Others are mentally ill, drug addicts, or petty criminals who reject help. Most of the latter have agency, but homeless advocates deny that and treat them as victims of grand socio-economic forces. They also, for obvious reasons, present the homeless as mostly the same - which they are definitely not.
Unclear why Kevin assumes that shelters have to be near/in neighborhoods. They could be housed in commercial/light-industry zones, away from everybody else while they get better.
The cynical reason is that commercial real estate produces a lot more tax revenue for cities than residential housing areas (due to Proposition 13), so they stand a lot more to lose from businesses relocating due to homeless camps in commercial zones.
This idea is impractical for all kinds of reason. A homeless shelter in a light industrial area would be indistinguishable from a prison. I mean, how do the people get to/from the shelter?
I completely agree that homeless shantytowns in the middle of residential areas is more a complete breakdown of the system than a system as well. But why have "shelters" at all? Most people who have a place to live don't live in a "shelter". They live in a house or apartment.
One thing we need to get past is the idea that the homeless need some special kind of housing. No, they don't. Give them regular homes where other low income people already live. It will take money and probably more apartment buildings will need to be built. But it is doable.
California still has some pretty extensive rural areas inland even with its sprawl. The homeless themselves say they usually just want a safe place to camp, so they need to do a carrot-and-stick approach where they crack down hard on camping in cities on the one hand, and open up sites outside the city outskirts where they can camp and bathe/have lockers to stash their stuff/keep cops nearby so they only do drugs inside their tents instead of the open. Run buses into the nearby cities so they can work if able (and enable social service providers to come out to the camping sites).
It's a short-term solution until you figure out how to build more housing in California.
👍👍👍👍👍
Only tangentially related to the main points here, but a little while back I started seeing people use the word "unhoused" rather than "homeless." I feel like I missed some sot of memo about this... anyone able to clarify what went on? Is there some secret committee out in the Midwest that rules on these matters or something and I am not on the distro?
The old euphemism has aged to the point that it's not a euphemism any more. And nowadays we daren't even use a term that's a noun. So the homeless are now unhoused persons. This happens all over the place. Idiots became mentally retarded, retard became an epithet, so then they became special needs people. I'm not even sure if that term is still acceptable though.
You're missing two points:
1) Based on what I've seen and learned here about homelessness here in Vermont, this is not a problem which can be solved merely by providing housing. As you note, not all of the homeless want or are willing to leave the streets. A key part of the shortage is service workers who can help these people with all sorts of needs that privileged middle class folks take for granted as well as getting through the regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles which, alas, are always with us.
Successful programs -- those that actually give people new opportunities and a new chance in life -- require a huge amount of assistance from social workers, who are never compensated anywhere near enough for what they have to do or for the daily stress of their jobs. This was brought home most tellingly recently when a homeless shelter resident murdered a worker with an axe. Gruesome.
2) LA is a sprawling city, which occupies a vast land area, much of which is NOT middle class housing. It's kind of hard to believe that housing in poor areas/ghettos etc, would meet significant NIMBY resistance. Presumably, prices are lower in those areas as well.
Homelessness is a housing problem. Mostly, that means construction of new housing at vast scales or adaptation/incremental densification of existing stock. Some comments have been good about pointing that out.
But also: $40M would make a 1% to 2% difference in that number of people currently homeless in the state of California. More than that, if it concentrated on CoC's outside of expensive urban areas. And that's an immediate thing - it would help counteract the trend.
Simply providing a TON more funding to housing and homeless services would greatly reduce homelessness. The problem is that, with the service system starved for resources, we rightly focus on helping those who are most vulnerable and most in need of housing rather than those whose homelessness could be ended with a simple subsidy and occasional light-touch services.
"It's a question of too many rules governing anyone who agrees to live in public housing."
But what is the alternative? It's not unreasonable for some of the people who are forced to use that housing to want an environment that does not include junkies, drunks, and on-going violence.
So what do we do? Create two tiers of public housing, one for decent people with rules, and one for junkies where anything goes? And who wants to live within ten miles of the second one?
The alternative is to *reduce* the rules, not to eliminate them. Start with streamlining the CEQA process.
There are too many veto points, so the only projects worth building are the most lucrative, geared towards high end buyers.
We have had a couple decades of population growth outstripping housing additions. That has consequences. I don't think my kids will ever be able to afford to live near me and that sucks.
In many cases, those who know these folks best - family - have already abandoned them or don't want anything to do with them.
I was skeptical of Bass and were I within the city borders, I may have voted for Caruso. But she has been way more proactive about getting folks off the streets and into some sorts of shelters.
I'm not seeing the same fire in her belly about clearing the barriers to new housing construction, but I'm trying to keep an open mind.
I think Bass is doing what she can. We'll see how it goes. And nobody denies the long-term solution to homelessness is to build more housing. That will help with other problems here in California too.
A few points:
The housing crash/GFC of 15 years ago is the pivotal event underlying the housing shortage. That's across the nation, not just California.
California is now losing population. The problem is not that no one wants to live here, but that too many people want to live here. With a limited housing supply, that makes life here unaffordable for most except the affluent. Or, recent immigrants who are willing to scrape by for a chance at a better life.
The lack of housing has multiple causes. But you can't talk about solutions without addressing traffic. Unless you design a better way for people to get from point A to point B, you're not serious about fixing the problem. I live 21 miles from SoFi Stadium and it took me almost 3 hours to get there for an event. Still no train to Dodger Stadium. High school for some in our neighborhood is 12 minutes without traffic, but an hour each way during the afternoon commute. LA has been building public transportation for the 40 years I've been here but for most trips it's not practical. It might never be. This is not Manhattan.
"It's a question of too many rules governing anyone who agrees to live in public housing."
Too many rules? No illegal drugs, no criminal activity is too many rules? There was a piece in the LA Times a while back where they relocated a whole street encampment in the toy district into housing in a new building off the 110 and the petty "you're not the boss of me" rule breaking among some of the people living there on the public dollar was pretty pitiful.
To add on to another comment, there's some infrastructure in California City that is being underutilized.
You sound like me complaining about how little we're doing to address climate change.
It's indeed a supply issue but it's beyond that: when we talk about homeless shelters, housing for the unhoused, and so on, we're obviously in most cases implying dedicated structures intended for the currently unhoused. In other words, we're talking about aggregating multiple homeless persons (maybe in some cases quite a few) in a single development or structure.
I think the number of middle class neighbors who would fear and object to a new, bespoke, 36-unit building in their area purposely built to house 43 currently unhoused persons greatly exceeds the number who would object to, you know, a single homeless guy who has managed to rent the upstairs studio unit of that duplex down the street.
The latter situation is a distributed solution, and it works a lot better than a concentrated solution, if we can only find the supply. But in much of blue America, the supply is nowhere to be found.