Tonight thousands of volunteers will begin an annual three-night count to determine how many people in Los Angeles are now experiencing homelessness.
It’s a number that’s been steadily rising for the last half-decade—though not through a total lack of effort on the part of elected leaders and community members. Ballot measures dedicating funds toward affordable housing construction and homeless outreach passed in 2016 and 2017. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti launched an emergency shelter program in 2018.
But it’s clear more work is needed. Last year, the number of people counted jumped 16 percent in the city of Los Angeles and 12 percent across LA County.
In interviews, service providers and those working on Los Angeles’s response to the homelessness crisis told Curbed that the current approach is working; it’s a matter of scaling the region’s response to meet the level of need.
Joey Weinert, senior manager of public affairs for the Midnight Mission, compares the work of homeless service organizations to “chipping away at a growing rock.”
According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which coordinates the city and county response to homelessness and organizes the yearly count, nearly 49,000 residents who were homeless found housing in 2019. But over the same time period, almost 55,000 people became newly homeless.
Service providers say this discouraging statistic speaks to the need for more investment in a handful of key areas.
Affordable housing
“There isn’t anyone who works in homelessness that will disagree that housing isn’t the most important need,” says John Maceri, CEO of The People Concern.
A 2019 report from the California Housing Partnership and the Southern California Association of Nonprofit Housing calculates that Los Angeles County would need to add more than a half-million affordable units to meet demand from low-income renters. Many of those residents are a steep rent increase or a lost job away from homelessness.
Roughly one-quarter of Angelenos living without shelter in 2019 were experiencing homelessness for the first time, according to LAHSA. Of those, more than half said “economic hardship” caused them to lose housing.
Without more affordable residences available for Angelenos teetering on the brink of homelessness, says LAHSA interim executive director Heidi Marston, “we’re going to have a hard time catching up, even with all the resources in the world.”
In 2016, Los Angeles voters approved Measure HHH, which set aside $1.2 billion to subsidize construction of 10,000 units of permanent housing for homeless residents.
Service providers say that’s a good start, but much more is needed. Only one apartment complex funded by the measure has opened so far.
“We are housing people. We just need more units to really get it going,” says Haley Fuselier, who directs outreach efforts in West Los Angeles for People Assisting the Homeless. “If there’s 60,000 people homeless, that’s 60,000 people on a waiting list.”
Fuselier says the small number of available units makes getting people permanently housed a long and complex process. That’s particularly true when residents need a particular type of housing, or access to specific services.
“If someone needs senior living connected to medical care, but that’s not available, we try to get them something for now,” she says. “When [the housing they need] becomes available, we can move them into that.”
Fuselier says there’s no telling how long that will take.
“Today I received a call from someone desperate for housing,” she says. “It’s hard. You’re telling an 80-year-old woman they have to get on a waiting list.”
Rental assistance
Connecting residents to financial support through federal housing vouchers has long been a key part of LA’s strategy for addressing homelessness. But those vouchers aren’t in unlimited supply.
The city of Los Angeles opened the wait list for longterm Section 8 vouchers in 2017, making 20,000 spots on the list available—for an expected 600,000 applicants.
Federal rental assistance can be awarded to individuals or be applied to entire buildings, allowing developers to offer units to low-income tenants and homeless residents. Maceri says those project-based vouchers are a key tool used by affordable housing developers.
“There are a lot of developers that have projects waiting to go, but without a subsidy they’re not going to be able to move forward,” he says.
With longterm rental assistance in short supply, service providers often turn to shorter-term subsidies available through Los Angeles’s Rapid Rehousing program. Aimed at getting newly homeless residents back into permanent shelter as quickly as possible, the program makes funds available for security deposits, move-in costs, and the first few months of rent.
Kris Freed, chief programs officer for Los Angeles Family Housing, says short-term rental assistance can make a big impact for families who need a little help getting back on their feet. But she points out that the program can offer diminishing returns in Los Angeles’s cutthroat rental market.
“Four years ago, units we moved people into might have been $1,400 per month. Now, they’re $1,900 per month,” Freed says. “We don’t want to put people in a unit that in six months they’re not going to be able to afford. We’re not doing them a favor by doing that.”
Shelter as a stopgap measure
Since Garcetti rolled out plans nearly two years ago for a network of temporary shelters, nine have opened and seven more are under construction.
Maceri says sites like these go a long way toward “alleviating human suffering in the short term.” He also points to safe parking sites (accessible to those living in vehicles) and mobile restrooms and showers as opportunities to keep people safe and healthy at times when they lack shelter.
“These are interventions that are a lot less expensive and can make a big impact while people are waiting for housing,” he says.
Eric Hubbard, director of development at Jovenes, agrees that local leaders should consider the immediate needs of homeless residents. But he says it’s important not to lose focus on longterm solutions.
“We’ve developed a whole infrastructure around getting people housed,” he says. “If the public demands that we just need to clean the streets and get everyone off of them, it wouldn’t produce results that would get people out of homelessness.”
Based in Boyle Heights, Jovenes focuses specifically on youth homelessness. Hubbard says that for young people in particular, the path to stable, permanent housing can be slow.
Service providers need “time to develop a trusting relationship” with young people, and to help them obtain the education and career resources they need to become self-sufficient, he explains. That can be a challenge without available longterm housing.
Prevention
Marston says that as LAHSA coordinates efforts to house those living on streets and in shelters, the agency can no longer afford to ignore those who could become homeless in the future.
“There’s always been a little bit of prevention activity, but not to the level that we’re trying to scale up now,” she says.
Measure H, the countywide ballot measure combatting homelessness that voters approved in 2017, set aside $48 million over three years for homelessness prevention strategies, including a “problem solving” fund that can be used to pay for anything from emergency rental assistance to auto repairs necessary to keep someone employed.
The program is aimed at keeping those at risk of losing housing in their homes, and Fuselier says it’s being “well used” by outreach workers.
Community support
In a 2018 poll, 84 percent of residents said homelessness was a “very serious issue” affecting Los Angeles. Service providers say a key part of addressing the crisis is leveraging that level of public concern about the issue.
“I truly believe at this point that this is much larger than just a governmental issue,” says Freed. “This is a community problem affecting everyone, and as a community we need to be able to step up and support each other.”
She says people looking to help could consider opening up their own homes to those in need.
“There’s a lot of people who have empty bedrooms who could rent a room, and there’s a lot of people who they could be connected with—who don’t necessarily need to be part of the [homeless services] system but have simply fallen into the system because of their inability to afford rent,” Freed says.
Weinert says those without a room to spare could consider donating a bit of their time.
“We have daily volunteer opportunities for people to come and learn on the frontlines of this issue,” he says.
To Hubbard, the most important thing is that people are aware of work that’s already being done—and that it can take time.
“If we can spend more time educating people how the system is working, that will give them more of an understanding of why [people we work with] aren’t housed within the next week,” he says.
Comments
The fix isn’t in "service providers" as indicated in this blogpost. It is in disincentivizing street living in LA as an option to the 100,000 homeless here and the other hundreds-of-thousands of homeless people living in this country.
So long as street living is allowed, the homeless will come.
By Cleavon Little on 01.21.20 4:21pm
Providing housing is a path to stricter enforcement of street living. Look at New York.
By razorflake on 01.21.20 6:05pm
Perhaps, but unless civic leaders embrace enforcement as a tool and housing assistance is restricted to those who actually become homeless while living in Los Angeles, everything else will be futile. Either elected officials clean the mess up, or other, quite nasty individuals will take their places.
By Underling2 on 01.21.20 7:06pm
Not necessarily housing, but shelter is definitely doable.
Rezoning large swaths of the city to allow a lot more density and removing parking requirements would also help a lot in alleviating the housing crisis that is obviously contributing to the problem.
But neither of these obvious steps is being taken (I don’t count 9 shelters as any serious effort or solution), and will never be taken as long as the current city council and mayor are in place.
By goingup on 01.21.20 8:07pm
So we need 500,000 more affordable housing units. I wonder how many low rent apartments are occupied by illegal aliens? Seems to me that deporting the illegal aliens and training the homeless to do the jobs that the illegal aliens were doing is an easy way of making significant progress to getting people housed and earning an income. But I suppose others will say that it is more important for us to support a foreign national than get an American citizen off the street and working.
By LADude on 01.21.20 4:40pm
You want a schizophrenic homeless person making your food? Trimming your trees? Cleaning your bathrooms?
By Greyvagabond on 01.21.20 10:24pm
WRONG. The homeless are comprised mainly of people who are homeless solely because housing is so expensive. They are perfectly capable of working a job, they just chose to be homeless in LA rather than moving 30 minutes east of here. So I believe that these "unhoused neighbors" will be able to work just fine if we give them affordable housing and a job. The idea that the homeless are comprised of drug addicts and mentally ill people is a Trump narrative repeated by the alt right. That is what Bonin and the democrats in charge tell us all the time.
By LADude on 01.22.20 11:25am
there is no way you can believe this.
By hautedawg on 01.23.20 7:49am
take a stroll on skid row sometime.
By cherryo on 01.23.20 10:14am
Question: how many people who are homeless here 1. Once had a place to live here in LA county? 2. Don’t have a substance abuse issue?
A lot of interviews I’ve heard and seen with the homeless population here indicate that a large number of homeless people have migrated here. Which to me suggests this shouldn’t be exclusively an LA country issue to solve. This is a federal issue. Also, within the big, multi-part article Forbes did last year about homelessness in CA, people who have worked with the homeless for years said virtually all of them have substance abuse issues. Isn’t that something that needs to be addressed on an equal scale as finding actual homes for people? Couldn’t this possibly be a major reason so many people are homeless? It doesn’t seem like that componant can’t be left out of the conversation as it almost always is. Maybe clear factual information and data would help solve this problem rather than assumptions.
By MorrisTitanicHighlights on 01.21.20 5:26pm
The answer to both of your questions is: unknown.
Now what?
By LosFeliz$ean on 01.21.20 5:40pm
Chalk up another pointless, ???, no solution, negative comment from LosFeliz$ean.
Now what? You stop commenting.
Are you participating in the homeless count? I am.
By Ravid Dyu on 01.21.20 5:57pm
The media goes out of it’s way to only find homeless people who are here from out-of-state and addicted to drugs to interview.
By Henry Chinaskee on 01.22.20 6:23am
No. The vast majority of the media pushes the narrative that homelessness is primarily the result of increases in housing costs, as if the majority of the homeless you see on the streets would be self-sustaining, gainfully employed members of society if only the average rent were 20% less. People who actually encounter the homeless everyday know that claim is about as truthful as the Emperor’s New Clothes.
The actual data (not self-reporting garbage from LAHSA, but actual professionally-gathered data) is clear that about 2/3 (67%!) of LA’s homeless suffer from substance abuse and/or mental illness. Here is the LAT’s coverage of the LAHSA misreporting scandal: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-07/homeless-population-mental-illness-disability.
A lot of the pushback you see on Curbed is because of the false narrative that self-proclaimed "activists" and their supporters in the media – Curbed’s Alissa Walker is a prime example – have been flogging for years. People are tired of being force-fed virtue-signaling agitprop instead of facts, and they tired of paying high taxes only to see that money wasted on boondoggles like $650,000 luxury units for a small number of homeless. The public is hungry for reality-based conversations and solutions.
By MyrnaMinkoff on 01.22.20 11:53am
…pretty soon those permanent supportive housing units will be "$1 million ultra-luxe penthouses…on the moon!"
Too funny coming from someone complaining about "narratives"!
By LosFeliz$ean on 01.22.20 12:00pm
This article says the Koreatown construction was $690,000 per unit.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/08/20/homeless-people-los-angeles-la-builds-pricey-koreatown-apartments/1984064001/
And this article notes that over 1,000 units "could exceed $600,000," which, if history is a guide, means they will exceed that sum when all is said and done.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-07/homeless-housing-bond-measure-audit-shelters-galperin
By MyrnaMinkoff on 01.23.20 2:19pm
Myrna, let’s keep this short. You know what I’m gonna say already:
How much of that was funded by the taxpayer and how much of that was privately financed?
By LosFeliz$ean on 01.23.20 2:34pm
Almost none is privately financed. Private money wants to not only get paid back and even a positive return. Homeless housing where there are little to no rents does not pay back anything. People given something they didn’t earn combined with drug use and mental illness often means the apartments are beaten to smithereens too.
If the money didn’t come from local taxes, it comes from state and federal taxes.
By LA Denizen on 01.23.20 3:06pm
Do the words ‘tax credit equity’ mean anything to you Myrna…oh, wait
By LosFeliz$ean on 01.23.20 3:30pm
The homeless housing units become Market Rate Housing after 50 years. This combined with many years of Property Tax Credits and the residents paying the rent with Section 8 vouchers and other government funding, mean that there is a return on investment, as well as the equity of a large apartment building, centrally located in a dense Downtown business district. About 70% of the cost per each unit is Privately funded by Bank loans.
By Whitman Lam on 01.27.20 4:24pm
Your response is to change the unit of measurement from what was being discussed (the cost per unit) to something else you just came up with (the portion of that cost paid for directly by taxpayers)? Pathetic. What a lame, D-list debater’s trick. It’s no wonder why the only people on Curbed who usually bother to respond to your posts are the trolls who are fixated on you. I won’t waste my time in the future.
By MyrnaMinkoff on 01.23.20 4:34pm
Not change the units but rather properly describe the financing mechanisms. This project was not soley funded by the City of LA’s bond measure. It was funded in part by HHH, part by loans, part by using County land, a smaller part by grants, but mostly (like 46%) via tax credit equity, a tried-and-true, blessed by St. Ronnie, successful way of financing affordable housing in this country for the last 3+ decades. Yes, it takes more words to even attempt to appropriately describe the financing, but they’re worth it.
[it is weird that dude is following me around isn’t it?]
By LosFeliz$ean on 01.23.20 6:54pm
I am not a Troll Myrna.
I live in Los Feliz (actual homeowner) and am embarrassed by this moron $ean.
By Ravid Dyu on 01.24.20 7:55am
You think you’re slick. This is not a federal issue, don’t try to throw the responsibility of the consequences for your shitty political and social climate on the federal government and the rest of the country.
Cali acts as if it’s better than everyone else and more privileged, yet you can’t handle your homeless problem yourselves?
By hautedawg on 01.23.20 7:53am
I couldn’t agree with MorrisTitanicHighlights more, the fact that we are never discussing why on earth we’re supporting tens of thousands of homeless from other states, all on CA and LA taxpayers dime, is beyond logic.
By Derby5797 on 01.21.20 5:40pm