Los Angeles politicians sure don’t make it easy for nonprofits that provide permanent, low-income housing at single-room occupancy buildings in Downtown L.A.—even though the city has been mired in a catastrophic homelessness crisis for years. One would think Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council would roll out the red carpet for the organizations. Instead, city hall bureaucracy and hostility make it nearly impossible for the SRO nonprofits to operate, and the homelessness disaster is not getting any better.
Things are pretty dire in Los Angeles.
There are 45,194 unhoused residents in Los Angeles, with Mayor Karen Bass unwilling, or unable, to switch gears after it’s become clear that her top homeless program, Inside Safe, isn’t working.
The Los Angeles Times, for example, reported in April that the “longer Inside Safe exists, the greater the share of participants who have returned to ‘unsheltered.’” The paper also noted that when “Inside Safe finished its third year, about 40 percent of [the program’s] participants were back on the street.”
Months later, the L.A. Times reported that the Inside Safe team, which places homeless people in temporary housing with the final goal of putting them in permanent housing, continually went to the same neighborhoods to find unhoused Angelenos repopulating those communities. In other words, Inside Safe wasn’t getting the job done.
UCLA Law School professor emeritus Gary Blasi, a highly respected expert on homelessness, told the L.A. Times that Inside Safe has become too expensive to justify the poor results and needs “a thorough re-engineering.” He pointed out that the city has been paying for individuals to live in expensive motel rooms for long periods of time, not in permanent housing.
“Once they started having people in interim housing for nine months or a year, that should have rang some alarm bells, because that’s just not sustainable,” Blasi said to the L.A. Times.
Yet Bass, whose homeless program has already cost a whopping $300 million, refuses to listen to experts like Blasi and keeps doing the same old thing.
Bass also has the power to fire department chiefs if they aren’t making the grade. Which is important. Because it’s widely known that city hall bureaucracy is a mess—affordable-housing developers and operators deal with constant delays by city agencies to receive approvals and permits to build or update lower-income and homeless housing. Bass could change that by telling department heads to speed things up—or suffer the consequences of getting the heave-ho.
On top of all that, Los Angeles City Planning doesn’t expect to meet state goals for the construction of new affordable housing in L.A.
According to a city report, the Regional Housing Needs Allocation set a goal of 115,978 extremely-low-income and very-low-income units to be built by 2029. The planning department expects only 33,000 of those units will be constructed before 2030.
In addition, the report notes that the city will not hit state goals for low-income and moderate-income housing. But, plenty of luxury housing, which moderate- and lower-income Angelenos can’t afford, is expected to be built: 247,000 units out of a state goal of 196,831.
So things are horrible for L.A., and one would think the city would desperately want to construct new affordable housing—as soon as possible.
Bass and the City Council can do that by embracing the adaptive reuse of existing buildings, such as single-room occupancy hotels that have long provided lower-income housing in L.A. One would also think that Bass and the City Council would want to make sure that SRO nonprofits continue to operate and stay healthy financially. Guess again…
Read the rest of the article at the Housing Is A Human Right website.
Patrick Range McDonald is a veteran investigative reporter and the award-winning advocacy journalist for Housing Is A Human Right.
