LOS ANGELES — The nation’s epicenter for street homelessness is pushing forward with the mayor’s ambitious plan to move unhoused residents – 17,000 by next year – from tent cities to hotels rooms and eventually to permanent housing.
Momentum for clearing city streets of unhoused people has been building nationwide. Portland, Oregon, Washington, D.C., and the state of Missouri are among the high-profile places banning or reducing tent encampments in recent months.
All eyes, though, may be on Los Angeles where about 69,000 residents live in shelters, on streets, in cars or in temporary housing in LA County. Pressure to solve the homelessness crisis in LA city and county is so great that Mayor Karen Bass says that’s why she ran for the city’s top job.
If Bass’ plan is successful, it will have an outsized effect on national homelessness numbers and contribute to President Joe Biden’s goal of reducing U.S. homelessness by 25% in the next two years, she told USA TODAY.
“My appeal to the White House is, ‘just come to LA. You can meet your entire national goal by helping us in LA,'” Bass said.
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When Bass declared homelessness an emergency in December, it sped up the process for creating affordable housing and securing motel rooms. Since then, LA County and neighboring towns have followed with their own emergency declarations.
“The fact that the mayor has decided to make this a priority is certainly music to our ears,” Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge told USA TODAY.
In 2022, 40% of people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. were living unsheltered on the street, in abandoned buildings or in other potentially unsafe places. Among adults without children experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles, 82% were living unsheltered on a single night in 2022, according to HUD data.
Earlier this month, HUD awarded LA a $60 million grant to address the city’s many encampments. The department gave a total of $315 million to cities across the U.S.; LA and Chicago received the maximum amount.
Bass’ plan to reduce homelessness in LA, known as Inside Safe, can probably be a model for other cities, Fudge said. But she acknowledged that “every city has to address the issue the best way they can.”
“Everybody doesn’t have the resources that LA has,” Fudge said. “Everybody doesn’t have the magnitude of the problem LA has.”
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One man’s tale of homelessness in LA
After Will Sens lost his job as a prep cook at a restaurant during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was quickly evicted from his living situation splitting a small, partitioned office space with a friend in LA’s Koreatown.
Soon Sens, 45, was living out of a tent at Echo Park Lake. He was there for about nine months alongside nearly 200 other unhoused people.
Then one day city officials offered him temporary housing in LA’s Grand Hotel through Project Roomkey, a statewide shelter program launched in March 2020 that used the same hotel/motel model as Inside Safe, which launched in January.
Sens said the offer of a hotel room came about two months before the police raid of Echo Park Lake in March 2021, in which the remaining 15-20 residents were forced to leave, according to the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.
For the next two years, Sens lived at the Grand Hotel, his daily life consumed by waiting for a Section 8 housing voucher and an opportunity to sign an apartment lease.
Sens’ new life was also isolating: Residents weren’t allowed to gather in hallways or the lobby — even in groups of two — and everyone had to eat meals alone in their room. If a resident broke the rules, they were kicked out of the hotel, Sens said.
At Echo Park Lake, there had been a “tight community,” Sens said, with a “people’s garden” and a shared kitchen equipped to store donated food. Teaming together, residents organized night security watches, meals and celebratory events, he said.
At the Grand Hotel, when he would try to advocate for himself and ask for updates on the housing process, Sens said he was always met with: “‘We’ll call you when we got something for you.'”
“There’s this air of, ‘We know what’s best for everyone,’ but in actuality it’s just a bunch of chaos,” Sens said. “It’s just a bunch of frustrated people because the people that are in charge aren’t being in charge. They’re just getting by with doing the least amount possible.”
In September, a friend from the hotel finally secured a Section 8 housing voucher and Sens and his Salvation Army housing navigator found a landlord who would accept it.
Sens and his roommate now have a studio apartment of their own in LA’s Leimert Park neighborhood. On Valentine’s Day, Sens returned to the Grand Hotel and stood at a table outside, giving residents fried chicken, potato wedges and cake with Ground Game LA, a civic engagement nonprofit.
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So far in 2023, a handful of tent encampments have been cleared throughout LA. Bass said outreach to encampments is effective because police are not directly involved and because officials come with immediate offers of motel rooms.
Elsewhere in the country, bans on encampments can lead to jail sentences and fines.
“We’re trying to get people housed. We’re not punishing people for being poor,” Bass said.
Critics say Bass’ plan just perpetuates another cycle: Homeless people being marooned in temporary housing for extended periods.
Project Roomkey and Inside Safe aren’t solving the crisis of homelessness in LA because there isn’t enough housing for people to access once they’re in the motels and hotels, said Annie Powers, an organizer with Union de Vecinos, a coalition of low-income tenants.
“Theoretically you get into one of these programs and then it’ll put you on the path to permanent housing. However, it just doesn’t work that way because there isn’t enough housing and because of issues around Section 8 vouchers,” Powers said.
Before someone can afford to sign a lease, they usually must secure a federal housing voucher to supplement rent contributions – a process Sens and others struggled with at hotel sites.
“I’m trying to get to the bottom of that,” Bass said. For now, she said she wants to encourage more landlords to accept the vouchers and “create a spirit” of property owners helping to solve the crisis by getting people housed in their apartments.
More people will also enter homelessness if the city’s extended eviction moratorium is allowed to expire on March 31, advocates say.
In her plan, Bass says she will fight unlawful evictions and try to “maximize resources for rental assistance.” But it will take a City Council vote to extend the eviction moratorium, she said.
To Powers, preventing people from falling into homelessness is “very simple.”
“Just extend the moratorium on evictions permanently. That’s it. The way to keep people in their homes is just to stop evictions from happening,” she said.
‘It’s all bad choices’
Besides preventing evictions at a large scale, Powers said the city needs to “open up” vacant apartments. Many apartments are sitting empty because they’re priced too high, shutting people out of housing, she said.
On Feb.10, Bass issued her third executive order on homelessness, requesting a list of city-owned properties that are vacant, surplus or underutilized. After being assessed, properties on the list can be made into housing.
But if city officials could have “regulation over the market in order open up those vacant apartments,” a cascading effect of available privately owned units could lead to more people entering housing – permanent housing, not the motel rooms labeled as “housing” people are being offered, Powers said.
“A lot of it is just the language to make things look like they’re different, but it’s a hotel room that feels like a jail versus the street versus an actual prison,” Powers said. “It’s all bad choices.”
Contributing: Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY
