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BY GALE HOLLANd and SOUMYA KARLAMANGLA (LA TIMES)
The homeless population jumped 12% in the last two years in both the city and county of Los Angeles, driven by soaring rents, low wages and stubbornly high unemployment, according to a report released Monday.
In one of the most striking findings, the number of tents, makeshift encampments and vehicles occupied by homeless people soared 85%, to 9,535, according to biennial figures from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
“It’s everywhere now; the encampments are in residential neighborhoods, they’re outside of schools,” said L.A. City Councilman Mike Bonin, who represents Venice.
“It’s jarring. … It shows we’ve got a hell of a lot of work ahead.
The rise was fueled by gentrification downtown and in Venice, where cheap hotel rooms, motels and single-room apartments — once the last refuge of the poor — are being eliminated.
Growing tensions in these rapidly changing neighborhoods were heightened by the fatal police shootings of two unarmed homeless men in just over two months. The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating the March 1 death of Charly Keunang on skid row and the killing last week in Venice of Brendon K. Glenn.
Mark Ryavec, president of the Venice Stakeholders Assn., called on Bonin, Mayor Eric Garcetti and other elected officials to “accept that fixing this situation is their responsibility, not just the LAPD’s.”
Countywide, more than 44,000 homeless people were tallied in January, up from more than 39,000 in 2013, the report said. Well over half — nearly 26,000 — were in the city of Los Angeles.
In another closely watched category, homelessness among veterans dropped 6% countywide, to about 4,400, but the report did not break out a comparable number for the city.
Garcetti and federal officials have pledged to house every homeless veteran by the end of the year, and in January the mayor said he was more than halfway to his goal.
Homeless advocates blamed public officials for the disappointing results.
“The city and county have done such a terribly poor job of creating affordable housing, basically they’ve ignored the issue,” said Steve Clare, executive director of the Venice Community Housing.
“We need shovels in the ground,” said skid row activist General Jeff Page.
Homeless authority commission members called for more state and local money, and said neighborhoods throughout the county must accept housing for homeless residents.
“There need to be enormous new dedicated resources,” said Peter Lynn, the authority’s executive director.
The rise comes at a time of renewed local focus on the problem.
After decades of squabbling and inaction, the city and county resolved old differences over homeless service tactics and began pursuing nationally recognized solutions. Those include rapidly re-housing newly homeless people and creating so-called permanent supportive housing, with mental health and addiction counseling, for the chronically homeless.
After a scathing report from City Administrative Officer Miguel A. Santana that the city spends $100 million a year on homelessness, City Council members formed a new committee in April to develop a fresh approach to ending it.
But the campaign has so far proved no match for the region’s high cost of housing and lack of new money for low-income housing or rent subsidies for the destitute, the report suggested. Despite the economic recovery after the Great Recession, the county’s unemployment rate of 7.5% still tops the national rate of 5.6%, the report said.
The tally is based on a street count conducted by 5,500 volunteers over three days in January, shelter censuses and demographic extrapolation and analysis. The number is required to receive federal funding to tackle homelessness, and is used to estimate program needs and assign resources.
Los Angeles has the nation’s largest concentration of homeless veterans. The Obama administration this year roughly doubled funding to the county, offering $105 million in homeless grants and services, according to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, but the increase came largely after the January count.
Advocates say that in some cases, veterans and longtime homeless people are shoving aside those newly homeless because of the affordable housing crisis.
“What’s happened is existing resources have been re-targeted to the chronically homeless, but the pot hasn’t been significantly expanded,” Clare said.
The city’s affordable housing fund, which in 2008 totaled $108 million, plunged to $26 million in 2014.
In his proposed budget, Garcetti called for $5 million in general fund money and $5 million in yet-to-be negotiated taxes on Airbnb short-term rentals to replenish the coffers. As part of his back-to-basics agenda, the mayor proposed spending $31 million annually on sidewalk and other improvements beginning in the next budget year.
The region has wrestled for decades with how to create housing for homeless people. Under a “containment policy,” the city concentrated services and shelters, most of which are run by religious groups, on skid row.
Unlike in New York, there is no legal right to shelter, and securing the money and political backing to build supportive housing throughout the county has been a struggle.
Christine Margiotta, vice president of community impact at United Way of Greater Los Angeles, said “it’s critical we don’t lose sight of that and become disheartened. We just need to redouble our efforts … and have a strong eye toward prevention in the future.”
Alice Callaghan, a longtime advocate for the homeless on skid row, criticized city leaders for failing to stem the loss of housing.
“All we get from City Hall is breezy poetry — ‘I will house everybody by next year.’ That’s absurd. There’s no housing to put people in,” Callaghan said. “It’s very depressing. I don’t think people understand how bad it is.”
The Amazing Democrats Endorse Mayor Garcetti’s Plan to Eradiate LA’s Homelessness – The Hollywood Entertainment Industry and People of LA Need To Support it With Private Funding And Here Is Why 1 comment
by The Editor (The Amazing Democrats, LA)
For seventh minutes today we got the whole run down of LA’s Mayor Garcetti’s new and proactive plan to tattle LA’s chronic homeless issue which has reached critical levels. It was very educational to get it first hand from the Mayor’s personnel who are on the front lines dealing with this massive issue that they have on their plate.
The Hollywood entertainment industry and the people of LA need to get involved with the Mayor’s office to raise private funding. What would be most helpful is a well-known Spokesperson from the Hollywood entertainment industry to step up to the task and act as an Ambassador for the campaign to raise private funding which would be coupled with Federal, State and city funding. We were lucky to have had Elizabeth Taylor as an amazing advocate for AIDS and Brad Pitt for the regeneration of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Now that the task of really tackling LA’s homelessness is really picking up stream, it is so necessary for Hollywood entertainment industry and the people of LA to get involved in fund raising without delay.
Firstly to correct the main stream media when they throw out figures like 58,000 homeless in LA, this figure they pull from various agencies that are not monitoring the accurate figure of the 31,000 homeless like the Mayor’s office is currently doing. What the Mayor’s staff does; is take a head count and the homeless person’s name, going from street to street in LA from 9pm until 6am each night. Those are the times the homeless find their “spot” to bed down for the night. The Mayor’s office also has data available to him regarding the homeless numbers from all the various Federal, State and local agencies.
Breaking the figures down, 6,000 of those are veterans and President Obama has kept his promise to all of us that he made during his 2012 re-election campaign and the Federal funding to take all our veterans off the streets in the United States is finally making its way into the local coffers. 3,000 of those 6,000 veterans have now gotten housing thanks to President Obama honoring his pledge.
What most of don’t know, is the city’s hands are tied by two Federal Appeal Court rulings, one in 2007 and one as recent as 2011 which forbids the city and local law enforcement from moving any person sleeping rough in the city of Los Angeles. However, the court refused to rule that both Federal and State governments must provide housing for these people, so the city of LA is stuck with this huge problem of homelessness on our streets, with little funding from the Federal and State agencies. Not that we would advocate heavy handed tactics if there were no Federal Appeal Courts rulings with law enforcement using such means of water cannons to spray the homeless off the streets of LA if they refused to move.
The issue here and we see the difficulties the Mayor and his staff has, is that cleaning the streets of the homeless is necessary when there is a well thought out plan to housing these individuals in its place. Yes, we all do forget that sometimes that’s what each and every person living on our streets in LA is: an individual, with feelings and needs and not just another “homeless person”.
What we need to debate with our Republican colleagues, who I firmly advocate we must educate and bring them on board with us on this issue, that the cost of one homeless person on the street of LA costs the city eight thousand dollars a month to the tax prayer. The cost to house one of them for one month to the tax prayer? Three thousand dollars. That means the tax prayer is losing five thousand dollars per month per homeless person. It makes no business sense and also makes our city look like it cares nothing for the human suffering that homelessness brings. When the tourists pour in and they witness all our homeless on our streets, they view us as being a heartless, cruel, selfish and uncaring society. It is easy to explain why a homeless person on the street costs the tax payer eight thousand dollars a month. When a person lives on the street, they are going to meet all sorts of dangers, catch all sorts of diseases and will end up receiving a great deal of medical attention in our hospital’s ER departments. Then there is the emergency medical aftercare that may be needed and the follow up care not to mention the huge array of medications that might be required when this homeless individual is released back on our streets, only to end up going through all this cycle again, possibly a week or two later. That is the average and is eating away at the cities’ finances while at same time the world’s media is portraying LA as being a selfish and uncaring city when it comes to our homeless citizens.
So a lot of plans are underway and very exiting ones too at the Mayor’s office, like using old abandoned buildings owned by the city and knock them into units for the homeless. Here is where the city needs private financial donors to come forward and combine resources in the form of a partnership which would also be set off against their tax bill each year. Makes for a lot of common sense?
On top of that, after the shooting dead of a homeless individual in Skid Row recently by an LAPD Officer, there is a plan to hire only well-trained Police Officers (who have proved skill and experience records with the homeless). These Officers will be the only first responders allowed in these homeless areas; they will not be in uniform and also will work hand and hand with a social worker. I have never heard of this before and it could be the model for the future for every US city to adopt. Then when a 911 call comes in about a homeless person, the usual LAPD units will not be allowed to respond, instead a very specialized Police Officer will respond as most LAPD Officers on the force only get forty-eighty hours training on how to deal with homeless individuals. The Mayor’s office is also looking at its Mobile Emergency Homeless Response Unit and streamlining it to operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week with specialized staff working with those units.
We all can be forgiven for not caring that much during the economical melt down in the US for the homeless but now things are improving slightly, there is a sense that most of us are beginning to become more vocal and proactive with this very serious issue in our city. It is also encouraging to see the media outlets like the LA Times finally taking interest to highlight homelessness and the affects it has the people who homeless and the city’s general health as well with this massive issue that must be addressed urgently.
A lot of credit must also be given to the new man on the job at the Mayor’s office, Greg Spiegel, the Mayor’s new Homelessness Policy Director. This is someone whose resume is very impressive and if anyone is the right person for the job, Greg is.
The hardest issue facing all of us is that inner fear in ourselves that be it through ill health, being laid off from our employment or simply a run of bad luck, ending up homeless ourselves. This is why most of us pass a homeless person on the street and refuse to that any interest in the issue because as Shakespeare explained it so well in Hamlet: “the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure”.
Homelessness on our streets is the mirror of our soul, the heart of our financial unfairness and the root of an ever silent present cancer eating away at our community and society’s heart and soul. If left unchecked, as we have done now for so many years in LA, it will destroy the very fabric of our existence, the standing we have with the rest of the world, where we could lose the hearts and minds of those in the world that support Los Angeles and what it has stood for.
So step up to the plate Hollywood entertainment industry and citizens of LA, take the plunge and do your duty as the dutiful citizens and proud members of LA’s community that you are and start partnering with the city to raise funds to get LA’s 31,000 homeless individuals off the streets and into proper housing. That way we give them hope, a safe place to live, give them back their dignity, the chance to rebuild their lives and finally a much safer and cleaner LA for us all.
© Editor of The Amazing Democrats’ (LA) blog, Facebook and twitter. March 17, 2015