The State Of Homelessness
A post to remind you I haven't forgotten about this newsletter
Hey everyone. I haven’t forgotten about this feed, and will get it going again soon, once I work out how to keep everything in my world in balance. In the meantime, I wanted to pass along a piece of writing I put together for another newsletter I write (LA Newsletter, the newsletter arm of LA Podcast, where I’m dedicating a lot of my effort these days — subscribe here, and view old issues here).
That said, here’s the piece I wrote for last Saturday’s issue. If you’re reading this on Monday, the election is now 183 days away—
If you're reading this on Saturday morning, the June Los Angeles City election is 185 days away. It's the primary in a contest that could, by the conclusion of the city's election cycle in November, leave LA with substantially different elected leadership than the group currently taking up space in City Hall.
Altogether, eight city council seats and all three executive offices -- the Mayor, the City Attorney, and the City Controller -- are up for grabs. All of the current executive officers are termed out. And while incumbent councilmembers are running for re-election in all but two of the eight council seats, most of those incumbents face stiff competition. (There may also be a ninth council seat up for grabs if there's a special election to fill Mark Ridley-Thomas' seat.)
It's into this calm-before-the-storm atmosphere that the Los Angeles Business Council and LA Times dropped, this week, the results of a new poll that surveyed LA County voters' attitudes and experiences related to homelessness. The poll found that voters overwhelmingly consider homelessness the foremost problem in LA County, ahead of other problems like housing costs, traffic, and pollution.
"Voters have lost patience with the current homelessness policies and plans," said Mary Leslie, the President of the LA Business Council, to me. "They're still very compassionate towards the homeless. But they are frustrated and angry about the lack of leadership, and they are demanding leadership that is equal to what they perceive to be the humanitarian crisis facing us."
Leslie said the poll articulated that most county voters do not blame unhoused individuals for their situation. Instead, the poll found that most voters attribute homelessness to systemic causes like low wages, high housing costs, and poor access to mental or physical healthcare. By contrast, fewer than 1 in 5 voters attributed homelessness to poor individual decision making.
At the same time, Leslie said the poll underscored voters are increasingly dissatisfied with the perceived sense of urgency on the part of elected leadership. Leslie added that 57% of voters said LA should focus more building "short-term" interim shelter sites over just 30% who said LA should focus on "long-term" permanent housing.
"[Voters] would like to see emergency measures taken to change the conditions on our street," said Leslie. "They would like leadership that's transparent and engaging. And they want them to have a clear policy on how to meet this crisis."
Unlike the 2019 iteration of this poll, the newest version also surveyed voters' direct connection to homelessness and housing insecurity. Among all surveyed, 11% said they themselves have experienced homelessness or housing insecurity over the past year. 25% more say they know someone who has.
Although LABC has not yet made available the definition of "housing insecurity," the term typically refers to individuals or families who are at risk of having to leave whatever housing they are currently in. It typically also includes those who are already "precariously housed" in the sense they may be couchsurfing, are living in a hotel, or have shelter some other informal way.
When adjusting for race, about half of all Black voters say they have personally, or know someone who has, experienced homelessness or housing insecurity this past year. For Latino voters it's about 42%. For White and Asian voters, it drops to 29% and 25% respectively.
Those last numbers, where more than a third of LA County voters say they or someone close to them is worried about going homelessness, underscores the true scale of the problem in Los Angeles. When I used to work for KPCC, and had to go on the radio to talk about this stuff, I would refer to the people living in tent camps as the very tip of the gigantic iceberg of people in extremely precarious living situations across Southern California. In many circumstances, those are people who could be on the street in a month or two if things don't go well.
On Thursday, the day after the poll results published in the LA Times, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) hosted panel discussion to talk more about that proverbial iceberg. Billed as a talk about the "State of Homelessness," LAHSA commissioner Jacqueline Waggoner lead an hour-long discussion with LAHSA staff, and directors of non-profit housing and social service agencies focused on addressing the needs of homeless clients.
Not long into the discussion, Waggoner asked one of the panelists, who directs the HOPICS service agency serving South Los Angeles, whether or not there were more people coming looking for help. Veronica Lewis said unequivocally 'yes,' there were more people coming in her doors.
"For folks who are already on the brink, these last two years were detrimental and devastating. And as a consequence, we're seeing more folks, in particular older adults -- the matriarchs of families -- show up with their adult children, and their children's children," said Lewis.
She continued: "And we continue to see people fall out [of housing] because of medical situations. Whether its related to their loved one, or their personal medical crisis. A lot of folks are falling out of housing because they make a decision to try to figure out how to pay for medication or pay for treatment or pay for whatever it is, and they end up outdoors."
Becoming homeless because of medical expenses is perhaps the quintessential American story. In my experience as a reporter, I've met countless people who attributed a medical emergency as the inciting incident behind their downward plunge into homelessness.
It's also the sort of thing that isn't easily addressed simply building more shelter beds. Or, for that matter, really anything that the homeless services system is designed to mitigate.
In the parlance of homeless services, the word "inflow" is used to describe those who are becoming homeless. People fall out of housing for any number of individual reasons, but poverty is the single common thread in almost every situation. While there was no homeless count in 2021 due to the pandemic, the results of the 2020 count revealed a 50% increase in the number of people who had fallen out of housing compared to the same period leading up to the 2019 count.
To put a number on it, the 2020 count estimated that 227 people fall into homelessness every day in Los Angeles County, while 207 people exit homelessness for housing. And that was before the pandemic which, as Lewis and countless others have pointed out, has exasperated the underlying stresses and circumstances that lead to any individual person or family having to move into their car, or worse.
The State of Homelessness panel hosted by LAHSA on Thursday also featured a presentation by Matt Schwartz, the President & CEO of the California Housing Partnership, which makes available some of the best available data about housing insecurity in California.
I’m just going to lay out three of Schwartz’s slides here for you to look at. They communicate clearly the scale of the mismatch between the high cost of housing, and our region's high rate of poverty.
I'm spilling all of this out here because, as so many have said before, without addressing the root causes of homelessness, we are doomed to remain frozen in the current status-quo. So long as the rate of "inflow" continues to accelerate, building a few-hundred (or even tens of thousand) shelter beds or new subsidized apartments is not going to substantively change the reality that (likely) tens-of-thousands fall asleep in their cars every night in Los Angeles County.
This becomes a question not about whether or not the city should build housing or shelter beds, but rather how government can keep people from falling into homelessness in the first place. That's a question that extends well beyond what a city or county government can practically do. In my view, it's something that should be addressed federally, and by substantially refunding America's threadbare social safety net.
But locally, as we head into what's about to be a wild election season where homelessness figures prominently as the leading issue, I'm not going to be satisfied by politicians who say the problem can be fixed by just building more shelter beds, and providing stepped up police enforcement in the areas nearby. It's a strategy doomed to failure and, as we're already seeing, prone reactionary backlash on all sides because it doesn't do anything other than further traumatize people who are outside, and incinerate public money paying the salaries of police and other government workers who move unhoused people to another corner.
When I covered homelessness for KPCC, I frequently found myself at a loss for what to say because, on this issue, often, everything is true at once.
It's true that the existing shelter infrastructure is inadequate, and we would likely benefit from more interim housing. It's also true that interim housing is neither as cheap nor expedient as it's often promised, as I've reported before about LA's A Bridge Home program. And it's true that unhoused people often have substantively good reasons to not "accept" a space in a shelter.
It's true that for people to exit interim shelter to an apartment, there needs to be an available and accessible apartment with rent low enough for someone with a very low income to afford while also meeting other household expenses. It's also true that the existing models of producing subsidized housing are wildly inefficient, and are producing only a handful of "affordable" units relative a truly enormous amount of need.
It's true that LA's housing supply has been constrained by municipal policies over the last 40 years, and that this supply constraint has a substantial amount to do the fact that rent increases are outpacing income increases. It's true that a new market-rate building does some part to alleviate that overall regional supply constraint. But, it's also true that a new building with $2,400 1-bedroom units does virtually nothing for the family in the dilapidated building next door who struggles each month to make their $1,300 payment.
To bring this back to the election, we're all about to witness a campaign season where politicians pitch themselves as being the ones to fix it. In reality, many running for office right now have already been in power for years and decades while the homelessness humanitarian crisis in Los Angeles has mushroomed into what it is today.
At its core, homelessness is not something that is going to be solved by "innovative scalable solutions" that "activate underutilized resources," and whatever other talking points I've already braced to hear. Instead, we need to substantively talk about how healthcare, the justice system and policing, the high cost of housing, and a myriad of other contributing factors conspire to keep poor people poor, and ultimately consign several thousands to die on the street.
In the meantime, it's cold outside. See if your unsheltered neighbor needs a blanket.
Thanks for the newsletter. One frustrating thing is that the question of "what do we actually have the capacity to do in a politically reasonable time frame" is being completely abandoned to the Buscaino's and Recall Bonin's of the world. "Regular encampment sweeps, build some crappy congregate shelters and call it a day" is a very bad plan, but it's something the county/city/state can probably pull off. The "this is how we will actually pull off enough housing to solve homelessness in a reasonable time frame" plans all seem to have a lot of unrealistic moving parts.