When Los Angeles rolled out its ambitious and highly publicized strategy to fight homelessness under former Mayor Eric Garcetti, plans centered on quickly putting up temporary shelters, and building both interim and permanent housing.
Not unpredictably, none of it happened fast — and the reception among some in the city fell short of a warm embrace.
Besides criticism about cost overruns and bureaucracy related to the housing effort, there was also a fair amount of pushback from folks opposed to shelters coming to their neighborhoods, along with frustration over burgeoning sidewalk encampments.
The public became increasingly skeptical about solving the homeless crisis.
Despite that skepticism, however, Los Angeles as well as LA County and other cities across the region, have continued building places for those who are homeless to live, from congregate shelters to tiny homes, from transitional housing to permanent residences.
Today, the crisis remains, as does the urgency to find solutions — including, of course, by increasing the housing stock.
Yet, in some ways, Los Angeles County is in a new phase, at least politically.
Los Angeles city has a new leader in Mayor Karen Bass. In the county’s second-most populous city, Long Beach, Mayor Rex Richardson has also begun his first term. And last week, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority – which operates countywide, except in Long Beach, Pasadena and Glendale – installed a new CEO, Va Lecia Adams Kellum.
(Pasadena Mayor Victor Gordo, while not exactly new, was still elected in 2020, as Garcetti’s tenure neared its end.)
Bass and Richardson have both made homelessness a priority for their early days in office, with both working to declare local emergencies in their cities – which LA County also did – and announcing a series of initiatives.
Adams Kellum’s hiring, meanwhile, had auspicious timing. Her appointment was announced the same week as LAHSA, Long Beach, Pasadena and Glendale conducted their annual point-in-time homeless counts, the data from which will come out later this year.
So, with new leaders in place, the region’s residents, businesses and homeless advocates have taken a wait-and-see approach before assessing what comes next – while expressing cautious optimism, thanks to some recent successes, over how effective newly announced and future initiatives will be.
In essence, the often-seething discourse over homelessness has seemingly been lowered, at least for the time being.
“Only time will tell,” Wilmington resident Helena Zuvich, who volunteers with the Los Angeles Police Department and is a community activist, said about the prospects of solving the homeless crisis. “We have a new councilman (Tim McOsker, of LA’s District 15) and a new mayor. I’m hopeful.”
While several housing and shelter developments are already underway – from the San Fernando Valley to San Pedro – Bass also began her mayoral term with an urgent push to reduce homelessness.
She declared homelessness an emergency shortly after she took office in December, dubbing the plan going forward as the “Inside Safe” initiative.
The focus is to move people living in tents and homeless encampments off the streets — and indoors – and to keep such encampments from popping up again.
Other cities around L.A. County, from Pasadena to Long Beach, have also announced plans to – are or already working to – build even more housing.
Yet, creating more housing isn’t necessarily a “build it and they will come” scenario.
Folks who are homeless often have substance-abuse or mental health issues that make them either reluctant to go into shelters or unable to stay in long-term housing.
The pandemic compounded that problem, with temporary shelters forced to forgo some services, including outside counseling and substance-abuse support meetings. The virus also caused lockdowns, prompting some shelter residents to leave what they felt was a too-restrictive environment.
In that regard, Bass’s plan embraces a more pronounced effort – backed possibly by new legal tools, such as the state’s bipartisan Care Court initiative – to allow workers to have more proactive options in treating those with mental illnesses.
LA isn’t alone in such efforts.
Torrance, the South Bay’s largest city, has had a team specially trained to provide street outreach since February 2021.
And Long Beach recently launched a Mobile Access Center, which travels around downtown – and eventually, the rest of the city – allowing folks to enroll in services, and be referred to mental health and substance-abuse treatment, among other assistance.
Of course, some unsheltered people are just down on their luck – those who lost jobs or are otherwise financially unstable.
Options exist for those folks, such as housing vouchers. But many landlords don’t want to accept vouchers, which is a problem, advocates say, elected leaders must address.
Finding more landlord acceptance of vouchers will be a key part of the work moving forward, said Amber Sheikh, who heads up the homelessness working group for L.A .City Council District 15.
“In my interview with a woman who was newly housed, that was her biggest take-home (request). She said, ‘Please accept more vouchers,’” Sheikh said. “It took two years to have her voucher accepted.”
Long Beach is already working to address that.
Earlier this month, Long Beach began offering a series of financial incentives to local landlords — including direct payments to cover leasing bonuses and security deposits — in an effort to encourage them to accept vouchers from low-income residents facing housing instability.
“One of our most important tools in meeting the city’s homeless need is housing vouchers,” Richardson said when announcing the initiative. “These provide recipients with help to pay the rent, and make sure that they have what they need, to get low-income residents into stable housing.”
Still, the bulk of recent initiatives – and almost certainly those that will come – have to do with creating more housing.
Torrance has a new tiny homes village. Pasadena has three existing permanent supportive housing projects in operation, with two more under construction. In Whittier, a 139-bed navigation center is now running as part of that town’s Homeless Action Plan, said City Manager Brian Saeki. And in September, Baldwin Park opened a 16-unit bridge-housing project.
The experiences of those cities are instructive: Residents initially pushed back on some of those efforts – but have become more accepting since.
“Now that it has been built,” said Pasadena Housing Director William Huang, “people have calmed down a little bit.”
That would seem to suggest an approach in which officials build housing and then deal with any public fallout later – betting on their successes quelling any dissent.
Los Angeles city, the region’s biggest builder of housing for those without permanent shelter, has witnessed this as well.
The massive housing efforts in L.A., advocates say, has already led to progress in getting some of the large encampments to disperse – particularly in the Harbor Area.
“Encampments in the Harbor Area,” Sheikh said, “either have gotten smaller or have moved or have scattered.
We’ve done an incredible job housing folks temporarily and permanently,” she added. “It’s amazing what we’ve done as a city and a county.”
San Pedro resident Gayle Fleury, meanwhile, was among the residents who protested the location of the city’s Bridge Home temporary shelters when they first came online.
Yet, Fleury said, she hasn’t had “a lot of issues” with the one that’s across the street from an art studio she and her husband run.
“There are a few people who camp out on the street, there are people staying in vans in the (adjacent) Caltrans lot, and Caltrans provides zero trash receptacles so people get out of their cars and just dump their trash,” she said. “But, for the most part, it hasn’t been a huge issue.”
Still, she said, the frustration in the early months was palpable and still feels officials didn’t listen to criticisms and suggestions for alternative sites.
But going forward, Fleury said, programs like the state’s Care Court initiative should help in cases where people, such as those who have mental health issues, repeatedly turn down assistance and shelter.
“That is probably going to save a lot of lives,” Fluery said. “People who are on the street have lives that are 25 years shorter than the average person. It’s not a kind thing to allow people to just kill themselves, and they just don’t know how sick they are.”
The blocks-long sidewalk encampments that once existed around San Pedro’s Post Office are also no longer there.
“I just drove by the Post Office,” Zuvich, the Wilmington resident, said in an interview this month, “and there were no tents at all. I want to say it’s the cleanest I’ve seen it.”
Some issues still exist, however.
In Wilmington, some blocks, especially around shelter facilities, have problems with folks living in RVs and cars, Zuvich said. And the Lomita-McCoy encampment, near Lomita Boulevard in Harbor City, also remains a problem, she said.
Indeed, while the larger encampments have been largely eradicated, there are a number of smaller groups that have found more out-of-the-way places – including empty commercial buildings – to hunker down, said Chris Balonek, who hosts the Bay Cities Crimewatch Facebook page and volunteers in encampment cleanup and other homeless-related efforts in the Harbor Area.
He also said there are more folks living on the streets than eyeballs or data show – criticizing, albeit softly, the annual homeless counts, which took place last week.
The point-in-time-counts, Balonek said, are “fundamentally flawed, but I think it’s their best attempt.”
Many of the volunteer counting teams, he said, are “good hearted but not savvy” — and most homeless folks, especially in cold weather, are hard to see and simply get missed.
“They’re in the bushes, in or behind trees, squatting in buildings,” Balonek said — often unsafe places where most counters won’t explore.
Balonek, in a way, represents a sort of middle ground in the assessment of the region’s efforts to solve homelessness – someone who sees successes, but also acknowledges ongoing challenges.
He said, for example, that while many homeless folks have been reached and have found shelter in the new developments, issues such as mental illness and addiction remain barriers – and hard-to-solve ones at that – to some accepting help.
“I don’t know how you compel people to come in from the cold,” he said, though he added that the shelters have been a positive step. “I don’t think anyone wants to see that suffering.”
Still, the outright public criticism of various homeless initiatives have lowered from a boil to a simmer in recent months.
And some, such as Fleury, even have a twinge of optimism.
“I’m hopeful,” she said.
Staff writer Kristy Hutchings contributed to this report.