Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is on a major drive to combat homelessness — one that’s guaranteed to fail, as any New Yorker could tell her.
Her central focus, after all, is simply to provide housing, much as Gotham’s tried for decades without making a dent in the problem.
As here, LA’s leaders refuse to face facts about why people are homeless, pretending it’s a “lack of affordable housing” rather than individual mental-health and drug-abuse issues.
On taking office last December, Bass declared homelessness a citywide state of emergency — fair enough, since the homeless ranks grew an estimated 10% last year and sprawling encampments and other outrages made it the top issue in the mayoral race.
But her signature initiative is Inside Safe, a $250 million bid to put up homeless in motels with an eye to getting them permanent shelter of some kind.
She’s also devoting roughly $1 billion more to services and fostering new affordable housing.
“We’re paving the path to recovery as we scale up our program citywide,” tweeted Bass.
But “scaling up” is already meeting resistance from the harder-core homeless.
LA County’s 75,000+ homeless population is tops among US cities.
Inside Safe got some 1,200 off the streets in its first five months, but they’re the easy cases.
Encampments of dozens of tents remain in areas the program’s targeted, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Addicts, in particular, won’t go where they can’t do their drugs; workers trying to talk them into shelter instead have wound up administering Narcan.
Indeed, ODs have been the leading cause of death among the area’s homeless since 2017, per the county Health Department, with the numbers rising every year.
Then, too, roughly half of homeless Angelenos self-report significant mental-health issues, RAND Institute researchers found. Even when these folks agree to enter a shelter, they can wander back out — or get kicked out for unacceptable behavior, like hoarding trash or outright violence.
Indeed, all too many homeless just refuse to go anywhere that requires them to obey inconvenient rules.
Bass’ effort to provide individual rooms, rather than “congregate” shelters, isn’t changing that.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles (like New York) both has far fewer inpatient psychiatric beds than it needs to treat mentally-ill homeless and lacks the political will to mandate psych treatment.
To be fair, even Bass admits LA’s homeless horrors may get worse before they get better.
Problem is, they won’t get better at all until she changes the city’s approach to include a lot more “tough love.”
Free housing, and even ample access to voluntary services, can’t address the individual root causes that put most homeless on the streets in the first place.
Pretending otherwise is not only indecent, it makes any broad effort to “end homelessness” utterly futile.
