“A new report unveiled at the Los Angeles City Council meeting earlier this week found that the city impounded 555 vehicles in which homeless people lived in while only offering shelter to 186 in the past two years, going directly against recent comments Mayor Karen Bass made about the recent Grants Pass case and wanting to house homeless in the city.
For years, the city of Los Angeles has struggled with homelessness. Until recently, the number of homeless people in the city has skyrocketed, with the 2023 homeless count finding 46,260 homeless people in the city. This number has been compounded by Mayor Bass’ policies. While she did declare a state of emergency in the city over homelessness and push more funding into homelessness endeavors, a majority of homeless experts have said that she tried to reduce homelessness in all the wrong ways. Her Inside Safe initiative, her signature homeless initiative, has largely been seen as a total failure.”
Why hasn’t Newsom denounced Bass? Does his silence mean he supports this?
LA Homeless Report Finds City Has Been Actively Making People Lose Shelter
Homeless experts have said Mayor Bass tried to reduce homelessness in all the wrong ways
By Evan Symon, California Globe, 7/6/24 https://californiaglobe.com/fr/la-homeless-report-finds-city-has-been-actively-making-people-lose-shelter/
A new report unveiled at the Los Angeles City Council meeting earlier this week found that the city impounded 555 vehicles in which homeless people lived in while only offering shelter to 186 in the past two years, going directly against recent comments Mayor Karen Bass made about the recent Grants Pass case and wanting to house homeless in the city.
For years, the city of Los Angeles has struggled with homelessness. Until recently, the number of homeless people in the city has skyrocketed, with the 2023 homeless count finding 46,260 homeless people in the city. This number has been compounded by Mayor Bass’ policies. While she did declare a state of emergency in the city over homelessness and push more funding into homelessness endeavors, a majority of homeless experts have said that she tried to reduce homelessness in all the wrong ways. Her Inside Safe initiative, her signature homeless initiative, has largely been seen as a total failure.
However, in recent weeks, Los Angeles has had some cautiously good news about homeless levels in the city. The 2024 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count specifically found that there were an estimated 75,312 homeless people in Los Angeles County, down from 75,518 last year, with a total of 45,252 homeless people in the city of L.A., down from 46,260 in 2023. However, compared to 2022 numbers, the number of homeless in the county and city are still way up, with 69,144 being counted in L.A. County that year, with 42,000 in the city. Overall the count is 2.2% lower than last year in the city, although homeless experts have said that independent and local homeless shelters and relief services are largely responsible for the change, and not Mayor Bass’ programs.
Despite the situation in L.A. stabilizing, the recent City of Grants Pass v. Johnson Supreme Court ruling is expected to upend things again, with Los Angeles now having more power to remove homeless encampments from city property. While many lawmakers praised the ruling, with Republicans and even Democrats like Governor Gavin Newsom being on board with the decision, Mayor Bass rallied against it.
LA Homeless
“If it’s OK for other cities to ticket and shoo people away, I will be very concerned that the number of people moving into L.A. from other cities will increase,” said Bass last Friday during a press conference. “I also do not believe that it is ultimately a solution to homelessness. How are they supposed to pay for their ticket, and what happens when they don’t pay? Does it go into a warrant and give us an excuse to incarcerate somebody?”
Later she added that “The only way to address this crisis is to bring people indoors with housing and supportive services. In the City of Los Angeles, we will continue leading with this approach, which helped move thousands more Angelenos inside last year than the year before. We cannot go backwards – we must continue innovating and moving with intention and urgency until every person experiencing homelessness is able to access housing, services and support.”
However, the new report brought to the City Council this week made those statements hypocritical.
“Here she is rallying against the court case which will ‘punish people’ by arresting or kicking them out of shelter, when this policy was doing that the entire time. Hundreds by the looks of it,” said Mark Wagner, a Philadelphia-based researcher on homelessness, to the Globe on Friday. “And if it isn’t the L.A. Mayor, then it is the L.A. homeless system. Look, people living out of their cars, that’s a last resort. And the decent thing to do is to make sure they get shelter space or have a place to go to. But apparently that only happens every so often there.”
“Look, L.A. is really trying to solve this. But they need new methods that work. Or else you end up with a system where they say that everyone needs shelter space, then take away people’s cars and send them to the street.”
