News 2004-5

Homelessness in Los Angeles - 15 Minutes of Fame

By Adlai Wertman - January 16, 2007

As the CEO of Chrysalis, a homeless agency with three offices throughout Los Angeles, I always heard the same plaintive cry from my peers - "Why isn't anybody paying attention to this tragedy?" If people only knew what was going on, we thought, they would surely respond with the funds and attention needed to address a population of homeless in our County of over 88,000 - significantly larger than any State.

In 2006, we all got what we asked for, sort of. First, an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times wrote a series of articles exposing Skid Row - a thirty square block area in downtown LA which has the highest concentration of homeless in America (an estimated 10,000 to 15,000). These extremely dramatic and embarrassing articles caught the attention of everyone in LA. At the same time, the development of downtown lofts had finally expanded to where it bumped up against the edges of Skid Row. Suddenly, we had created a team of strange bedfellows - citizens, businesses, developers, government, advocates and service providers, all focused on the tragedy of homelessness in LA.

It should have been expected that the reactions would be quite different. The downtown developers and businesses used this opportunity to successfully lobby to move the "criminality associated with homelessness" out of Skid Row through the short-term assignment of 50 new police recruits to "clean up the area." (This has resulted in fewer people sleeping on the streets; however, with nearly all homeless services in LA concentrated in this area, they are expected to return when the police are reassigned). At the same time, the ACLU and the Third Circuit Court singled out Skid Row as an area in which the City could not move off people living on the streets at night as long as there were no beds for them - and given that LA has 21,000 beds for 88,000 homeless, the ruling essentially

guarantees that homeless individuals will continue to sleep on the streets of Skid Row.
The politicians, embarrassed by the Los Angeles Times series, felt forced to quickly respond. In a remarkably inadequate but highly publicized set of programs, they offered their 'two cents.' While the best estimates show that $1.5 billion a year for 10 years would be necessary to end homelessness in LA, the County, with a budget larger than most States, announced a one-time appropriation of $80 million ($67 million of which it took back to support its own programs) plus $20 million of ongoing annual funding for the service community and housing providers to compete over. The City announced that it found $100 million over two years for housing (with no help on NIMBY issues).

In general, everyone has since moved on to the next thing. The Mayor announced that he is going to take on the gang problem now while the County Supervisors wrangle in private over whether a mission can site a facility for 150 homeless women and children in an area where the nearest neighbor is five miles away! Meanwhile, those of us who have devoted our lives to helping the homeless find ourselves alone again. Our '15 minutes' seem to be passing and not a single person has been moved out of homelessness.