Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass launched the “Inside Safe” initiative on Dec. 21 to place homeless individuals in hotels and motels, after declaring a state of emergency on the city’s homelessness when she took office.
The program doesn’t include a plan to clear encampments through anti-camping ordinances or enforcement but, rather, will encourage people to move indoors and offer temporary housing through the master leasing of nearby motels.
Bass said the program can be considered successful if there are fewer to no encampments left in the city within four years. She said she hopes this plan, along with the six-month state of emergency, which allows for additional resources from the state, will solve the problem.
Bass said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Dec. 18 that with proper outreach, 95 percent of people will accept services and come indoors if given the opportunity.
However, critics of the approach questioned the program’s practicality without enforcement.
Susan Shelley, political commentator and vice president of communications for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, told The Epoch Times that without clearing encampments, Bass’s plan could be costly and ineffective.
“If the housing is not accompanied by a requirement to get off the streets, if living on the streets in a tent remains an option for people, then we are going to spend a lot of money and not solve the problem for anybody, and it’s not safe for the people who are on the streets,” Shelley said.
She noted that the lack of enforcement is essentially “putting the people who are in the encampments in charge of the outcome of the policy.”
“Whether they choose or do not choose to accept housing will determine whether we are going to have encampments—to me, that’s not a rational policy,” Shelley said.
Besides launching the program, Bass signed an executive order on Dec. 16 that will lower the cost and speed up the process of building affordable and interim housing in the city by skipping reviews otherwise required for construction and completing the approval process within 60 days.
“This is a dramatic reduction in red tape and acceleration of the construction timeline that will move people inside faster and save precious dollars that can be invested in more housing and more solutions for L.A.’s homelessness crisis,” Bass said in a statement.
Under the executive order, there are at least 31 pending affordable housing projects set to be expedited in the city, according to a Dec. 16 statement by Bass’s office.
On Dec. 20, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors threw their unanimous support behind the mayor’s emergency declaration to address homelessness—calling for county staff to work with city officials to pool resources.
Homelessness increased by 1.7 percent in the City of Los Angeles and by 4.1 percent in the county since the COVID-19 pandemic, with the latest point-in-time count showing more than 41,000 homeless people citywide and nearly 70,000 countywide.
Bass’s office didn’t return a request by The Epoch Times for comment by press time.
