The Los Angeles City Council will create a $50 million emergency fund to address the city’s homelessness crisis.
Council members approved a motion on Jan. 18 to transfer city funds to a new emergency homeless response account—$26.5 million from the general fund and $23.5 million from what was previously set aside for COVID-19 response. The motion, which was authored by Council President Paul Krekorian, passed 13–0.
The funds would boost Mayor Karen Bass’s Safe Inside Initiative pilot program, which seeks to evaluate citywide encampments and place homeless individuals into temporary and permanent housing.
The new account will make spending more quickly available for hotels, motels, staffing, outreach, meals, as well as permanent housing, according to City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo.
“There is a need for providers that are executing the program, the need to have an account for flexible dollars to be spent quickly without going through the standard process of going through appropriations,” he told the council.
“This is a complicated program” because of the city’s attempt to scale it to include all areas of the city, he said.
Within 45 days, Szabo—in collaboration with the mayor’s office—must report back to the council with an update on the Safe Inside Initiative, including the number of homeless currently in city-sponsored permanent and interim housing, the cost, types of services afforded, and the involvement of nonprofit and government agencies.
“This will help provide greater transparency on homelessness spending, and metrics on how our city’s performing on tackling homelessness as it pertains to the mayor’s initiative,” newly elected City Controller Kenneth Meija told the council. “Our work will help shine a light on the resources available and what is lacking.”
Councilwoman Traci Park of the 11th District, who also supports the initiative, cited the success of her collaboration with Bass in cleaning up encampments in Venice Beach earlier this month.
“We housed over 100 people, so thank you for your partnership,” she told the council. “I do think it’s important to further empower [Bass] with the funds to bring this initiative citywide.”
However, Park expressed concern over the use of the funds to get the homeless immediately off the streets.
“I do understand the need for the investment in the long-term permanent solutions, but I’m not convinced that this $50 million will get us where we need to be on that front,” she said.
Councilman Bob Blumenfield of the 3rd District called the funds a “drop in the bucket” for what’s needed, while expressing concern over the fiscal allocation.
“There’s not a lot of detail in where the money is going, but we are in this crisis right now and we want the mayor to succeed,” he said.
Even as he voted in favor of the motion, Blumenfield cautioned the council that many of the current temporary housing sites are already full, so there aren’t many places for the homeless to go.
Bass’s Safe Inside program will encourage people to move indoors and offers temporary housing through the master leasing of nearby motels, rather than simply clearing encampments through anti-camping ordinances or enforcement.
Last month, Bass said the program could be considered successful if there are fewer to no encampments left in the city within four years. She said she hopes the plan, along with a six-month state of emergency she declared in December, which allows for additional resources from the state, will solve the problem.
Homelessness rose 1.7 percent in the City of Los Angeles and 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.
In Eric Garcetti’s final year as mayor, he allocated nearly $1 billion to the city budget to combat homelessness. When he took office in 2013, there were just shy of 23,000 homeless people in the city, including 60 percent without shelter.
The new funding is another attempt to get homeless people into interim and permanent housing—a repeated effort through various city and county policies, such as Proposition HHH—a $1.2 billion bond proposal approved by voters in 2016 that promised to build 10,000 affordable housing units for the homeless in 10 years.
But previous LA City Controller Ron Galperin found the plan largely failed six years later due to issues such as a lack of units completed and expensive building costs. In one instance, more than $800,000 was spent on a single unit.
