Newly elected Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is making good on her promise to help move roughly 41,000 homeless people from encampments into temporary shelters and supportive housing through her Inside Safe Initiative, which seeks to connect unsheltered people to temporary housing and motel vouchers.
Last week, Bass targeted homeless hotspots in South Los Angeles and the Westside, conducting one-on-one outreach to help get them into temporary housing.
“As we scale up our operation, we are going to be able to house more and more Angelenos, and I look forward to continuing that work,” she said in a Feb. 1 statement.
The initiative was started during Bass’s first week in office, following her declaration of a local state of emergency over homelessness.
Los Angeles Councilwoman Traci Park of the city’s 11th District welcomed Bass’s work in her district after the two cleared large encampments in two other locations in her district last month, placing nearly 100 homeless living in Venice into housing.
During the most recent effort in Park’s district, they identified the Culver Boulevard area, near Marina Del Rey, as a region of need for services. About 40 homeless people live unsheltered there, but by day’s end on Feb. 1, 35 had accepted housing vouchers, according to Park’s office.
“I’m proud to partner once again with Mayor Bass to bring much-needed resources to the Culver Boulevard area,” Park said. “I’ve heard loud and clear how important this was for the local community, and I am so relieved that people living on the streets are going to be offered a safe place indoors.”
Under Bass’s initiative, outreach workers from the nonprofit St. Joseph Center, other city departments, and service providers are deployed to identified encampments, aimed at providing housing, health care, and mental health services.
Dillon Lawson-Johnson, a resident who lives near the recently targeted Culver Boulevard location, said she was “impressed with the council office’s response to this crisis.”
More outreach in that area is already scheduled.
Park’s office told The Epoch Times that they “expect to finalize efforts by the end of the week.”
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, areas on the Westside increased with more tents popping up in residential and tourist areas. Park, who replaced former Councilmember Mike Bonin in December 2022 after he chose to not seek reelection, ran on a campaign to clamp down on encampments and vowed to enforce anti-camping laws in her district.
According to the 2020 point-in-time homeless count, Los Angeles County has more than 69,000 homeless people and there are 43,000 in the City of Los Angeles. Such a count wasn’t conducted in 2021 due to the pandemic.
This year’s count concluded at the end of January, and results will be available by late spring or summer.
