Ending Homelessness in Los Angeles
Inter-University Consortium Against Homelessness

Los Angeles has the biggest homeless population of any U.S. city today and spends proportionally less on the problem than New York, Boston, Chicago and Seattle. There are more than 90,000 homeless people countywide and current policies will not end homelessness, according to a new report from the Inter-University Coalition Against Homelessness.

“Our goals must aim to stop the manufacture of homelessness; close off the flow of homeless people to the streets of Skid Row; and assist those already homeless to get off the streets permanently,” one of the report’s authors, Michael Dear states.

Dear, geography professor at the USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences, and
Jennifer Wolch, director of the USC Center for Sustainable Cities at the College, teamed with UCLA law professor Gary Blasi, Paul Tepper, director of the Weingart Center Association Development Corporation, Dan Flaming of the Economic Roundtable and RAND’s Paul Koegel to document the evolution of the homelessness problem over the past 25 years.

The report, and its companion document – a petition signed by 48 prominent university researchers from southern California – also suggest ways to end homelessness in Los Angeles:
* Help homeless people by giving them a share of public-sector jobs, such as tree planting or highway construction. The program could be paid for with some of the infrastructure bond money approved in November.

* Ensure public assistance is enough to pay for lodging. General relief, the last-resort L.A. County program for unemployed and disabled people, amounts to $221 a month - the same as it was 25 years ago. Many county dollars could be saved if agencies helped the homeless obtain the federal Social Security benefits and veterans' disability payments they are entitled to.

* Provide affordable housing and services for the homeless, not just emergency shelters. This would be a bargain compared with the cost of putting people in jails, hospitals and shelters. In Los Angeles, a night in supportive housing costs about $30, compared to $37 in a shelter, $64 in jail, $85 in prison, $607 in a mental hospital and $1,474 in a general hospital.

* Stop the flow of homeless people into Skid Row. Other cities must scrap zoning restrictions that allow some neighborhoods to keep out low-income housing and essential public services. Support laws that would require cities to include emergency shelters and special-needs facilities in their general plans.

* Spend the political capital necessary to end homelessness. Long-established divisions of political authority cannot be used as an excuse for inaction. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the City Council and the County Board of Supervisors chaired by Zev Yaroslavsky need to find the money and political will to end homelessness. Until these actions are undertaken, the existing supply of shelter beds in Skid Row must be preserved and maintained.

The report argues that it should be possible to find the resources needed to end homelessness. In 2005, the city of Los Angeles spent less than $1 per capita to address homelessness, (compared to $3 in Chicago, $8 in Boston, and $13 in Seattle). In L.A. County overall, local jurisdictions using local, state, and federal funds as well as private sources spend about $600 million annually. The annual cost of sheltering and sustaining every homeless person in Los Angeles County could be approximately $1.5 billion.

New York City spends $1.7 billion each year on services and housing for its much smaller homeless population, driven in part by the realization that not providing supportive housing and services to homeless people is expensive. The rapid construction of affordable and supportive housing there has reduced the homeless population to such an extent that the city’s largest shelter, with 1,000 beds, will be closed in June. Los Angeles should take a similar approach to ending homelessness and its human and financial toll.

For a copy of the report, please click here (PDF file).

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