A Reality-Based Approach to Ending Homelessness in Los Angeles
A petition by the Inter-University Consortium against Homelessness

More than 50 professors from universities, colleges and agencies throughout the Los Angeles region have signed a petition demanding that city and county officials do more to solve the homeless problem than arrest indigents and provide emergency beds.

The petition by the Inter-University Consortium Against Homelessness that is to be released Jan. 30 also calls for smaller cities in the region to take responsibility for their homeless and stop dumping them on Skid Row.

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, according to Michael Dear, one of the consortium’s founders and a University of Southern California professor. There are more than 90,000 homeless people countywide and current policies will not end homelessness, he added.

“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,” the petition 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 Development Corporation, Dan Flaming of the Economic Roundtable and RAND’s Paul Koegel to create a plan to end homelessness in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles, according to the petition, needs to take five steps to solve the homeless problem:

* 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. It’s time that L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the City Council and the County Board of Supervisors chaired by Zev Yaroslavsky found 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 petition states.

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.

“We can afford to end homelessness,” Dear said.

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

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