L.A.'s Mayoral Candidates Don't Have a Plan to Solve Homelessness
What Karen Bass and Rick Caruso's plans leave out
Approximately 64,000 Los Angelenos are homeless on any given night, the second largest concentration of homelessness in the U.S. after New York City. The sheer scale of Los Angeles’ homeless population has broad implications for the rest of California as the state has recently invested over $12 billion for providing housing and medical services to its homeless residents.
That’s why I found the Los Angeles Times’ recent article about the competing homelessness proposals put forward by Los Angeles mayoral candidates Karen Bass and Rick Caruso so fascinating and depressing. The Times described their plans as “diverging widely in scale and method”. But are they really?
Caruso promises to build 30,000 new interim beds using Tiny Homes and Sleeping Pods in 300 days at a one time capital cost of $874 million. However, the beds would only open if the County of Los Angeles pays the estimated $660 million annually to provide supportive services, which counties are typically responsible for. Assuming the County funded this program at the levels hoped for by Caruso, and assuming more Los Angelenos don’t become homeless, the absolute best case scenario for Caruso’s plan would be for the city’s unsheltered homeless population to be reduced by 62 percent with over 18,000 people still on the streets. That would lower Los Angeles’ current unsheltered rate from 72% (second worst in the nation behind the San Francisco Bay Area) to 27%, basically in line with the U.S. average. Given the devastating health and safety impacts of even brief stints of unsheltered homelessness, that would be a big deal even if the city’s overall homeless population and rate of homelessness would remain unchanged.
Bass promises to house 17,786 people at a cost of $292 million including capital and operational costs via multiple project types, including hotel/motel/apartment acquisitions, rental vouchers, and new permanent supportive housing units. Some of these beds depend on funding from the state or federal government, but from programs that area already funded like Project Homekey. In that sense, Bass’ plan is more actionable day-1 than Caruso’s. On the other hand, her plan also rests on some bigly wishful thinking, including achieving a 50% cost reduction on future permanent supportive housing projects funded with Proposition HHH money. She also counts 3,700 already existing shelter beds towards her total by assuming those beds will be freed up by placements of people currently in those beds into more permanent housing solutions created by the plan. Assuming all funding came into place and assuming more Los Angelenos don’t become homeless, the absolute best case scenario for Bass’s plan would be for the city’s overall unsheltered homeless population to be reduced 14% from 48,041 to 40,925 people, and for providing permanent housing solutions to 10,670 people currently in temporary shelters (assuming sheltered people are first in line for permanent housing). Los Angeles’ rate of homelessness would decline from 66 to 56 homeless residents per 10k residents overall, meaning it would remain the fourth highest concentration of homelessness in the U.S. after D.C., NYC, and San Francisco. Because Bass’ proposal would provide more permanent housing than shelter, the plan would actually increase the city’s rate of unsheltered homelessness from 72 to 73%, tying the San Francisco Bay Area for highest in the nation.
My biggest gripe here (and I have several) is that both plans ignore the fact that more Los Angelenos will become homeless unless more housing is built to relieve pressure in the rental market and begin lowering prices. And what do the candidates say about building more housing? Nothing! Increasing housing production isn’t in their homelessness plans, nor is it—or housing costs writ large—anywhere on their websites. All the best-case scenario gains described above will simply be overwhelmed by “new inflows” (i.e., currently housed people who will become homeless before currently homeless people are housed). In other words, both plans would spend a lot of money to run in place.
“Are you sure housing costs are the major driver of homelessness? What about drug abuse and mental illness?” Glad you asked!
High housing costs are a better predictor of homelessness rates in the United States than any other factor, including substance abuse. For example, West Virginia’s drug overdose mortality rate is nearly four times higher than California’s, yet California’s rate of homelessness is over 5 times higher than West Virginia’s. This is made possible by the fact that even people suffering significant psychiatric and/or substance abuse disorders can typically afford West Virginia’s median rent ($879), whereas even many Californians working full time jobs cannot afford California’s median rents ($2,527).
The upshot is that California cities cannot house homeless people faster than the state’s housing market creates them. The City of Los Angeles estimates 227 residents become homeless for every 207 people that exit homelessness. The City of San Francisco estimates that for every 50 people it helps exit homelessness, another 150 people become homeless. Yet Los Angeles and other California cities continue to lag far behind peer regions across the U.S. when it comes to housing production. Until and unless California’s local and regional elected officials get ambitious about reducing cost pressures in the rental market by building more homes, they’ll continue to lose ground on homelessness.
Mmm here is the housing policy platform on Karen Bass’ website. https://karenbass.com/policies/housing/
While you can certainly criticize the policies within or even the lack of details in certain areas, it doesn’t seem fair at all to say the quoted lines below when the website clearly talks about building more housing:
“And what do the candidates say about building more housing? Nothing! Increasing housing production isn’t in their homelessness plans, nor is it—or housing costs writ large—anywhere on their websites.”