Homeless is a growing epidemic in Los Angeles, and it’s a secret to no one. A stroll down nearly any block in the city’s proper will prove that. Destitute sleeping on benches, shoddy tents blowing against the city’s rare wind, carts filled with life possessions paraded along the sidewalks; it is a sight that any Angeleno and visitor alike will be familiar with.
And it seems the city has finally realized it, too. Just last month, the Los Angeles City Council declared a “state of emergency” regarding homeless, pledging $100 million to fix a problem that has risen by 12 percent in just the past three years.
On the surface, it seems to be a hunky set of change. The number itself was chosen by the council for its symbolic nature. Surely the money should crack a formidable dent in the surface of the homeless problem, right?
Well, it might not be that easy. The de facto approach to solving homeless in the country right now is a housing first approach, in which homeless relief organizations focus on getting the homeless off the street immediately into permanent housing, rather than a graduated process of going from a temporary shelter, to health resources to temporary housing and so on. Countless studies have shown this to be the most effective process to rehabilitating the homeless, but it is extremely expensive.
For example, the Downtown Women’s Center in Skid Row specializes in providing permanent housing and health support services for the chronically adult homeless adult population in downtown Los Angeles. In 2010, they renovated a six-floor building with a onsite medical center, cafeteria, day center, and 71 apartments to the tune of $35 million. Amy Turk, the chief operations officer for the center, told me that price tag is indicative of the real cost of getting homeless people off the streets.
“When you know that we ended homelessness for 71 women with $35 million dollars, it’s going to take many more millions of dollars to end homelessness for everyone in L.A. County,” she said.
According to Turk, the county is lacking 500,000 thousand units of affordable and low income housings. Simple math will show you treating all of them would be in the hundreds of millions. The homelessness epidemic has gotten so bad that the issue appears may be beyond a price tag.
If the city and the county want to seriously get down and tackle homeless, they must recognize this is an issue that won’t be solved in one fell swoop, but must be a considerably budgetary measure in the years to come. This $100 million should go toward equally funding housing first measures, but also toward preventative measures to ease the necessary budgetary burden in a crusade that could last for the next few decades.
Just ANOTHER JOURNALISM STUDENT 
While I do not know the exact amount housing should cost to get one person off the street, a half of a million dollars seems rather high. I wonder, do they gut to live in these apartments for life? Utah recently created housing for the homeless, and so far have been very successful. However, according to my research, to house and provide a case worker for a homeless person, it costs the state (Utah) about $7,800. This seems much more reasonable. Here is an article and video about what Utah has done if you are interested: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/utahs-strategy-homeless-give-them-homes-n352966
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The facts that you present about the truths and reality of what the price tag is for fixing homelessness is astounding. It seems that we have let ourselves go in regard to not stopping this before it got out of hand, and now we as a city are stuck in an impossible situation. I think the only way to use the money that has been allocated in a worthwhile and meaningful way would be to look to populations with very low homeless populations, and implement their working solutions towards our own city’s problem. I have personally seen the ways in which Los Angeles’ skid row has slowly been branching out, taking over solemn streets and turning them into homeless populated mini towns. Los Angeles needs to help these people, not just throw money at a building and hope for the best. We need to think outside of the box, and possibly look to European countries to see the ways they support their homeless populations, or the ways in which they prevent homelessness. Yet, we are way past the point of prevention, and now we need to do more than just apply a band-aid quick fix. We need to construct a long term plan that will help current homeless populations this month and this year, but we can’t ignore the fact that helping 71 people this year, still could mean that 71 new homeless people could very well pop up the following year. I don’t know the solution to this, but I do know it needs to have at least a two prong approach, one in which we help fix today’s problems, and prevent tomorrow’s.
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You raise excellent points, and I think the problem is certainly more than a $100 solution. Housing solutions for the homeless aren’t enough, and I’m not honestly sure that Los Angeles alone can solve the issue. The rising problem is a combination of our national healthcare issues, a lack of attention to mental health, the housing crisis in Los Angeles, and the fact that LA is a mecca for transients due to its inviting weather.
Hopefully the $100 million partially goes to creating programs to employ mentally ill and disabled homeless people. Simply getting the homeless off the streets or out of the state is not a solution. We need long term plans to give homeless and mentally ill Los Angeles residents the tools to support themselves. Hopefully the Los Angeles government speaks with the non-profits already active in the area to establish a game plan that can actually make a difference.
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This article raises attention to one of the largest epidemics that our city is facing and the reality in beginning to resolve this epidemic. We have let homelessness in Los Angeles reach such heights that we are almost to a point of no return; this program’s plans bring hope to the notion that we could begin to reduce this issue in our city and hopefully someday see results that we can’t currently even imagine. While of course the main concern in any program such as this is to not overspend, I find the set budget of $100 million to be appropriate, and maybe even considerably low relative to the issue it is attacking. When you explained the process of moving the homeless into permanent housing as the most effective approach to solve this problem, although I have done little research, I absolutely agree and I find it worth the extra cost for the better long-term results. While the $100 million definitely won’t solve our problems, I believe that this strategy is the best start to seeing improvement and, eventually, eradicating homelessness to the best of the city’s ability. Even if within the next 5 or so years we could get half of the homeless population in L.A. off the streets and into housing and begin to help them start a new life, that would be huge. It isn’t necessarily about eradicating homelessness, because at the end of the day and like you mentioned in your presentation, you can’t force people to do something. You can’t force someone to live somewhere and you can’t force them to participate in mental health programs, but the people that we can get to move forward are what will measure the success of this endeavor. It is about focusing on improvements of the future and I believe that this epidemic is an issue that should be at the forefront of the city of Los Angeles’s attention.
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