The Los Angeles city and county governments have each approved a major plan to combat homelessness. (See the report in the Los Angeles Times, Feb 10, 2016.)
The county plan calls for setting aside $150 million dollars over the next two years to carry out the strategies that its task force outlined in January. This includes $26 million for quick turn-around rehousing, $11 million for short-term housing for people coming out of county jails and other institutions, and $8.7 million for subsidies to help disabled homeless people get into housing while waiting for federal Supplemental Security Income. It makes some efforts to increase the county’s stock of low-cost housing, but building the 15,000 needed additional units would cost far more than the county is promising in this plan. And the county has yet to figure out where the $150 million will come from.
The city plans to develop “a host of housing programs, create a citywide system of mobile showers and public restrooms, and allow overnight parking at designated sites for people who live in their vehicles.” These would be spread throughout the city rather than concentrated on L.A.’s ‘Skid Row’. Unfortunately, the housing programs alone will cost more than $185 billion over the next decade. Again, the City Council does not yet know where the money will come from.
Both plans were developed to deal with the root causes of homelessness. They are a response to the recent jump in the number of homeless people counted in all parts of Los Angeles County.
To play the devil’s advocate, I would question whether or not the “estimated $965 million dollars a year” is actually going directly to services that combat homelessness. It seems like you could categorize anything that the county puts money towards as “helping homelessness.” Schools, police, even roads could all technically be labeled as helping homelessness in some way. I’m sure writers and city councilman can skew facts about the cities budget so they can say what they want.
Regardless, the article doesn’t seem to take into consideration that the cost of all this housing would inevitably go down over time, because theoretically there would be less homelessness to combat. It goes back to our discussion earlier, about the strategy of first providing housing and education, then letting former homeless adjust to society, achieve stable jobs, etc.
Good points. There’s another way to look at it, though. Currently, the city and county spend some large amount of dollars on police, medical, and social service costs to control the homeless population. This doesn’t go away, so long as homeless folks stay on the street. One of the key ideas of the “housing first” model is to get folks off the streets and into supportive housing. That way, it’s easier for them to get medical care before there’s an emergency (at great costs savings), there are fewer police costs (e.g., lock-ups), etc. One could put that savings into building housing and providing support services and still save money.
That said, there is a long tradition of promising to reallocate funds from one pool to another and then failing to follow through. Closing the big mental health hospitals was supposed to provide money for community-based mental health care, and we know what happened to that. (See Chris Jencks’ chapter on that in his book “The Homeless”.)