During Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ first year in office, the city housed more than 21,000 homeless people, including more than 1,950 who found shelter through Inside Safe, the mayor’s signature homeless program, according to figures shared by Bass’ office on Wednesday, Dec. 6.
The 21,000-plus Angelenos brought indoors in the past year surpasses the 17,000-mark that Bass set as a goal during her campaign to become mayor in 2022.
To be clear, many of the city’s housing programs were established before Bass took office, and her administration has continued to build on that momentum.
At the same time, more than 9,000 affordable housing units are being built at a faster pace due to a directive that Bass issued to streamline City Hall processes, her office said.
While there is some progress in dealing with the city’s homelessness and housing crises, the picture isn’t all rosy.
Bass, who will reach her one-year mark as mayor next week, said during a roundtable with reporters that she initially thought people being housed by Inside Safe would only be in interim housing for about three months before being placed in permanent housing. Now, she’s come to realize, the waiting time is more like a year-and-a-half to two years, not three months, because of a lack of permanent housing.
Earlier on Wednesday, at a press conference in Hollywood where Bass visited the site of a former homeless encampment next to an elementary school, she alluded to challenges she has faced. She cited the city’s incomplete data used to track people who are homeless. In the past, she’s also spoken of a shortage of service providers and restrictions that affect who is eligible for services.
“This has certainly not been easy, and I’ve always said that confronting this crisis is like peeling an onion,” Bass said during the morning press conference.
“When you peel an onion, you cry along the way,” she added. “Because every time we’ve taken a step forward, we find a barrier. And we have to knock that barrier down. We move another step forward, we find another barrier. But we will continue to knock all of the barriers down until there are no Angelenos that are left to live and die on our streets.”
According to figures provided by the mayor’s office, as of the end of November:
- 21,694 people facing homelessness had been placed in interim housing – about 4,700 more people than in 2022.
- 7,717 people received housing vouchers to pay for rent – about 2,500 more than did so last year.
- About 3,550 Angelenos were placed in permanent housing, about 2,190 more than the prior year.
It was not immediately clear how much of these increases are due to new programs or efforts launched by the Bass administration, or were efforts initiated under former Mayor Eric Garcetti. For example, more housing units funded by Prop. HHH, the $1.2 billion bond measure to build affordable housing, came online in 2023, but construction may have begun well before this year.
Executive Direct 1
The mayor’s office on Wednesday highlighted executive directives that Bass issued after becoming mayor to speed up production of shelters and affordable housing units.
During her first week in office, Bass issued Executive Directive 1 (ED1) to remove red tape in order to fast track and lower the cost of building affordable housing and shelters.
Earlier this year, ED1 led to some unintended consequences, in which developers applied to build multi-story apartments in single-family residential neighborhoods where they weren’t intended, and the mayor updated her directive to close the loophole.
But the Bass administration also credited ED1 for shortening the time it takes to approve affordable housing projects from several months to 45 days. According to Bass, the executive directive has accelerated the city’s review of more than 9,000 affordable housing units. The City Council is expected to vote next year on a proposal to make the provisions in ED1 permanent.
Inside Safe
The mayor’s office also noted that Bass’ signature homeless initiative, Inside Safe, as of Nov. 30 had launched 32 operations to clear homeless encampments in L.A. In the process, the city has removed more than 503,460 pounds of waste.
On Wednesday morning, Bass and other officials spoke at a press conference outside Selma Avenue Elementary School in Hollywood, where a homeless encampment of 41 people was cleared earlier this year. Bass said the city’s efforts meant students and parents won’t need to walk around the tents on their way to school.
Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, who represents the neighborhood, said the city is on the right track with Inside Safe.
“We are finally housing the people in Hollywood in the correct way,” he said.
The city conducted another Inside Safe operation on Wednesday, clearing out an RV encampment in the Hollywood Hills area.
More than 1,900 people have moved indoors through the Inside Safe program. The mayor’s office, citing data from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), said that 81% of Inside Safe participants stuck with the program, compared to 64% in all other interim housing programs.
Officials acknowledged they did not always know what happened to everyone who left interim housing.
While highlighting progress, Bass and others who spoke at the afternoon roundtable acknowledged that a major challenge is the lack of complete or up-to-date information about where and how many shelter beds are available, or where other housing has opened up.
City controller’s audit
That issue was also highlighted this week in an audit report issued by City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s office, which found that data from LAHSA is problematic.
“Overall, we found that the data is lacking. LAHSA … and its partners, contracted service organizations who operate shelters, do not have a functional or accurate way to track shelter bed occupancy,” Mejia said during a Wednesday news conference at City Hall, separate from the mayor’s press conference and roundtable with reporters.
LAHSA’s CEO, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, said during the mayor’s roundtable, “We agree that the data systems and tracking are not in good shape. … And we want to try to provide greater visibility and transparency.”
She said there are plans to develop a real-time dashboard and to build out some of the tracking systems.
Bass, meanwhile, once again acknowledged that she’s worried that LAHSA’s next homeless count in January will reveal an increase in the city’s homeless population — due in part to an increase in evictions expected as tenant protections during the COVID-19 pandemic expire.
On Wednesday, Conway Collis, president and CEO of the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles, which has been working to prevent homelessness, said it’s estimated that 34,000 to 36,000 people will be evicted. Not everyone who is served an eviction notice will become homeless, Collis said, but the number of evictions will be “obviously substantial.”
City News Service contributed to this report.