LA Mayor Karen Bass Moving Unhoused People 'Inside Safe,' For A Start

No more police sweeps, either.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was sworn in on December 12 and immediately declared a state of emergency to address homelessness. The week before Christmas, she signed an executive order launching a new initiative called "Inside Safe" aimed at getting unhoused people out of camps and into temporary housing in motel rooms while the city provides them social services and help them find more permanent housing.

The program is voluntary and enlists outreach workers to persuade people to accept rehousing, rather than the notorious police sweeps that just come in and bust up camps to clear people out. Bass said during the presser announcing Inside Safe that police were not leading the operations, and that she didn't want anyone ticketed or punished just for being homeless.

"The role of the police is if they are needed" she said. "To be clear, this is a housing-based strategy. This is not a punitive strategy."

The LA Times reported that one of the first operations to rehouse people from a camp under an underpass, on December 21, went smoothly because the city already had rooms available and buses to take people to nearby motels. Eleven of the 25 people in the camp went to one hotel, bringing up to two bags of belongings along. More from the Times:  

“The pace at which Inside Safe can bring people indoors from encampments across the city will largely depend on the availability of beds,” said Cheri Todoroff, executive director of Los Angeles County’s Homeless Initiative. “What the city is doing that will likely be a game changer is accelerating housing placements, both in interim and permanent housing.”

More buildings master-leased — a process in which the city would take control of entire hotels or motels — means more people off the streets. But it remains to be seen whether the city can lease enough beds to meaningfully reduce or eliminate large encampments across Los Angeles.

It sounds like a pretty good approach? Bass's executive order emphasizes the "housing first" nature of the program, so that

Once in interim housing, social service agencies will provide wrap-around care to each participant to transition those previously living in encampments into permanent housing, improve their wellbeing, and promote their stability. Such an effort will simultaneously enhance the safety and hygiene of our neighborhoods for all residents, businesses, and neighbors.

The order also directed city officials to prepare a report by March creating a "unit acquisition strategy, including master leasing for both interim and permanent housing options.”

 The LA Times notes that Bass's first-day emergency order, which was later authorized by the City Council,

gives her a lot more flexibility to quickly commit city funds toward leasing motel and hotel rooms. City officials said Bass currently has about $20 million at her disposal that could be put toward leasing beds quickly.

More funds could be made available to her, but that would require more input from the council.

The Inside Safe program builds on work done last year by Va Lecia Adams Kellum of the St. Joseph Center in Venice, which rented motel rooms for about 200 people living in a large encampment that had been the target of complaints by businesses and residents. Adams Kellum is now part of Bass's transition team, and in an interview with the Times , she

said that of the 213 people moved off Ocean Front Walk, 109 have found permanent housing. She added that it’s much easier to get people paired with a housing subsidy and into permanent housing if they’re indoors already.

"She knows housing has to be a part of it,” Adams Kellum said of Bass and her team’s work. “I know she’s lining that up because she knows you can’t go into an encampment sincerely without [the motel bed] in hand.”

Also too, to jump-start the creation of more affordable housing in Los Angeles, Bass's emergency declaration will streamline the approval process for building affordable housing. The city will have to complete its authorization process for new applications within 60 days, and once construction actually starts, the city will have to complete permits within five days.

Bass's biggest challenge, as the New Yorker points out, will be overcoming "the sort of hyperlocal homeowner resistance that is the lifeblood of the city’s politics."

Perhaps Bass’s streamlined power will be able to circumvent some of that and deliver real wins for her homelessness agenda, but the homeowners associations will certainly let Bass know that she is in for a fight.

But as that article also points out, Bass's approach aims at unifying what up until now has been a highly fragmented mishmash of city responses to homelessness, so that if all she's able to accomplish is to "smooth out the absurdly parochial and bureaucratic nature of Los Angeles city politics, she will have achieved a major victory." Given Gov. Gavin Newsom's commitment to creating more affordable housing statewide and to get unhoused people into housing with supportive services — with an extra $2.2 billion in funding requested on top of the $12 billion previously approved — California may actually be starting to create real long-term solutions.

[ LAT / New Yorker / CBS News / Office of the Mayor of Los Angeles / KABC / Video Screenshot:  Fox 11 Los Angeles on YouTube]

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