ONE BIG THING: CHANGING LA & SOLVING HOMELESSNESS WITH SERVICES AND HOUSING

Our team has been in office for just over six months now, and we’ve already seen the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to how the City of LA responds to homelessness. This week, we want to break it down.

The Good

• Our office’s homelessness team has housed 110 people and counting just in the past 5 months. That’s in addition to hundreds of people housed and given services by the various service providers we coordinate in our district.

• We got over $1 billion in the upcoming year’s City budget to address homelessness with services and housing. $50 million of that will go directly towards buying or leasing entire hotels/motels to house people currently living on our streets.

• We will open a record number of Permanent Supportive Housing units this year, and we’re also working with the County, Mayor, LAHSA and Service Providers to cut red tape so we can build more interim housing faster.

The Bad (...but getting better)

We have over 40 service providers working in our district, and before we took office, no one was coordinating them.

As a result, some of these providers were doing the same thing in the same area, while other parts of the district were being entirely ignored.

But now, because we have a team dedicated to homelessness full-time, we can coordinate and conduct outreach with these organizations. They’ve visited every encampment in our district (there are roughly 130 of them) and they are able to visit and offer services to about 20 different encampments each week.

The Ugly 

• The City has fewer than 400 beds in our district for 3,000 unhoused people. 

• Those ~400 beds have a 97-99% occupancy rate on any given night, meaning we are severely limited in the housing and shelter options we can offer folks.

• We still need to prevent more families from falling into homelessness. That’s why we want to focus on community investment like our funding of Family Source Centers, strengthening renter protections, and other homelessness prevention services.

One More Quick Hit!

Happy Pride!! 

We're excited to host the 2023 LA Pride Parade this month right here in Hollywood where the first official Pride Parade in the US was held in 1970. 

Join us Sunday June 11 -- plus WeHo Pride is this weekend, and we hope to see you there too!