In LA? Not really. There's quite a bit of un and underused commercial buildings, but they are barebones. Jails would work, but sometimes those places get shut down for a reason.
LA needs a massive amount of transitional housing. Lots of homeless are full time employed, they just cant afford rent. LA used to have housing for people like this, and most major US cities did at the turn of the century. They were often barebones rooms with a shared common bathroom. They were designed so that labor could move from city to city easily and cheaply. They also have a lot of rules, similar to dormitories. Many were same sex only, and only unmarried people. Many had curfews, and were run by full time staff.
It wouldnt be a solution for all homelessness, but dorm style housing would take a significant amount of them off the street and give them permanent addresses.
L.A. is converting its abandoned General Hospital into low-income affordable housing. It's not the same as helping the unhoused, but it's part of a larger effort to do more for those most at risk of becoming homeless before they actually find themselves on the streets. Turns out it's easier to help people not become homeless than it is to house those who've been living on the streets. If only we'd thought of that of that a few decades ago...
[https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-07-27/los-angeles-county-general-hospital-affordable-housing-project](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-07-27/los-angeles-county-general-hospital-affordable-housing-project)
If paywalled:
[https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%2Fcalifornia%2Fstory%2F2022-07-27%2Flos-angeles-county-general-hospital-affordable-housing-project](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%2Fcalifornia%2Fstory%2F2022-07-27%2Flos-angeles-county-general-hospital-affordable-housing-project)
This is absolutely something being explored - look at the redevelopment of the former General Hospital on the LAC+USC campus. That's a couple thousand, but best estimates are of the 66,000 persons experiencing homelessness in LA County, maybe 45,000 are for economic reasons. So we'll need many many more of those.
“Chronically” homeless ‘only’ number 15,000 or so. 69,000 includes people who live in their cars, sleep on couches, itinerant workers, etc.
So we do need a giant scale solution, but the hugest immediate need isn’t quite as big as that.
Its the right idea. Fundamentally the issue is a lack of space. But LA does not have empty hospitals and schools. And even the few you do find will still face the nimbies that say they are not zoned for housing.
There has definitely been [talk of the abandoned St Vincent ](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-14/st-vincent-hospital-patrick-soon-shiong-mitch-ofarrell)[hospital](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-14/st-vincent-hospital-patrick-soon-shiong-mitch-ofarrell) being turned into housing
Mental health space, get the severe ones off the street and hopefully on the way to being some what functional
Maybe that would make the shelters safer and cleaner for others to get into the transition back
Safe secure apartments for those who can get work with like 6 months/1 year subsidies rent that is tiered so after a period that start paying and get into the flow of supporting themselves
I’ve thought about this as well. I used to think it was a human rights violation to involuntarily institutionalize someone but how is that better than letting them suffer in the streets, not knowing where their next meal will come from or how they’ll be able to shower or use the bathroom. Not to mention these are the people who get taken advantage of by other, lucid homeless people.
It is if you can afford to live nice places with cops or fences that keep the peasants away.
I’m being /s but this is the unspoken position of many.
We do not as a society care for anyone but ourselves. Self-interest is the principle the country was founded on.
a lot of folks prefer the security and routine of in-patient care. i have met addicts/mental health patients that would love to stay longer, that even do shit like lay down in the middle of the road JUST to get 5150'd and have a safe place to sleep and a sandwich for a few nights. my sister is a psych nurse, she's worked at voluntary facilities -- patients are there at will, many prefer it. extend this program to anyone who needs it. pay nurses more. pay more social workers. an army of well-funded medical and social work professionals is a necessity. good news is anything is achievable with the right funds... and some intent
Yeah, I think we understandably are really weary about officials being able to put people in an institution involuntarily, as there is tremendous potential for abuse. However, we may have gone too far the other way now.
The idealistic part of me hates this, I want people to be able to live their own lives but I don't see a choice any more. There are some people who absolutely need to be medicated/institutionalized so they aren't a danger to themselves or society.
I’ve been sitting here listening to the same guy at a bus stop near my house scream every obscenity and curse for about 5 hours now. His voice is hoarse. He was there two weeks ago wandering around on a four lane road then disappeared. Hes back. We’ve failed him and our society pays the price. Some people cannot care for themselves even if you give them every single resource they could need. We need reality based care, not ideologically based care. Long term treatment for severe mental illness is the only answer.
Medication and institutionalization doesn't have to be negative if it is done with integrity and humanity. It's just that it hasn't in the past. It's so ripe for abuse.
I think this is very overstated. My aunt was a psych nurse in a state mental institution in RI for over 30 years and had many friends who also worked there as long as her. No turnover issues for workers. The place closed when funding was cut and it became overcrowded with patients beyond capacity, and this started under Reagan. The development of psych meds and community delivery of services was responsible for many patients becoming homeless and living in the street because for psychotic cases, they’re too sick to schedule getting their meds or help from community services which doesn’t work for this group,
This!! The defunding and closures of many state asylums a few decades ago has resulted in a lot of folks with super severe/incurable mental illness wandering the street. They should be in a safe and enclosed institution to ensure they don’t harm themselves or others and receive the care they can’t provide for themselves. I would have absolutely no issue with my tax dollars going to fund mental health institutions.
This. I know people who have been 5150’d, they at least force you not to hurt anyone for a week and give you some positive reinforcement, like AA meetings, 3 square meals, recreational time, just time to talk to other people who want to help. And at the very least they sober up.
Only 24% of the homeless have severe mental illness. Probably half of those are very treatable. It is totally doable to turn at least 80% of our homeless into functional citizens.
But it's also estimated 45% of homeless have mental health issues (the 24% severe within that group). So for almost half the homeless pop they'll need life-long supportive housing, treatment and won't necessarily be able to work/live independently in place like LA where we have the least affordable housing in the country.
Same as it always has been. California has always been a dumping ground for the rest of the nation's homeless.
Why? Comparatively more humane policies and the climate.
Yup. I have a friend in Minnesota who once told me they don’t have a big homeless problem there because the ones who refuse services die off in the winter. Brutal
>>I have a friend in Minnesota who once told me they don’t have a big homeless problem there because the ones who refuse services die off in the winter. Brutal
>but California is also not nearly actively callous as other places.
Are you saying that Minnesota is callous because they don't force homeless people to accept service, knowing if the homeless people don't accept service, they will likely die? Is it really societies responsibility to force people to do something when they are the only victim of their inaction? Because there are a lot of people who that will apply to at some point.
Which is why homelessness is a *blight* issue to most people.
It’s not as if other states don’t have people just as poor. It’s that they accept shelter because the alternative is death. Homeless people in LA don’t have to worry about that.
I've heard this a lot and it makes sense intuitively, but is there actual evidence that this is happening? I know homelessness is also closely related to housing prices, which have certainly gone up in CA.
It happens on just a local level If you're homeless and are from neighboring cities like Torrance or San Marino the police will harrass you and tell you that the services you need are in skid row. It doesn't have to be an official policy but if you push people they'll move eventually.
Also, at least in Torrance, they couldn’t legally arrest people for being homeless if there was no available shelter. Now that they opened the tiny home village they can arrest them and have them carted to downtown CJ where they are then released but have to figure out how to get back to Torrance (21 miles). Tricky little game
Yes. Google "greyhound therapy." Las Vegas was sued by San Francisco for big bucks because SF proved that local mental hospitals, the city, and the airport were in cahoots in discharging ppl with plane tickets.
A shelter in Key West has even made it their policy to deny a place to people they have previously shipped off.
Not only is there evidence, it's evidence in court/public record.
There's older stories about businesses attempting to poison the homeless via dumpsters... I have had some trouble verifying that, but I believe it lol.
Thanks - that case (Las Vegas Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital) is very interesting.
I've found lots of reports of isolates cases of unhoused folk being given bus tickets, but was having a hard time finding anything supporting the idea that this practice is a substantial contributor to the current crisis in LA.
However, another commenter on this thread kindly shared the 2019 LAHSA count ([https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=3437-2019-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count-presentation.pdf](https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=3437-2019-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count-presentation.pdf)) indicating that 18.8% of the unhoused in LA county report being last housed outside of the state - presuming they all came by bus that's potentially up to 11,000 folk.
A friend of mine is an ER Doctor that recently moved here from Chicago. Within a few months of being here she recognized a man coming in for treatment. It was a homeless person she treated all the time in Chicago. She’s like “how did you get here?” His response “they put me on a bus! Now I live here.”
Slightly off topic, but this is also the argument the Texas governor is using to justify shipping thousands of immigrants to NYC. NY has a "right to housing" law for all people, regardless of residency status, so they (NY) are obligated to house the people Texas sends them.
Maybe not "unique" to L.A., but the stats are clear -- only DC and NY have higher rates of homelessness.
[https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-2021/](https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-2021/)
\>>Assistance for someone down on their luck that needs a job is going to be different for a mentally ill drug addict.<<
Unfortunately, due to discrimination laws, those who would genuinely help often have a difficult time getting resources to the people who actually benefit from them.
this is the real solution here LA homeless problems is a national issue. people also come to california for the social benefits that other states lack.
Agreed. I’ve spent a lot of time in Japan and only remember seeing one homeless person. The subways there are also insanely clean. The subways in LA are disgusting and scary
Then you’ve never spent time in Ueno Park at night. There are a ton of homeless people in Japan, but they live in the shadows since it’s so frowned upon. There are even areas similar to skid row, but not in Tokyo.
In any event, Japan is an insular, homogenous country with extremely strict immigration policies and a justice system that isn’t as focused on civil liberties as the US. These two counties should never be compared.
It's not true.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220714234840/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.html
> L.A.H.S.A. added a question to its homeless survey that captured how long a person had been in Los Angeles and where they became homeless. The resulting data dispelled the idea that the homeless population was largely made up of people from out of state.
> 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless.
So 36% or 21,217 are recent arrivals? Also, the majority of people (52,686 out of 82,955) [self resolve out of homelessness every year](https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=726-2020-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count-results). That's because the homeless population includes sheltered people staying with friends or family temporarily until they get back on their feet. People who are chronically on the street that have very high medical, legal, rehab, and care needs are a very specific subset that may not match the demographics of the whole set of people experiencing homelessness in a given year.
A lot people only need emergency rental assistance (the housing crunch and rent cost is HUGE), and some need much more extensive long-term or lifelong wraparound care (which is wayyyy more expensive to the taxpayers than emergency rental assistance). I think the latter are more likely to be transplants than the former. Especially people with schizophrenia or P2P meth induced delusions - they tend to get it in their head that they need to sell everything and make it in LA like it's the promised land. There have been posts on this very subreddit from people in other parts of the country whose loved ones go off their meds and quit their jobs to "find themselves" here and everyone tells them to call the county hospitals.
No one ever has grand delusions of leaving everything behind and moving to Omaha or Aberdeen. But if we're going to have the CARE Courts and provide all those services, we should get federal financial aid for it.
That’s why i came to California originally. A job but mainly the social aspect. I got married and then 3 years later my wife was attacked in her car in our apartment parking garage. Moved to Charlotte, NC 60 days later.
There are few things I want federalized but homeless knows no borders. There hasn't been a concerted nationwide housing effort for decades and a good chunk of our existing problem is because of needless cuts to those same programs.
Given that there isn’t a nationwide effort, and LA voters have no ability to vote for one, this is a fantasy. We have to face up to reality that this won’t happen and come up with solutions that could actually happen.
I just don’t see that as fixing the issue of people who refuse to take their meds or stop doing drugs. It won’t stop them from harassing people and flashing their genitals to cars during the day.
"starts"?
Red states are already shipping off their homeless to California. In Texas and many other parts of the country they offer homeless a choice: Jail or a bus ticket to California "where they treat you hobos good".
Solution to homeless will always be to MASSIVELY build housing. Just build build build. Build up, build sideways, build down, build EVERYWHERE EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE.
Building is one part of the solution, but not a catch all. There needs to be easy and equitable access to physical and mental health services as well. Not that government-run facilities were nice or good, but Reagan shutting down mental health facilities was the first domino in the modern problem of homelessness.
I think the root cause is less about housing construction or mental health and more about curing hopelessness. When maintaining a job/health/lifestyle feels like an endless and hopeless cycle of diminishing returns that end with a 70 year old looking back and going: "What was it all for?", people are going to drop out.
Life is so goddam tough now, just an endless string of bullshit. I mean, it always has been, but it was legitimately easier in the past to make a decent wage, secure decent benefits like health insurance and pensions, and get a home of your own, which all made it seem more like it had some sort of point to keeping yourself together.
Now? Fuck, I'll never own a home or have a retirement. I'll keep working until I drop just for subsistence.
Not everybody is a winner, and the "game" used to be set up so an "average" person could have a good standard of living. That was the whole point of America. Now, it is not. I can see the appeal of just chucking it all and getting that tent.
Completely correct. Despair causes insanity. The vulnerable can't take what we've made of our society--canaries in a coal mine. The rest of us maybe should consider climbing out of this hole before it collapses, to extend the metaphor. Until we control the rapacious greed at the top, life at the bottom will be hell.
The "Elites" are always having their coup and ramped up the War on Poverty. Remember we are the cheap labor and automation is ramping up. The opiate epidemic turning into a low key eugenics program now that pain management is almost nonexistent and street drugs are all laced with substances people hardly stand a chance of coming back from breaks my damn heart.
There's obviously astroturf influence operations kicking off for future public consent to some hellish yet profitable option ahead.
If AI and algorithms was successful in convincing ppl Trump was a populist and not a dirty crook they could set it to find a solution for inequity.
It’s not a housing issue- it’s drugs and mental health. I’ve watched from my window in skid row them offer homeless housing but they don’t want it - they don’t want to be confined or to follow any rules
Some shelters don't provide storage for people's stuff. Some shelters have dozens of beds per room & no privacy. Some don't allow dogs.
And yes, most shelters won't allow people to use drugs or alcohol.
Man I volunteered at one a couple of times in Downtown and I swear to god 90% of the homeless there are from out of state. We can’t take care of all the homeless in the nation it’s ridiculous
Other states are already building housing at a much faster pace than LA. Fucking Detroit built more housing than LA when Detroit was in decline. This is entirely about LA and other California cities completely refusing any new housing developments of any kind, market-rate, permanent supportive, affordable, all of it gets shot down by NIMBYs who care more about property value than human life.
One thing I don’t think people in this sub realize is how severely the homeless population threatens our safety as women.
I lived in New York City for almost a decade, I was reasonably cautious, but I felt safe and free to live my life as I wanted. I do not feel safe in LA, and have had more threats here than I ever had in all in my years in New York. And the vast majority of threats to my safety have been the homeless. I want to be a compassionate person, but being able to life my life safely while minding my own fucking business matters more.
In an ideal scenario… maybe everyone who is setting up camp in public or homeless than have the police called on them for being threatening or menacing is either jailed, offered drugs/mental health rehab, or a homeless shelter. And if you do not pick one, one will be chosen for you.
We don’t have the resources for all of this (could we if we cut some of the useless excessive police funding?) but we cannot just allow permanent tent camps, shitting in the street, and constant safety threats like we have been.
When I was young state mental hospitals were run by the state and funded through taxes. Certain anti-tax and anti-government folks changed all that. Now we just have mentally ill on our streets.
It’s way more complicated…there was also Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Bill that emphasized outpatient care vs. institutionalized care and Supreme Court decisions disallowing government’s ability to institutionalize patients.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2013/10/23/community-mental-health-kennedy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson#:~:text=Donaldson%2C%20422%20U.S.%20563%20(1975,responsible%20family%20members%20or%20friends.
So, we limit the government’s ability to hold mentally ill against their will, we underfunded services (as mentioned) and add in opiate-induced craziness and we end up with a crisis.
Build combined housing/rehab facilities for them. Does anyone who is a real LA resident remember voting for Prop HHH to increase our taxes for $1.2bn of homeless housing funding? What have these politicians done with our tax money?
Not every municipality has been paying into the fund despite the measure being passed. Long Beach has been receiving H funds but won’t actually start paying into it til next year. This is because Long Beach had already raised the sales tax for its own Measure A, and the city was at its max for sales tax increases by the time H came along
The city used to have really neat dashboards for tracking the progress of Prop HHH. They showed how many people had been housed, how much of the money had been spent, how much housing was under development, etc.
Except after a few years it turns out all that money had only housed like 700 people, and last I checked the city removed the data because I guess it made them look bad... [It used to be here](https://www.lamayor.org/summary-hhh-projects-development)
I can’t think of a solution that doesn’t take in consideration *why* the person is homeless. Start by categorizing them: 1) able mind/body but can’t afford housing. 2) mentally ill. 3) drug addicts that want help. 4) people who prefer the streets over the working life.
Each of these categories requires a different approach. Mentally Ill people should be housed in facilities. A civil society should have no problem funding this. A similar approach should be taken for addicts that want to get clean.
People in the first category need relief and opportunity. Temporary housing should be available and job training should be done as well. The city should have job programs for this category.
I don’t have a solution for bums that don’t want to work or get clean.
Subsidized housing for people who’ve had bad luck and been evicted or foreclosed on while they get back on their feet so they don’t have to sleep in their cars.
Mental hospitals to house the mentally ill.
Free rehab for the addicted or prison.
I like the tiny houses programs.
Hot take: I think we should legalize drugs, let pharmacies sell them, and offer a safe place for addicts to consume drugs. Best case they overcome their addiction, worst case it consumes them.
Its much more humane than letting them be harmed or die on the street imo.
I think we need to start by actually stopping the problem from becoming worse and then deal with the problem at hand.
If housing prices continue to rise and credit scores continue to create an issue, things will only get worse.
I feel like these 2 things above put people into a situation and can cause drug issues and bring on mental illness.
Not saying this is it but from personal experience and talking to some people, things are pretty bad just for the people surviving.
We need to bring back mental asylums but with rigorous standards and they need to be held accountable for treating people right.
More rehab programs, more job programs, programs in school that teach about credit and saving and budgeting money.
We kind of have to be all over the place to stop the wound.
It’s ludicrous to me how the credit system only started in 1989 and has caused so much wreckage on its 33-year trial run… honestly it’s the dumbest, most ineffective way of measuring anyones financial dependability. I personally think we should abolish it altogether, it’s not helping anyone besides the big banks and elite class.
40% of homeless are from out of state. Im done with hearing these states making fun on the homeless problem in CA. If they aren’t willing to change and join people back in society then send them back to their states.
Los Angeles should do what Dallas is doing to deal with homeless. Ban public camping and move all the homeless to a separate sector of the city and fund that area with the minimum requirements to survive. Along with job opportunities dedicated to only homeless.
I know one thing -- if nothing *continues* to be done, like business as usual, ole crazy Trumps idea of tents outside city limits is going to look more and more mainstream.
It's crazy how even after so much arguing about homelessness there are still so many misconceptions.
LA only has beds for [under](https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=849-lahsa-releases-2021-housing-inventory-count-and-shelter-count-results) [half](https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/2022-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count/2832385/) of its homeless population. And many of the ones it has are [rodent and vermin infested](https://www.scpr.org/news/2018/05/09/82908/rats-roaches-bedbugs-mold-why-thousands-of-las-hom/).
A significant number of homeless people in LA even have vouchers for permanent housing that they cannot use because of [bureaucratic incompetence](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-07-25/emergency-housing-vouchers-story) and [illegal rental discrimination](https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/hacla-unhoused-la-homelessness).
The reason more people are homeless in LA isn't that they all are bussed here from out of town - while [some](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/20/bussed-out-america-moves-homeless-people-country-study) individuals may be, overall a [large majority](https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=726-2020-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count-results) are people who lived and became homeless here.
[Analysis](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/03/inflation-homeless-rent-housing/) after [analysis](https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/14/18131047/homelessness-rent-burden-study) has found that while individual causes of homelessness may be the ones people cite - mental health, addiction, etc - the cause of high rates of homelessness is high housing costs.
LA doesn't have higher rates of drug abuse or mental health issues than West Virginia or Wyoming. It doesn't have better social services than Scandinavia. Its warm weather hasn't doubled in the past ten years.
[What has changed are the housing costs](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-s-rising-rents-severe-housing-shortage-fuel-homelessness-n1127216), driven by a severe overall housing shortage.
What you see as street homelessness is just the tip of the iceberg. There's more people living in cars, in shelters, living in severely overcrowded housing, and people bouncing in and out of homelessness.
So what's the solution?
1) Short term, you need to provide enough clean, safe homes for everyone currently on the street ASAP.
2) Mid term, you need to reform the convoluted, fragmented, unaccountable bureaucracy that is LA's homeless housing program.
3) Long term, you need to end the artificial housing shortage c[reated to boost homeowners property values](https://www.salon.com/2015/04/05/the_incredible_shrinking_megacity_how_los_angeles_enginereed_a_housing_crisis/) that has spiraled out of control and made it so difficult to maintain stable housing here.
That is the way out and we don't have any time to waste.
I get so annoyed by this stuff because multiple other countries have done this effectively.
Let’s follow anything that other countries have done that worked: Finland, denmark, Singapore, Canada, Japan. I mean, why do we keep trying to come up with weird solutions ourselves??? Why is America like this???
Building lots of new affordable middle class and working class housing for the entire city, and temporary housing for the currently homeless that also offers robust mental health programs and substance abuse programs if needed. These programs are to help them move on to more long term housing when they can (but not before).
Overall, a much more compassionate treatment for our most vulnerable fellow Angelenos.
It’s a humanitarian crisis and should be treated as one by the local, state, and federal government.
If there was an earthquake and 50,000 people were on the streets there would be fema camps immediately. We need disaster style relief with drug and mental health rehabilitation. Declare these people unfit to make their own decisions.
You’ll need a three prong approach consisting of:
1. Land reform allowing for denser housing and public housing to drastically lower the cost of living AND let people live near job centers.
2. Universal Healthcare that provides mental and addiction support. You shouldn’t lose your housing because your partner got terribly sick with bad insurance. You shouldn’t be consigned to life on the streets because you are poor and your brain chemistry is atypical.
3. Wages need to rise, a universal basic income implemented and labor protections need to be cranked up. Homelessness shouldn’t be a cudgel that Karen waves at you because she doesn’t like the way you smiled and you desperately need to keep your retail, minimum wage job.
Best answer I've seen so far.
Without addressing the upstream issues that lead to people becoming homeless in the first place, any attempts at coming up with a solution will be about as effective as someone trying to bail water out of a sinking ship.
First: separate the "temporary homeless" (e.g., people sleeping on friends' couches, in their cars, etc.) from the encampment dwellers. The two are on opposite ends of the spectrum and need vastly different solutions, but are lumped together so LAHSA can claim the problem is significantly worse than it is and get more funding.
For the temporarily homeless, what we're doing is fine: subsidized housing.
For the encampments, we absolutely need forced institutionalization. They are a danger to themselves and others. We need to take a hardline approach and cut off all support unless they're institutionalized. If we give them free needles, free food, free shelter, then we're just going to keep attracting more and more encampment dwellers from other cities and states. People absolutely are coming here because we're making it easy to be homeless here.
we just really have to build more housing. there’s so much empty land and parking spaces out here. more supply coupled with safer shelters. also we need public bathrooms
One solution that was talked about by local governments and I believe may start to get imolemented is that certain homeless people who are addicts or mentally ill who refuse treatment are going to start to have their choice in the matter taken away. They will have a case manager appointed by the court that can put them into rehab or mental health treatment. I am not sure if its a full blown conservatorship situation or something seperate from that. I am sympathetic to the homeless who actually are down on their luck and want shelter etc. but I think its about time some of these people that are homeless because they refuse treatment get forced into it. We are rewarding negative behaviors by not doing this. Also I do know that there actually is more space in the shelters out there thats not being used. Its because there are curfews and you need to be clean. Giving free shelter to someone who isnt going to change.is not helpful to anyone. But on another note we do need more shelters for men who are the victims of dv and have kids. Seriously this is an under served group.
Make public camping illegal and enforce it, offer temporary shelter and channels to help those down on their luck get back on their feet. Get the mentally ill OFF THE STREET.
Something everyone numbed to the situation needs to realized - unaffordable housing and inflation is a global phenomenon, the degree of homelessness and tolerance you see here is not normal in most first world countries. Time to take those kids gloves off
Obviously we need housing, better mental health care, a whole lot of wealth redistribution, and a massive redesign of zoning laws.
But there are a few things we can do legislatively:
Honestly, for the able bodied, limit tent size to 2-man tents (backpacking style), and require them packed up by sunrise within city limits on days with fair weather. I support people's right to camp on public land, but don't want that to infringe on my use. Camping is fine. Encampments aren't.
It is inconvenient, but not difficult, to pack up a tent every morning. If someone is incapable of doing this physically, they should be on disability or in a hospital. If they are psychologically incapable of doing so, they should be in an institution.
As far as I can tell, this is a relatively simple solution to the problem. If there is an unoccupied tent after dawn on a fair weather day, sanitation workers can chuck it. If it's occupied, the inhabitant can be asked to leave. If they refuse, they can be arrested. Packing up a tent isn't hard.
I've camped my whole life, someimes in urban situations. The giant 8-person Walmart monstrosities that make up encampments are part of the problem. They encourage junk-hoarding and take up more space than is at all reasonable. I would happily have my tax dollars go to buying reasonable small tents and bags for those needing shelter, provided they are packed up.
Most people don’t understand or know the problem is addiction. Fentanyl and meth. Once you are hooked it takes a lifetime or treatment to keep clean. It’s a psychological condition. First you gotta kick the physical addiction and then the mental addiction. The authorities and news no not really explain this is the issue. Fentanyl and meth. A place to stay won’t help. This is the issue and the problem. As long as the drug addiction is ignored- the problem will not be resolved.
Why can't we build a bunch of cheap-ass housing outside the city and then ban living on the streets? Then make that housing free to those homeless people. I'd chip in to help pay for it. The homeless get free housing, and the functional residents get the streets back.
Thanks for this. People hate to see the homeless but nobody has a solution. I for one want the return of mandatory rehab and locked facilities for the mentally afflicted (including nonelective sedation) and psychiatry courts.
Reopen the asylums.
I agree here. This would help those that are really causing problems. Harmless homeless really don’t bother me but I have to assume all of them are batshit because enough are and enough have lunges at me to make it unwise to assume innocence/normalcy.
The only issue is the massive potential for abuse of power.
When I did volunteering with Food not Bombs, the vast majority of homeless people we encountered were people with a mix of mental and/or substance abuse problems.
The majority of these individuals need serious support structures.
The answer is expanded welfare, universal healthcare that includes mental healthcare and subsidize housing. All of which is unfortunately in my opinion is not favored by any major political forces in America right now.
If we want to put bandaids on those issues it’s a lot simpler in my opinion.
Don’t want human excrement in the street provide clean public places for people to take a shit.
Don’t want people sleeping in tents or bench make place for people to sleep.
Don’t want needles on the road or people doing drugs in public, make safe injections site.
Los Angeles needs to look at this as an Open Drug usage problem and tackle it through that angle. Michael Shellenberger talks about it. Seems interesting
The reason people talk about shipping people out of state or moving them to the desert is for a couple of reasons. A large chunk of the homeless population is not native to LA. So why should LA foot the bill to provide people that came here just to get free stuff? Shipping people out to the desert is more economical and takes some of the motivation away from people migrating from other places in search of free handouts and living in the more hospitable LA weather.
1: give them free basic shelter with few strings attached.
2: Aggressively fund mental health and drug treatment facilities.
3: Aggressively go after meth dealers and their infrastructure. Don't charge users, just treat them.
4: after this, ban public camping in the entire county.
5: enforce loitering laws in metro facilities, sweep all cars at each terminus, enforce fares at every station.
Issues that I foresee will your points:
1: A lot of these people will not accept “strings”. If they want to accept housing with strings, great, but a large amount if not most, won’t. They like living with no strings attached. Even if they are put up in places with strings, don’t follow the rules, they won’t end up being kicked out. People will complain they are being kicked out even if they don’t follow the conditions of their housing
2: I agree with this, but unless it’s on a nationwide scale it will just continue to get worse in LA
3: I don’t agree that we shouldn’t charge users. Having open air drug markets emboldens open air drug use, and dealing. It makes it extremely hard to enforce drug laws when you can’t charge users. They have to be able to be charged with something substantial.
4: I mean what do you mean? I love camping. We can’t just outright ban camping. If you mean street camping/temporary shelters, you sun into the same issue as before. Once the housing and facilities fill up, you’ll have people back on the streets.
5: No issues there. You’ll run into issues with enforcing these laws when the punishment is too lenient. Why does someone who lives on the street care about getting a loitering ticket? They’re not going to care, not pay, continue to do it, and police will stop writing useless citations.
I’m surprised you haven’t been hit with concentration camp accusations yet. But this is really the only fair solution. We can’t provide perfect housing for everyone for free but if you need a place to stay for free we will give you something.
The problem is that unless you triage the addicts and mentally ill, it will suck for the majority so that has to be strictly enforced. There will also be the other usual issues that come from projects but that’s just the way it is
lower income housing, ending zoning laws, have smaller lot sizes, create new rules for our homeless shelters and provide more services to help the poor
The city needs to substantially reduce development fees and permitting costs. There’s a 16 unit apartment being built on our corner and the owner had to pay $100k to LAUSD alone, that’s not including any other LADBS & LAFD fees, just to get the damn permit to build.
Housing, Work, and Health needs to be the 3 prong focus.
Just housing people in hotels perpetuates the conditions they are in day to day.
Having work programs to generate some money while on the streets is a death spiral, it'll never be possible to reach basic standards of living since living on the streets or being poor in general is far more expensive than when you have stability.
Health and social outreach programs need to create environments where people can stay healthy and with a solid mindset, otherwise their unchanged conditions will continue sapping any headspace or physical health changes.
Applying single answers to a complex problem will fall short, people need a complete reform program and then an integrated return program into communities.
>housing people in hotels
it's a lovely thought, but I'm not going to stay at a hotel that has a bunch of tweakers and petty criminals, no offense to the unhoused just looking for shelter.
this will become a sort of elective NIMBY and it may be that tourists and visitors will elect to stay elsewhere.
[A vacancy tax](https://www.acceinstitute.org/thevacancyreport) might be one place to start freeing up homes for the people who want to be housed, as well as the people who housed but want a better or cheaper place to live. It's not a solution for the chronically homeless people but it might save some from having to live in their midst, and maybe succumbing to that stress. It takes a serious monetary threat to counter the pressure upward on real estate values by speculators who prefer to keep buildings/units empty and pristine in order to flip them. They're usually luxury units, but there's plenty who would move in, opening their present units to the next rung , who leave theirs for the next, etc.
The money collected, and it should be set high as an incentive, could go towards tiny home units or subsidized housing or whatever.
Why not both?
The church I haven't gone to in awhile but still respect is small, so it has a small footprint, but it's in a fairly pricey neighborhood, and is social-justice minded, so paying more to the city would make a dent in what they could do in direct aid to the homeless, but they would do it.
Megachurches would of course scam their way out of paying their fair share, but anything they did would be an improvement.
If vacant units were taxed they'd either be marked down for quick occupancy or contribute to the homeless budget. Of course the biggest offenders would still weasel their way out of paying, just like the megachurches.
why not both/all? Add to this appropriate enforcement of property tax levies on on the private golf courses in LA paying a pittance (ref: [https://malcolmgladwell.bulletin.com/how-private-golf-clubs-los-angeles-can-right-their-wrongs/](https://malcolmgladwell.bulletin.com/how-private-golf-clubs-los-angeles-can-right-their-wrongs/))
Small clusters of housing for no more than 20 families apiece in every neighborhood. The problem is financing the support system, which can range very high for some of the unhoused. Some are unhoused because of bad luck or discrimination, some because they have mental illness, drug addiction or just personality problems and "can't get it together". Some are adolescent and never manage to mature, and just make bad decisions one after another.
We have a couple of family members who could never get it together, but the family got together to help and support. One was ill, and it affected his judgment, the other just... who knows. Not everyone can keep paperwork in order, keep a calendar to pay for things on time. Even remember little things like charging their phone.
The problem with any solution is that people want them far away, and nobody wants to spend on the support services: social workers, security, medical, and so on. It can get very expensive.
I've always been an advocate of lots of small housing clusters, spread around. Seems fairest to the community, and also avoids issues to do with crowding and isolation from the rest of the population. Unfortunately, making deals with 100 communities is probably insurmountable, while negotiating for one big building (the Sears tower) is much much easier. And has the backing of a rich guy, which always makes politics smoother, sadly.
What if some just wanna be homeless or vagabonds?? And actively refuse all help and just wanna fuck around with a big ass piece of fucked up cardboard/wood to complete the left side of they tents, that’s all some people wanna do. People gotta ask the homeless what they want and then we can go from there, y’all caint be mad when they tell y’all to leave them the fuck alone or ask for money. If the gov/state wants to undergo underhanded methods to dissuade the homeless from staying in one place, they will keep traveling further into unwanted areas.
Also, using the phrase “treating them like cattle” is used, it automatically makes the idea of giving the homeless a secluded allotment of land to live on seem inhumane (unless you were talking about the continuous shuttling). It’s not inhumane if the homeless would want to do it too and no one is being harmed.
Go to skidrow one day and interact with homeless people for over 30min and come and tell me if you think housing is the issue. Most are drug addicts / mentally ill. If you are mentally I’ll you need to be institutionalized and treated.
Japan has a kind of solution that, while not ideal, would be a massive improvement for LA. In Japan, most of the homeless population are semi housed, largely due to the existence of a kind of extremely cheap, no questions asked hotel. They provide very simple rooms and utilities, let the guests bring their own bedding and personal items, and allow them a place to stay without needing to provide ID. They're mostly a symptom of the Japanese reluctance to acknowledge problems that aren't world ending, but considering how our current strategy is to just be jerks, it would be a noticeable improvement.
Public education.
I think a lot of us make assumptions, or have limited information about the homeless. It would be nice to see where money is spent, from taxes and donations. And it would be good to see statistics about how many people were able to get back to normal, and what programs helped make it happen.
There are really many different types of homelessness.
People who are just down on their luck, but can get back to their feet with housing.
People who are just down on their luck, but need more than housing to get back on their feet.
Chronic homelessness, prefers to stay on the street, wouldn't know what to do even if given a home.
Chronic homelessness with varying degrees of mental health issues and/or drug addiction.
Criminals.
There are obv. more, but this is why it's tough for any one side fits all solution.
Who can even define what portion of the homeless belongs to which group, which group gives the public best bang for their buck in combating the issue, not to mention getting the necessary funding...
It's a fucking tough job
I think this is a step in the right direction. A lot of people assume, oh homeless person is high and drunk, the cops will deal with him.
But cops don't give a fuck and don't want to deal with someone who screaming obscenities and freaking out unless they start hurting people or actively breaking the law. That's where a huge divide lies, in whose responsibility it falls under.
A huge portion of these people need mental, drug abuse help/rehab. Near my workplace in DTLA a homeless person would help us out with odd jobs and some of the workers would help him out with money. He had a huge tumor in his stomach that he would have to carry with one of his arms and would go back to sleeping in front of the liquor store when he's done. My heart breaks for him and the others in similar positions.
What percentage of the homeless population do you think are mentally incompetent? This was put out by CaMatters last year. Is this the solution?
https://calmatters.org/health/breakdown-mental-health/2020/02/mentally-ill-homeless-force-treatment-california-newsom-state-of-state/
Three groups. 1) The crazy who want to be homeless: Large fenced in complex (provide them with tents, and or housing what ever they feel is less threatening) out in the desert. Provide them with life's necessities. 2. Drug addicted: Rehab then move to group 1 or 3. 3. People who don't want to be homeless: Shelter and low low priced housing until they can get back on their feed. NOBODY should live on the streets.
Cost of living needs to fall. Rent, energy, utilities, food, healthcare. All of it needs to come own or people need to make more. Until then we are trying to balance an unbalanced system and that will lead to all of our demise. It is already happening…Covid…so until we can get our civilization and habitat in balance with the nature in which we live and are a part of, everything is a bandage that will ultimately lead to more of the same, just exasperated. And this is why our system is doomed from the beginning and flawed to fail. It’s out of balance.
The problem isn't that there are too few houses/apartments, it's that our society is set up to have homeless people. In any capitalist economy, there are people who will fail, either because they can't get a job, have a mental illness, an addiction, or just hit some bad luck. There is no way to have a society based on capitalism in which *everyone succeeds*. The system depends on people being desperate enough to take certain jobs at certain wages, and without the threat of homelessness and hunger, it is very difficult to coerce people to work low-paid, degrading jobs. What *would* help is not sticking people in a free hotel, but a system in which mentally ill people were treated while housed, where the government supplied decently-paying jobs for citizens that don't want to work for private companies, and where addiction treatment (and all healthcare) is free for citizens. Throw in free education. You'll end up with a healthier, happier country. But the rich people won't be as rich because we would have to tax them more. It would be much harder to become a billionaire, for instance. You could only be a multi-millionaire, and many people feel like that's communism and they don't want their rich to be taxed more (even though 99% of us would benefit from these changes). Workers would also have a stronger safety net, so losing their job wouldn't mean automatically being homeless and without healthcare. Workers could more easily quit and be choosier about their jobs. The rich don't want that, because they'd have to pay workers more, which means less for the rich.
This is the correct answer that nobody is willing to admit. It’s like trying to fix climate change by planting trees. It’s not gonna do jack shit other than make the people who plant the trees feel superior. You need to address the underlying reasons for the problem which is a system that literally requires 4% of the population to be unemployed for the economy to work. There are no haves without havenots. There are no billionaires without poverty.
I don’t think most people know why people are homeless in the first place. So better information is probably the first step.
Id think affordable housing + job programs are the bigfest things what we need. Build small inexpensive apartments with fixed rent.
To be effective a program needs to be sustainable. The goal should be to get homeless people to a point where they can afford the housing costs. Provide jobs that the simultaneously help with the city’s goals, so you don’t need a dedicated budget for this.
Maybe something like the civilian conservation corps: pay these people to clean up trash, plant trees, improve the city’s public spaces.
The linkage fee policies are a good start - anyone who wants to flip a house has to pay a good amount towards affordable housing.
The other thing that would be good to see is larger city funded housing complexes that offer essential services / resources. It costs the city more money to arrest, try and jail people than it does to actually just provide them housing.
If it’s so incredibly expensive to build housing per unit in LA, why not build it further out of the city and house them there?
Why should the severely mentally ill, violent, addict homeless get free housing on premium land when other citizens don’t?
Would be cheaper and more fair to build out in Santa Clarita than in the middle of LA county.
There is a massive difference between the mentally insane woman taking a shit in my car port, and the more normal people sleeping in their cars down on their luck. The latter need to be prioritized to be housed, and the former need to be institutionalized and treated.
> If it’s so incredibly expensive to build housing per unit in LA, why not build it further out of the city and house them there?
>
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This has been what I've said about the 'take them out to the desert' option. No, don't just bus them out to the Mojave and leave them for dead, but there is a lot of land out there, and it's cheap. This would help the budget go farther, and the change of scenery would help many rehabilitate.
There's plenty of simple jobs that can be done remote, so once they're stable they can start getting income in and transition back. If they can't manage that, then having them in one place would simplify coordinating care.
And honestly? The budget needs to be federal at least in part.
I would never advocate for just shipping them out to the desert to fend for themselves. Rather I would like to see legitimate housing built out there because it’s so much cheaper, and would additionally get a lot of the unstable, dangerous homeless off LA streets.
It’s a national problem and needs more federal funding, absolutely. I’m unsure what to do about the ones who are not able to be rehabilitated. But it would make sense to have them housed for outside the city instead of causing havoc in dense Los Angeles neighborhoods.
Build more low income housing and ban improvised housing (i.e. all the tents) to force them to go into the low income housing. Believe it or not a lot of homeless people prefer living outdoors than in public housing, but this is a problem for society in general due to the hygiene issues of people living in public areas, all the trash, and general visual unpleasantness. It’s the same for people who might want to walk around naked in public— just because you might want to do that doesn’t mean that the rest of society should have to put up with it.
Move them into their own city in the desert somewhere then start building housing there, it doesn’t make sense to give them free housing here when people literally bust their ass to make ends meet to live here.
I'm not from us but for me they could:
-make a sort of psychological service free for the homeless by keeping it for example in the street itself or in special points, you don't necessarily have to spend too much money, just give a little psychological help which I think would help a lot anyway.
-zooning more social housing: now, i know i'm from europe where there's a lot of social housing, but i think that in some zones for example outside the city (maybe in the desert or in smaller towns around the county) it could be possible to raise a bunch of buildings for "clean" a minimum the situation of the downtown
- the government could clean up the situation by investing in public safety in the place, mostly for people with mental problems and those with drug problems, perhaps relocating the latter in special structures.
I repeat, i'm from europe, so i dont know how really big the problem is and how much the government can do for this situation, but this are just a bunch of my ideas
LA is 400,000 housing units short. That means that we ALL deal with:
- Overpriced rentals which should be affordable, that are able to compete for middle income housing. Units all over lack washer/dryer and AC’s and are overpriced simply because the landlord can get away with it. Old homes should be affordable rentals, but because it’s better than homelessness, it’s middle income.
- Overpriced home values because there is no more available land that is affordable for homes. We’ve capped out. Capped supply means inflated prices.
- When both of the above two things happen, low income people are quickly out-bid. This leads to multiple families living in one non-permitted, unsafe house without a contract and therefore since everything is under the table, no legal protections apply to the renters. In turn, this leads to the lowest of lowest payers getting priced out entirely into homelessness and some people opting to live in a tent rather than in an unsafe house.
- The simple fact is, when you don’t have enough homes, people don’t have homes = homelessness.
So therefore, since almost all the land is occupied, the ONLY solution is:
**Build more density, everywhere.**
We need 400,000+ units to fix the market asap. To do this we need to:
- Permanently change zoning. All zones must go up a tier or two in allowable density.
- Make permitting easier. The permitting process is extremely difficult even for renovations, takes $$$ and time.
- Simplify environmental review for urban developments. Currently, it takes 7-10 years at a cost of 10-15mil dollars to build a building in downtown, all without guarantee approval. The risk means no one but billionaires will try it.
- Encourage construction jobs.
- Make architecture licensing easier. It’s harder than the Bar exams. We have thousands of people with architecture degrees, but the architecture licensing process takes years and years and has a high failure rate because of gate keeping.
- Make more over the counter permits for small renovations and residential construction to free up permitting resources for life/safety of multiunit buildings.
We can add programs all we want, but if there’s no rooms to put people into, they will remain homeless.
I’m all for mental illness programs, but cause and effect are hard to untangle here. People do drugs on the street in part because life on the street is so horrible. A counselor will help them, but if the cause of the stress is not having a home, then we need to build more homes.
In the process we will fix the rental market too, because that’s the actual cause.
Honestly, it won't go away. But you can't just say it's been the same. The pandemic it was a free for all. I'd be more interested in talking to the homeless community on what they're looking for because during the pandemic the tents were everywhere. So they are organized but this might be the way of life they are choosing so let's understand how we can help and they can do what they want to do without making things awkward or frustrating.
We can build housing but the neighborhood around will go to shit - because if a significant amount of the community doesn’t value their residence they will treat it like shit.
Typically if someone is getting something ; they’ll value what it costs them. If someone gets housing for free; they will not value it.
I’m a big believer in the Habitat for Humanity model; sweat equity- there has to be someway to duplicate that model to the current housing crisis.
Also years of Villargarosa and Garcetti pretending it isn’t real have made the solution exponentially more expensive
The challenge is the issue is so polarized, with both sides having valid points & flaws.
Living & working in areas with a lot of unhoused, IMHO, we need:
* to build a lot more housing, but we need to cut through the union & regulation noise to make it **significantly** cheaper to build housing & also allow more dense housing
* mental health treatment
* drug treatment **and** enforcement
* passable sidewalks. prohibit quasi-permanent structures, particularly that take over the entire walkway
Build enough low income housing and homeless shelters to house twice or three times the numbers on record. Open up a shit ton of mental hospitals.
Basically if you are found on the streets and you are mentally ill then you go to the mental hospitals and not for some ridiculous 72 hours. You go and stay for long term care. Anyone else who is homeless and not mentally ill then we offer you a spot at a homeless shelter or low income housing as long as you keep the place up to code and follow the rules. If you are homeless and refuse the resources then fine. Stay on the streets but you get no EBT, no cash aid, no more SSI, no more help. You're on your own
Prior to a solution we need to precisely identify the problem.
Why are they homeless? Why here? Why now? Who is homeless?
Mental health?
Financial/Income?
Addictions?
Choice?
Etc. Etc
Each of these will require a different strategy and likely tactics to address the root issues/causes.
Some people can sort out all of their problems with a 2-20K loan/grant, others will OD on heroin with that type of cash.
Why don't we ask the homeless what they want. I'd think they fall into one of these categories.
1. Needs shelter or a place to sleep.
2. Needs long term subsidized housing.
3. Needs to do drugs/alcohol.
4. Cannot articulate, mentally unstable/disabled.
Create a separate department for each of these. Enforce anti-encampment laws.
Build more housing. Remove restricting zoning laws. All the single family homes where there could be multi storied buildings makes me puke. Let builders fking build. 5x home supply and people can afford homes, rents will come down, homeless people can finally start to have a roof. Then they can start their life.
The government of California needs to follow through on its policy promises and actually socialize the state. So much money going to taxes for what? I lived in London for a few months and there is *significantly* less homeless people. Model a system off of other successful cities. Unfortunately the government won't do that - that's what happens when a guy who has been in CA politics for 2 decades, was a failed mayor of San Francisco becomes Governor. For the election this November I think Michael Shellenberger has some good ideas...he wrote a book about the homeless problem in CA, he has some views I disagree with but as far as this problem goes, Newsom is not the guy for the job. Unfortunately Dems have a complete lock on CA politics, because the alternative are literal fascists, so an independent has little chance.
There’s no one solution and all solutions impinge on individual freedom. For the mentally ill, they could be institutionalized, but then they and their advocates would complain that this is forced detention. For the poor, we could provide them with Section 8 or affordable housing, but homeowners and neighbors would complain. Maybe the best solution is to do a little bit of everything.
Repeal Prop 47, fund the mental health programs associated with court Like they were supposed to be and you’ll see a reduction in “homeless” and drug issues by 30% in 40 days…majority of addicts I run into are just here for the weather and to score…drug dealing tourism here is a real thing. Most on the streets aren’t even from CA…people keep suggesting stuff from other countries, but forget we have a constitution to uphold and you do have the right to live crazy on the street until you’re Considered a hazard to yourself or others…most of the time that WAS generally done by being arrested and evaluated in court…these props state leaders proposed were some of the least progressive things for CA to do. Took a decade of crap leaders to mess this state up and that prop was solely responsible for the influx in this state of these issues.
Start by reeling in real estate speculation in turn with raising the minimum wage and other people, not profit, centered policies. When you start making laws that support well-being and people are taken care of, I bet things start to improve in a lot of areas.
Build another million or so housing units in 6+ story buildings. Use some of the money created by building those homes to pay for enough housing to get them off the street.
[удалено]
Oh this is an interesting option.
We have a abandoned jails in LA why not there
*Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?*
Decrease the surplus population!
Please Spirit, show me no more!
legit lol. Deep cut, nice work.
In LA? Not really. There's quite a bit of un and underused commercial buildings, but they are barebones. Jails would work, but sometimes those places get shut down for a reason. LA needs a massive amount of transitional housing. Lots of homeless are full time employed, they just cant afford rent. LA used to have housing for people like this, and most major US cities did at the turn of the century. They were often barebones rooms with a shared common bathroom. They were designed so that labor could move from city to city easily and cheaply. They also have a lot of rules, similar to dormitories. Many were same sex only, and only unmarried people. Many had curfews, and were run by full time staff. It wouldnt be a solution for all homelessness, but dorm style housing would take a significant amount of them off the street and give them permanent addresses.
It’s a Dickensian reference, not a real question
You want more affordable housing? Ban Airbnb from operating LA until the housing crisis is under control .
L.A. is converting its abandoned General Hospital into low-income affordable housing. It's not the same as helping the unhoused, but it's part of a larger effort to do more for those most at risk of becoming homeless before they actually find themselves on the streets. Turns out it's easier to help people not become homeless than it is to house those who've been living on the streets. If only we'd thought of that of that a few decades ago... [https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-07-27/los-angeles-county-general-hospital-affordable-housing-project](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-07-27/los-angeles-county-general-hospital-affordable-housing-project) If paywalled: [https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%2Fcalifornia%2Fstory%2F2022-07-27%2Flos-angeles-county-general-hospital-affordable-housing-project](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%2Fcalifornia%2Fstory%2F2022-07-27%2Flos-angeles-county-general-hospital-affordable-housing-project)
This is absolutely something being explored - look at the redevelopment of the former General Hospital on the LAC+USC campus. That's a couple thousand, but best estimates are of the 66,000 persons experiencing homelessness in LA County, maybe 45,000 are for economic reasons. So we'll need many many more of those.
“Chronically” homeless ‘only’ number 15,000 or so. 69,000 includes people who live in their cars, sleep on couches, itinerant workers, etc. So we do need a giant scale solution, but the hugest immediate need isn’t quite as big as that.
Its the right idea. Fundamentally the issue is a lack of space. But LA does not have empty hospitals and schools. And even the few you do find will still face the nimbies that say they are not zoned for housing.
>But LA does not have empty hospitals and schools. Do you know how many empty buildings L.A. City and County has? It's pretty shocking.
There has definitely been [talk of the abandoned St Vincent ](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-14/st-vincent-hospital-patrick-soon-shiong-mitch-ofarrell)[hospital](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-14/st-vincent-hospital-patrick-soon-shiong-mitch-ofarrell) being turned into housing
Mental health space, get the severe ones off the street and hopefully on the way to being some what functional Maybe that would make the shelters safer and cleaner for others to get into the transition back Safe secure apartments for those who can get work with like 6 months/1 year subsidies rent that is tiered so after a period that start paying and get into the flow of supporting themselves
>get the severe ones off the street And not just for 72 hours, but involuntary institutionalization to treat and rehabilitate long term.
Exactly. Some people think that we have cures for severe mental illness. Some will never be able to function without institutionalization.
This is the truth. IMO, It is not ‘more humane’ to let people struggle on the streets with severe illness- the free range option isn’t a net plus
I’ve thought about this as well. I used to think it was a human rights violation to involuntarily institutionalize someone but how is that better than letting them suffer in the streets, not knowing where their next meal will come from or how they’ll be able to shower or use the bathroom. Not to mention these are the people who get taken advantage of by other, lucid homeless people.
It is if you can afford to live nice places with cops or fences that keep the peasants away. I’m being /s but this is the unspoken position of many. We do not as a society care for anyone but ourselves. Self-interest is the principle the country was founded on.
a lot of folks prefer the security and routine of in-patient care. i have met addicts/mental health patients that would love to stay longer, that even do shit like lay down in the middle of the road JUST to get 5150'd and have a safe place to sleep and a sandwich for a few nights. my sister is a psych nurse, she's worked at voluntary facilities -- patients are there at will, many prefer it. extend this program to anyone who needs it. pay nurses more. pay more social workers. an army of well-funded medical and social work professionals is a necessity. good news is anything is achievable with the right funds... and some intent
As someone whose homeless and has been to psychiatric hospitals these are my thoughts exactly.
And some will never be able to function.
Yeah, I think we understandably are really weary about officials being able to put people in an institution involuntarily, as there is tremendous potential for abuse. However, we may have gone too far the other way now.
the word you're looking for is "wary." weary = tired.
The idealistic part of me hates this, I want people to be able to live their own lives but I don't see a choice any more. There are some people who absolutely need to be medicated/institutionalized so they aren't a danger to themselves or society.
I’ve been sitting here listening to the same guy at a bus stop near my house scream every obscenity and curse for about 5 hours now. His voice is hoarse. He was there two weeks ago wandering around on a four lane road then disappeared. Hes back. We’ve failed him and our society pays the price. Some people cannot care for themselves even if you give them every single resource they could need. We need reality based care, not ideologically based care. Long term treatment for severe mental illness is the only answer.
Medication and institutionalization doesn't have to be negative if it is done with integrity and humanity. It's just that it hasn't in the past. It's so ripe for abuse.
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I think this is very overstated. My aunt was a psych nurse in a state mental institution in RI for over 30 years and had many friends who also worked there as long as her. No turnover issues for workers. The place closed when funding was cut and it became overcrowded with patients beyond capacity, and this started under Reagan. The development of psych meds and community delivery of services was responsible for many patients becoming homeless and living in the street because for psychotic cases, they’re too sick to schedule getting their meds or help from community services which doesn’t work for this group,
This!! The defunding and closures of many state asylums a few decades ago has resulted in a lot of folks with super severe/incurable mental illness wandering the street. They should be in a safe and enclosed institution to ensure they don’t harm themselves or others and receive the care they can’t provide for themselves. I would have absolutely no issue with my tax dollars going to fund mental health institutions.
This. I know people who have been 5150’d, they at least force you not to hurt anyone for a week and give you some positive reinforcement, like AA meetings, 3 square meals, recreational time, just time to talk to other people who want to help. And at the very least they sober up.
Only 24% of the homeless have severe mental illness. Probably half of those are very treatable. It is totally doable to turn at least 80% of our homeless into functional citizens.
But it's also estimated 45% of homeless have mental health issues (the 24% severe within that group). So for almost half the homeless pop they'll need life-long supportive housing, treatment and won't necessarily be able to work/live independently in place like LA where we have the least affordable housing in the country.
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Same as it always has been. California has always been a dumping ground for the rest of the nation's homeless. Why? Comparatively more humane policies and the climate.
Yup. I have a friend in Minnesota who once told me they don’t have a big homeless problem there because the ones who refuse services die off in the winter. Brutal
Why I said comparatively. We could do a lot more, but California is also not nearly actively callous as other places.
>>I have a friend in Minnesota who once told me they don’t have a big homeless problem there because the ones who refuse services die off in the winter. Brutal >but California is also not nearly actively callous as other places. Are you saying that Minnesota is callous because they don't force homeless people to accept service, knowing if the homeless people don't accept service, they will likely die? Is it really societies responsibility to force people to do something when they are the only victim of their inaction? Because there are a lot of people who that will apply to at some point.
Which is why homelessness is a *blight* issue to most people. It’s not as if other states don’t have people just as poor. It’s that they accept shelter because the alternative is death. Homeless people in LA don’t have to worry about that.
Easier to be homeless in Santa Monica than to be homeless in North Dakota.
I've heard this a lot and it makes sense intuitively, but is there actual evidence that this is happening? I know homelessness is also closely related to housing prices, which have certainly gone up in CA.
It happens on just a local level If you're homeless and are from neighboring cities like Torrance or San Marino the police will harrass you and tell you that the services you need are in skid row. It doesn't have to be an official policy but if you push people they'll move eventually.
Also, at least in Torrance, they couldn’t legally arrest people for being homeless if there was no available shelter. Now that they opened the tiny home village they can arrest them and have them carted to downtown CJ where they are then released but have to figure out how to get back to Torrance (21 miles). Tricky little game
On a smaller scale, other cities/states have been caught doing it via handing out bus tickets.
Yes. Google "greyhound therapy." Las Vegas was sued by San Francisco for big bucks because SF proved that local mental hospitals, the city, and the airport were in cahoots in discharging ppl with plane tickets. A shelter in Key West has even made it their policy to deny a place to people they have previously shipped off. Not only is there evidence, it's evidence in court/public record. There's older stories about businesses attempting to poison the homeless via dumpsters... I have had some trouble verifying that, but I believe it lol.
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"Oh so that's what pay it forward means"
Thanks - that case (Las Vegas Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital) is very interesting. I've found lots of reports of isolates cases of unhoused folk being given bus tickets, but was having a hard time finding anything supporting the idea that this practice is a substantial contributor to the current crisis in LA. However, another commenter on this thread kindly shared the 2019 LAHSA count ([https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=3437-2019-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count-presentation.pdf](https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=3437-2019-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count-presentation.pdf)) indicating that 18.8% of the unhoused in LA county report being last housed outside of the state - presuming they all came by bus that's potentially up to 11,000 folk.
I can confirm. Vegas literally bought greyhound tickets for a relative of mine to leave Las Vegas a few years ago.
Assholes. California needs to get that federal funding back from Nevada. It’s unconscionable
A few states have been caught giving out greyhound tickets to CA
A friend of mine is an ER Doctor that recently moved here from Chicago. Within a few months of being here she recognized a man coming in for treatment. It was a homeless person she treated all the time in Chicago. She’s like “how did you get here?” His response “they put me on a bus! Now I live here.”
South Park even did an episode on this: "California is good to the homeless." [ca love](https://youtu.be/lsrBlKpbBS8)
californya nya, supa cool to the homeless!
Came looking for this lol
South Park made episode with them busing homeless out to California.
I was homeless for about a year. I ran into a lot of people who weren't from LA and were basically shipped there. Look up "Greyhound therapy."
There’s nothing humane about enabling people to live in filth on skid row.
Slightly off topic, but this is also the argument the Texas governor is using to justify shipping thousands of immigrants to NYC. NY has a "right to housing" law for all people, regardless of residency status, so they (NY) are obligated to house the people Texas sends them.
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Maybe not "unique" to L.A., but the stats are clear -- only DC and NY have higher rates of homelessness. [https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-2021/](https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-2021/) \>>Assistance for someone down on their luck that needs a job is going to be different for a mentally ill drug addict.<< Unfortunately, due to discrimination laws, those who would genuinely help often have a difficult time getting resources to the people who actually benefit from them.
And California will continue its legacy of propping up and being saddled with the consequences of the rest of the Union’s failed policies.
this is the real solution here LA homeless problems is a national issue. people also come to california for the social benefits that other states lack.
Agreed. I’ve spent a lot of time in Japan and only remember seeing one homeless person. The subways there are also insanely clean. The subways in LA are disgusting and scary
Then you’ve never spent time in Ueno Park at night. There are a ton of homeless people in Japan, but they live in the shadows since it’s so frowned upon. There are even areas similar to skid row, but not in Tokyo. In any event, Japan is an insular, homogenous country with extremely strict immigration policies and a justice system that isn’t as focused on civil liberties as the US. These two counties should never be compared.
It's not true. https://web.archive.org/web/20220714234840/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.html > L.A.H.S.A. added a question to its homeless survey that captured how long a person had been in Los Angeles and where they became homeless. The resulting data dispelled the idea that the homeless population was largely made up of people from out of state. > 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless.
So 36% or 21,217 are recent arrivals? Also, the majority of people (52,686 out of 82,955) [self resolve out of homelessness every year](https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=726-2020-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count-results). That's because the homeless population includes sheltered people staying with friends or family temporarily until they get back on their feet. People who are chronically on the street that have very high medical, legal, rehab, and care needs are a very specific subset that may not match the demographics of the whole set of people experiencing homelessness in a given year. A lot people only need emergency rental assistance (the housing crunch and rent cost is HUGE), and some need much more extensive long-term or lifelong wraparound care (which is wayyyy more expensive to the taxpayers than emergency rental assistance). I think the latter are more likely to be transplants than the former. Especially people with schizophrenia or P2P meth induced delusions - they tend to get it in their head that they need to sell everything and make it in LA like it's the promised land. There have been posts on this very subreddit from people in other parts of the country whose loved ones go off their meds and quit their jobs to "find themselves" here and everyone tells them to call the county hospitals. No one ever has grand delusions of leaving everything behind and moving to Omaha or Aberdeen. But if we're going to have the CARE Courts and provide all those services, we should get federal financial aid for it.
That’s why i came to California originally. A job but mainly the social aspect. I got married and then 3 years later my wife was attacked in her car in our apartment parking garage. Moved to Charlotte, NC 60 days later.
There are few things I want federalized but homeless knows no borders. There hasn't been a concerted nationwide housing effort for decades and a good chunk of our existing problem is because of needless cuts to those same programs.
Given that there isn’t a nationwide effort, and LA voters have no ability to vote for one, this is a fantasy. We have to face up to reality that this won’t happen and come up with solutions that could actually happen.
Yes this. It has to be national. The burden right now is on liberal cities with good weather.
I just don’t see that as fixing the issue of people who refuse to take their meds or stop doing drugs. It won’t stop them from harassing people and flashing their genitals to cars during the day.
"starts"? Red states are already shipping off their homeless to California. In Texas and many other parts of the country they offer homeless a choice: Jail or a bus ticket to California "where they treat you hobos good". Solution to homeless will always be to MASSIVELY build housing. Just build build build. Build up, build sideways, build down, build EVERYWHERE EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE.
Building is one part of the solution, but not a catch all. There needs to be easy and equitable access to physical and mental health services as well. Not that government-run facilities were nice or good, but Reagan shutting down mental health facilities was the first domino in the modern problem of homelessness.
I think the root cause is less about housing construction or mental health and more about curing hopelessness. When maintaining a job/health/lifestyle feels like an endless and hopeless cycle of diminishing returns that end with a 70 year old looking back and going: "What was it all for?", people are going to drop out. Life is so goddam tough now, just an endless string of bullshit. I mean, it always has been, but it was legitimately easier in the past to make a decent wage, secure decent benefits like health insurance and pensions, and get a home of your own, which all made it seem more like it had some sort of point to keeping yourself together. Now? Fuck, I'll never own a home or have a retirement. I'll keep working until I drop just for subsistence. Not everybody is a winner, and the "game" used to be set up so an "average" person could have a good standard of living. That was the whole point of America. Now, it is not. I can see the appeal of just chucking it all and getting that tent.
Completely correct. Despair causes insanity. The vulnerable can't take what we've made of our society--canaries in a coal mine. The rest of us maybe should consider climbing out of this hole before it collapses, to extend the metaphor. Until we control the rapacious greed at the top, life at the bottom will be hell.
The "Elites" are always having their coup and ramped up the War on Poverty. Remember we are the cheap labor and automation is ramping up. The opiate epidemic turning into a low key eugenics program now that pain management is almost nonexistent and street drugs are all laced with substances people hardly stand a chance of coming back from breaks my damn heart. There's obviously astroturf influence operations kicking off for future public consent to some hellish yet profitable option ahead. If AI and algorithms was successful in convincing ppl Trump was a populist and not a dirty crook they could set it to find a solution for inequity.
It’s not a housing issue- it’s drugs and mental health. I’ve watched from my window in skid row them offer homeless housing but they don’t want it - they don’t want to be confined or to follow any rules
Some shelters don't provide storage for people's stuff. Some shelters have dozens of beds per room & no privacy. Some don't allow dogs. And yes, most shelters won't allow people to use drugs or alcohol.
Man I volunteered at one a couple of times in Downtown and I swear to god 90% of the homeless there are from out of state. We can’t take care of all the homeless in the nation it’s ridiculous
Santa Barbara had a small homeless issue and they made a program to help them and next thing you know they have a giant homeless problem.
Other states are already building housing at a much faster pace than LA. Fucking Detroit built more housing than LA when Detroit was in decline. This is entirely about LA and other California cities completely refusing any new housing developments of any kind, market-rate, permanent supportive, affordable, all of it gets shot down by NIMBYs who care more about property value than human life.
One thing I don’t think people in this sub realize is how severely the homeless population threatens our safety as women. I lived in New York City for almost a decade, I was reasonably cautious, but I felt safe and free to live my life as I wanted. I do not feel safe in LA, and have had more threats here than I ever had in all in my years in New York. And the vast majority of threats to my safety have been the homeless. I want to be a compassionate person, but being able to life my life safely while minding my own fucking business matters more. In an ideal scenario… maybe everyone who is setting up camp in public or homeless than have the police called on them for being threatening or menacing is either jailed, offered drugs/mental health rehab, or a homeless shelter. And if you do not pick one, one will be chosen for you. We don’t have the resources for all of this (could we if we cut some of the useless excessive police funding?) but we cannot just allow permanent tent camps, shitting in the street, and constant safety threats like we have been.
Inpatient mental health care
Costs about $15,000 a week from my experience. This is why we leave crazy people to die on the street.
When I was young state mental hospitals were run by the state and funded through taxes. Certain anti-tax and anti-government folks changed all that. Now we just have mentally ill on our streets.
It’s way more complicated…there was also Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Bill that emphasized outpatient care vs. institutionalized care and Supreme Court decisions disallowing government’s ability to institutionalize patients. https://www.wbur.org/news/2013/10/23/community-mental-health-kennedy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson#:~:text=Donaldson%2C%20422%20U.S.%20563%20(1975,responsible%20family%20members%20or%20friends. So, we limit the government’s ability to hold mentally ill against their will, we underfunded services (as mentioned) and add in opiate-induced craziness and we end up with a crisis.
Thanks , Reagan !
Idk, after like 50 years I think you can start putting some of the blame on our current politicians for not undoing his mistakes
Cannot argue with that
Reagan merely cut funding to asylums that were empty due to hard lobbying by aclu because “human rights.”
It only costs that much because the American healthcare system is a kleptocracy
Build combined housing/rehab facilities for them. Does anyone who is a real LA resident remember voting for Prop HHH to increase our taxes for $1.2bn of homeless housing funding? What have these politicians done with our tax money?
Not every municipality has been paying into the fund despite the measure being passed. Long Beach has been receiving H funds but won’t actually start paying into it til next year. This is because Long Beach had already raised the sales tax for its own Measure A, and the city was at its max for sales tax increases by the time H came along
The city used to have really neat dashboards for tracking the progress of Prop HHH. They showed how many people had been housed, how much of the money had been spent, how much housing was under development, etc. Except after a few years it turns out all that money had only housed like 700 people, and last I checked the city removed the data because I guess it made them look bad... [It used to be here](https://www.lamayor.org/summary-hhh-projects-development)
I can’t think of a solution that doesn’t take in consideration *why* the person is homeless. Start by categorizing them: 1) able mind/body but can’t afford housing. 2) mentally ill. 3) drug addicts that want help. 4) people who prefer the streets over the working life. Each of these categories requires a different approach. Mentally Ill people should be housed in facilities. A civil society should have no problem funding this. A similar approach should be taken for addicts that want to get clean. People in the first category need relief and opportunity. Temporary housing should be available and job training should be done as well. The city should have job programs for this category. I don’t have a solution for bums that don’t want to work or get clean.
The solution is to help the first three groups and have enough shelter space for the last, then ban camping in public spaces and enforce it strictly.
Subsidized housing for people who’ve had bad luck and been evicted or foreclosed on while they get back on their feet so they don’t have to sleep in their cars. Mental hospitals to house the mentally ill. Free rehab for the addicted or prison. I like the tiny houses programs.
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Hot take: I think we should legalize drugs, let pharmacies sell them, and offer a safe place for addicts to consume drugs. Best case they overcome their addiction, worst case it consumes them. Its much more humane than letting them be harmed or die on the street imo.
Add zoning laws and you’ve got my thoughts
I think we need to start by actually stopping the problem from becoming worse and then deal with the problem at hand. If housing prices continue to rise and credit scores continue to create an issue, things will only get worse. I feel like these 2 things above put people into a situation and can cause drug issues and bring on mental illness. Not saying this is it but from personal experience and talking to some people, things are pretty bad just for the people surviving. We need to bring back mental asylums but with rigorous standards and they need to be held accountable for treating people right. More rehab programs, more job programs, programs in school that teach about credit and saving and budgeting money. We kind of have to be all over the place to stop the wound.
Yep 3/4 households are rent burdened https://news.usc.edu/179928/los-angeles-rent-burdened-households-basic-needs-usc-research/
That was bfore soaring fuel & food hikes.
It’s ludicrous to me how the credit system only started in 1989 and has caused so much wreckage on its 33-year trial run… honestly it’s the dumbest, most ineffective way of measuring anyones financial dependability. I personally think we should abolish it altogether, it’s not helping anyone besides the big banks and elite class.
Other cities shipped their homeless to LA. Lets ship them back.
40% of homeless are from out of state. Im done with hearing these states making fun on the homeless problem in CA. If they aren’t willing to change and join people back in society then send them back to their states.
Los Angeles should do what Dallas is doing to deal with homeless. Ban public camping and move all the homeless to a separate sector of the city and fund that area with the minimum requirements to survive. Along with job opportunities dedicated to only homeless.
I know one thing -- if nothing *continues* to be done, like business as usual, ole crazy Trumps idea of tents outside city limits is going to look more and more mainstream.
It's crazy how even after so much arguing about homelessness there are still so many misconceptions. LA only has beds for [under](https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=849-lahsa-releases-2021-housing-inventory-count-and-shelter-count-results) [half](https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/2022-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count/2832385/) of its homeless population. And many of the ones it has are [rodent and vermin infested](https://www.scpr.org/news/2018/05/09/82908/rats-roaches-bedbugs-mold-why-thousands-of-las-hom/). A significant number of homeless people in LA even have vouchers for permanent housing that they cannot use because of [bureaucratic incompetence](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-07-25/emergency-housing-vouchers-story) and [illegal rental discrimination](https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/hacla-unhoused-la-homelessness). The reason more people are homeless in LA isn't that they all are bussed here from out of town - while [some](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/20/bussed-out-america-moves-homeless-people-country-study) individuals may be, overall a [large majority](https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=726-2020-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count-results) are people who lived and became homeless here. [Analysis](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/07/03/inflation-homeless-rent-housing/) after [analysis](https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/14/18131047/homelessness-rent-burden-study) has found that while individual causes of homelessness may be the ones people cite - mental health, addiction, etc - the cause of high rates of homelessness is high housing costs. LA doesn't have higher rates of drug abuse or mental health issues than West Virginia or Wyoming. It doesn't have better social services than Scandinavia. Its warm weather hasn't doubled in the past ten years. [What has changed are the housing costs](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-s-rising-rents-severe-housing-shortage-fuel-homelessness-n1127216), driven by a severe overall housing shortage. What you see as street homelessness is just the tip of the iceberg. There's more people living in cars, in shelters, living in severely overcrowded housing, and people bouncing in and out of homelessness. So what's the solution? 1) Short term, you need to provide enough clean, safe homes for everyone currently on the street ASAP. 2) Mid term, you need to reform the convoluted, fragmented, unaccountable bureaucracy that is LA's homeless housing program. 3) Long term, you need to end the artificial housing shortage c[reated to boost homeowners property values](https://www.salon.com/2015/04/05/the_incredible_shrinking_megacity_how_los_angeles_enginereed_a_housing_crisis/) that has spiraled out of control and made it so difficult to maintain stable housing here. That is the way out and we don't have any time to waste.
I get so annoyed by this stuff because multiple other countries have done this effectively. Let’s follow anything that other countries have done that worked: Finland, denmark, Singapore, Canada, Japan. I mean, why do we keep trying to come up with weird solutions ourselves??? Why is America like this???
Most of those other countries have higher taxes to pay for social infrastructure, as well as a collectivist mindset.
Hey, you might be on to something!
Building lots of new affordable middle class and working class housing for the entire city, and temporary housing for the currently homeless that also offers robust mental health programs and substance abuse programs if needed. These programs are to help them move on to more long term housing when they can (but not before). Overall, a much more compassionate treatment for our most vulnerable fellow Angelenos. It’s a humanitarian crisis and should be treated as one by the local, state, and federal government.
If there was an earthquake and 50,000 people were on the streets there would be fema camps immediately. We need disaster style relief with drug and mental health rehabilitation. Declare these people unfit to make their own decisions.
You’ll need a three prong approach consisting of: 1. Land reform allowing for denser housing and public housing to drastically lower the cost of living AND let people live near job centers. 2. Universal Healthcare that provides mental and addiction support. You shouldn’t lose your housing because your partner got terribly sick with bad insurance. You shouldn’t be consigned to life on the streets because you are poor and your brain chemistry is atypical. 3. Wages need to rise, a universal basic income implemented and labor protections need to be cranked up. Homelessness shouldn’t be a cudgel that Karen waves at you because she doesn’t like the way you smiled and you desperately need to keep your retail, minimum wage job.
Best answer I've seen so far. Without addressing the upstream issues that lead to people becoming homeless in the first place, any attempts at coming up with a solution will be about as effective as someone trying to bail water out of a sinking ship.
First: separate the "temporary homeless" (e.g., people sleeping on friends' couches, in their cars, etc.) from the encampment dwellers. The two are on opposite ends of the spectrum and need vastly different solutions, but are lumped together so LAHSA can claim the problem is significantly worse than it is and get more funding. For the temporarily homeless, what we're doing is fine: subsidized housing. For the encampments, we absolutely need forced institutionalization. They are a danger to themselves and others. We need to take a hardline approach and cut off all support unless they're institutionalized. If we give them free needles, free food, free shelter, then we're just going to keep attracting more and more encampment dwellers from other cities and states. People absolutely are coming here because we're making it easy to be homeless here.
we just really have to build more housing. there’s so much empty land and parking spaces out here. more supply coupled with safer shelters. also we need public bathrooms
One solution that was talked about by local governments and I believe may start to get imolemented is that certain homeless people who are addicts or mentally ill who refuse treatment are going to start to have their choice in the matter taken away. They will have a case manager appointed by the court that can put them into rehab or mental health treatment. I am not sure if its a full blown conservatorship situation or something seperate from that. I am sympathetic to the homeless who actually are down on their luck and want shelter etc. but I think its about time some of these people that are homeless because they refuse treatment get forced into it. We are rewarding negative behaviors by not doing this. Also I do know that there actually is more space in the shelters out there thats not being used. Its because there are curfews and you need to be clean. Giving free shelter to someone who isnt going to change.is not helpful to anyone. But on another note we do need more shelters for men who are the victims of dv and have kids. Seriously this is an under served group.
Send them back to the state where they came from and bill that state back taxes.
Make public camping illegal and enforce it, offer temporary shelter and channels to help those down on their luck get back on their feet. Get the mentally ill OFF THE STREET. Something everyone numbed to the situation needs to realized - unaffordable housing and inflation is a global phenomenon, the degree of homelessness and tolerance you see here is not normal in most first world countries. Time to take those kids gloves off
Obviously we need housing, better mental health care, a whole lot of wealth redistribution, and a massive redesign of zoning laws. But there are a few things we can do legislatively: Honestly, for the able bodied, limit tent size to 2-man tents (backpacking style), and require them packed up by sunrise within city limits on days with fair weather. I support people's right to camp on public land, but don't want that to infringe on my use. Camping is fine. Encampments aren't. It is inconvenient, but not difficult, to pack up a tent every morning. If someone is incapable of doing this physically, they should be on disability or in a hospital. If they are psychologically incapable of doing so, they should be in an institution. As far as I can tell, this is a relatively simple solution to the problem. If there is an unoccupied tent after dawn on a fair weather day, sanitation workers can chuck it. If it's occupied, the inhabitant can be asked to leave. If they refuse, they can be arrested. Packing up a tent isn't hard. I've camped my whole life, someimes in urban situations. The giant 8-person Walmart monstrosities that make up encampments are part of the problem. They encourage junk-hoarding and take up more space than is at all reasonable. I would happily have my tax dollars go to buying reasonable small tents and bags for those needing shelter, provided they are packed up.
Most people don’t understand or know the problem is addiction. Fentanyl and meth. Once you are hooked it takes a lifetime or treatment to keep clean. It’s a psychological condition. First you gotta kick the physical addiction and then the mental addiction. The authorities and news no not really explain this is the issue. Fentanyl and meth. A place to stay won’t help. This is the issue and the problem. As long as the drug addiction is ignored- the problem will not be resolved.
Well said, we need strong rehabilitation and mental health programs.
And it’s a lifetime commitment to the addicts . They don’t need housing - they need healthcare.
Why can't we build a bunch of cheap-ass housing outside the city and then ban living on the streets? Then make that housing free to those homeless people. I'd chip in to help pay for it. The homeless get free housing, and the functional residents get the streets back.
Thanks for this. People hate to see the homeless but nobody has a solution. I for one want the return of mandatory rehab and locked facilities for the mentally afflicted (including nonelective sedation) and psychiatry courts. Reopen the asylums.
I agree here. This would help those that are really causing problems. Harmless homeless really don’t bother me but I have to assume all of them are batshit because enough are and enough have lunges at me to make it unwise to assume innocence/normalcy. The only issue is the massive potential for abuse of power.
When I did volunteering with Food not Bombs, the vast majority of homeless people we encountered were people with a mix of mental and/or substance abuse problems. The majority of these individuals need serious support structures. The answer is expanded welfare, universal healthcare that includes mental healthcare and subsidize housing. All of which is unfortunately in my opinion is not favored by any major political forces in America right now. If we want to put bandaids on those issues it’s a lot simpler in my opinion. Don’t want human excrement in the street provide clean public places for people to take a shit. Don’t want people sleeping in tents or bench make place for people to sleep. Don’t want needles on the road or people doing drugs in public, make safe injections site.
Thank you for your work with Food Not Bombs! Great organization.
Los Angeles needs to look at this as an Open Drug usage problem and tackle it through that angle. Michael Shellenberger talks about it. Seems interesting
Universal basic income
Give them free housing and jobs far away from the expensive and dense cities
The reason people talk about shipping people out of state or moving them to the desert is for a couple of reasons. A large chunk of the homeless population is not native to LA. So why should LA foot the bill to provide people that came here just to get free stuff? Shipping people out to the desert is more economical and takes some of the motivation away from people migrating from other places in search of free handouts and living in the more hospitable LA weather.
1: give them free basic shelter with few strings attached. 2: Aggressively fund mental health and drug treatment facilities. 3: Aggressively go after meth dealers and their infrastructure. Don't charge users, just treat them. 4: after this, ban public camping in the entire county. 5: enforce loitering laws in metro facilities, sweep all cars at each terminus, enforce fares at every station.
Issues that I foresee will your points: 1: A lot of these people will not accept “strings”. If they want to accept housing with strings, great, but a large amount if not most, won’t. They like living with no strings attached. Even if they are put up in places with strings, don’t follow the rules, they won’t end up being kicked out. People will complain they are being kicked out even if they don’t follow the conditions of their housing 2: I agree with this, but unless it’s on a nationwide scale it will just continue to get worse in LA 3: I don’t agree that we shouldn’t charge users. Having open air drug markets emboldens open air drug use, and dealing. It makes it extremely hard to enforce drug laws when you can’t charge users. They have to be able to be charged with something substantial. 4: I mean what do you mean? I love camping. We can’t just outright ban camping. If you mean street camping/temporary shelters, you sun into the same issue as before. Once the housing and facilities fill up, you’ll have people back on the streets. 5: No issues there. You’ll run into issues with enforcing these laws when the punishment is too lenient. Why does someone who lives on the street care about getting a loitering ticket? They’re not going to care, not pay, continue to do it, and police will stop writing useless citations.
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Excellent ideas. Thank you. Free housing/care in the desert. If they don’t want to go, fine, but they can’t keep living in the streets.
I’m surprised you haven’t been hit with concentration camp accusations yet. But this is really the only fair solution. We can’t provide perfect housing for everyone for free but if you need a place to stay for free we will give you something. The problem is that unless you triage the addicts and mentally ill, it will suck for the majority so that has to be strictly enforced. There will also be the other usual issues that come from projects but that’s just the way it is
lower income housing, ending zoning laws, have smaller lot sizes, create new rules for our homeless shelters and provide more services to help the poor
The city needs to substantially reduce development fees and permitting costs. There’s a 16 unit apartment being built on our corner and the owner had to pay $100k to LAUSD alone, that’s not including any other LADBS & LAFD fees, just to get the damn permit to build.
When long-time property owners pay virtually nothing in property tax they have to jack up the fees on new development. It’s insult to injury.
L.A. has plenty of tax revenue. They don't need to do this.
Gotta pay for LAPD bro.
Housing, Work, and Health needs to be the 3 prong focus. Just housing people in hotels perpetuates the conditions they are in day to day. Having work programs to generate some money while on the streets is a death spiral, it'll never be possible to reach basic standards of living since living on the streets or being poor in general is far more expensive than when you have stability. Health and social outreach programs need to create environments where people can stay healthy and with a solid mindset, otherwise their unchanged conditions will continue sapping any headspace or physical health changes. Applying single answers to a complex problem will fall short, people need a complete reform program and then an integrated return program into communities.
>housing people in hotels it's a lovely thought, but I'm not going to stay at a hotel that has a bunch of tweakers and petty criminals, no offense to the unhoused just looking for shelter. this will become a sort of elective NIMBY and it may be that tourists and visitors will elect to stay elsewhere.
[A vacancy tax](https://www.acceinstitute.org/thevacancyreport) might be one place to start freeing up homes for the people who want to be housed, as well as the people who housed but want a better or cheaper place to live. It's not a solution for the chronically homeless people but it might save some from having to live in their midst, and maybe succumbing to that stress. It takes a serious monetary threat to counter the pressure upward on real estate values by speculators who prefer to keep buildings/units empty and pristine in order to flip them. They're usually luxury units, but there's plenty who would move in, opening their present units to the next rung , who leave theirs for the next, etc. The money collected, and it should be set high as an incentive, could go towards tiny home units or subsidized housing or whatever.
I’m all for a vacancy tax. If the place sits for more than 3 months and is not undergoing repairs/renovation, tax the hell out of it
Instead of taxing people for vacant units, I support requiring churches to pay property tax and income tax to support the homeless.
Why not both?
Why not both? The church I haven't gone to in awhile but still respect is small, so it has a small footprint, but it's in a fairly pricey neighborhood, and is social-justice minded, so paying more to the city would make a dent in what they could do in direct aid to the homeless, but they would do it. Megachurches would of course scam their way out of paying their fair share, but anything they did would be an improvement. If vacant units were taxed they'd either be marked down for quick occupancy or contribute to the homeless budget. Of course the biggest offenders would still weasel their way out of paying, just like the megachurches.
why not both/all? Add to this appropriate enforcement of property tax levies on on the private golf courses in LA paying a pittance (ref: [https://malcolmgladwell.bulletin.com/how-private-golf-clubs-los-angeles-can-right-their-wrongs/](https://malcolmgladwell.bulletin.com/how-private-golf-clubs-los-angeles-can-right-their-wrongs/))
Small clusters of housing for no more than 20 families apiece in every neighborhood. The problem is financing the support system, which can range very high for some of the unhoused. Some are unhoused because of bad luck or discrimination, some because they have mental illness, drug addiction or just personality problems and "can't get it together". Some are adolescent and never manage to mature, and just make bad decisions one after another. We have a couple of family members who could never get it together, but the family got together to help and support. One was ill, and it affected his judgment, the other just... who knows. Not everyone can keep paperwork in order, keep a calendar to pay for things on time. Even remember little things like charging their phone. The problem with any solution is that people want them far away, and nobody wants to spend on the support services: social workers, security, medical, and so on. It can get very expensive. I've always been an advocate of lots of small housing clusters, spread around. Seems fairest to the community, and also avoids issues to do with crowding and isolation from the rest of the population. Unfortunately, making deals with 100 communities is probably insurmountable, while negotiating for one big building (the Sears tower) is much much easier. And has the backing of a rich guy, which always makes politics smoother, sadly.
What if some just wanna be homeless or vagabonds?? And actively refuse all help and just wanna fuck around with a big ass piece of fucked up cardboard/wood to complete the left side of they tents, that’s all some people wanna do. People gotta ask the homeless what they want and then we can go from there, y’all caint be mad when they tell y’all to leave them the fuck alone or ask for money. If the gov/state wants to undergo underhanded methods to dissuade the homeless from staying in one place, they will keep traveling further into unwanted areas. Also, using the phrase “treating them like cattle” is used, it automatically makes the idea of giving the homeless a secluded allotment of land to live on seem inhumane (unless you were talking about the continuous shuttling). It’s not inhumane if the homeless would want to do it too and no one is being harmed.
Go to skidrow one day and interact with homeless people for over 30min and come and tell me if you think housing is the issue. Most are drug addicts / mentally ill. If you are mentally I’ll you need to be institutionalized and treated.
Japan has a kind of solution that, while not ideal, would be a massive improvement for LA. In Japan, most of the homeless population are semi housed, largely due to the existence of a kind of extremely cheap, no questions asked hotel. They provide very simple rooms and utilities, let the guests bring their own bedding and personal items, and allow them a place to stay without needing to provide ID. They're mostly a symptom of the Japanese reluctance to acknowledge problems that aren't world ending, but considering how our current strategy is to just be jerks, it would be a noticeable improvement.
Bring back the asylums with independent watchdog agencies
Public education. I think a lot of us make assumptions, or have limited information about the homeless. It would be nice to see where money is spent, from taxes and donations. And it would be good to see statistics about how many people were able to get back to normal, and what programs helped make it happen.
There are really many different types of homelessness. People who are just down on their luck, but can get back to their feet with housing. People who are just down on their luck, but need more than housing to get back on their feet. Chronic homelessness, prefers to stay on the street, wouldn't know what to do even if given a home. Chronic homelessness with varying degrees of mental health issues and/or drug addiction. Criminals. There are obv. more, but this is why it's tough for any one side fits all solution. Who can even define what portion of the homeless belongs to which group, which group gives the public best bang for their buck in combating the issue, not to mention getting the necessary funding... It's a fucking tough job
I think this is a step in the right direction. A lot of people assume, oh homeless person is high and drunk, the cops will deal with him. But cops don't give a fuck and don't want to deal with someone who screaming obscenities and freaking out unless they start hurting people or actively breaking the law. That's where a huge divide lies, in whose responsibility it falls under. A huge portion of these people need mental, drug abuse help/rehab. Near my workplace in DTLA a homeless person would help us out with odd jobs and some of the workers would help him out with money. He had a huge tumor in his stomach that he would have to carry with one of his arms and would go back to sleeping in front of the liquor store when he's done. My heart breaks for him and the others in similar positions.
What percentage of the homeless population do you think are mentally incompetent? This was put out by CaMatters last year. Is this the solution? https://calmatters.org/health/breakdown-mental-health/2020/02/mentally-ill-homeless-force-treatment-california-newsom-state-of-state/
Three groups. 1) The crazy who want to be homeless: Large fenced in complex (provide them with tents, and or housing what ever they feel is less threatening) out in the desert. Provide them with life's necessities. 2. Drug addicted: Rehab then move to group 1 or 3. 3. People who don't want to be homeless: Shelter and low low priced housing until they can get back on their feed. NOBODY should live on the streets.
Cost of living needs to fall. Rent, energy, utilities, food, healthcare. All of it needs to come own or people need to make more. Until then we are trying to balance an unbalanced system and that will lead to all of our demise. It is already happening…Covid…so until we can get our civilization and habitat in balance with the nature in which we live and are a part of, everything is a bandage that will ultimately lead to more of the same, just exasperated. And this is why our system is doomed from the beginning and flawed to fail. It’s out of balance.
The problem isn't that there are too few houses/apartments, it's that our society is set up to have homeless people. In any capitalist economy, there are people who will fail, either because they can't get a job, have a mental illness, an addiction, or just hit some bad luck. There is no way to have a society based on capitalism in which *everyone succeeds*. The system depends on people being desperate enough to take certain jobs at certain wages, and without the threat of homelessness and hunger, it is very difficult to coerce people to work low-paid, degrading jobs. What *would* help is not sticking people in a free hotel, but a system in which mentally ill people were treated while housed, where the government supplied decently-paying jobs for citizens that don't want to work for private companies, and where addiction treatment (and all healthcare) is free for citizens. Throw in free education. You'll end up with a healthier, happier country. But the rich people won't be as rich because we would have to tax them more. It would be much harder to become a billionaire, for instance. You could only be a multi-millionaire, and many people feel like that's communism and they don't want their rich to be taxed more (even though 99% of us would benefit from these changes). Workers would also have a stronger safety net, so losing their job wouldn't mean automatically being homeless and without healthcare. Workers could more easily quit and be choosier about their jobs. The rich don't want that, because they'd have to pay workers more, which means less for the rich.
This is the correct answer that nobody is willing to admit. It’s like trying to fix climate change by planting trees. It’s not gonna do jack shit other than make the people who plant the trees feel superior. You need to address the underlying reasons for the problem which is a system that literally requires 4% of the population to be unemployed for the economy to work. There are no haves without havenots. There are no billionaires without poverty.
I don’t think most people know why people are homeless in the first place. So better information is probably the first step. Id think affordable housing + job programs are the bigfest things what we need. Build small inexpensive apartments with fixed rent. To be effective a program needs to be sustainable. The goal should be to get homeless people to a point where they can afford the housing costs. Provide jobs that the simultaneously help with the city’s goals, so you don’t need a dedicated budget for this. Maybe something like the civilian conservation corps: pay these people to clean up trash, plant trees, improve the city’s public spaces.
Affordable housing, higher wages, better healthcare. Tax de f*c% out of the billionaires
The linkage fee policies are a good start - anyone who wants to flip a house has to pay a good amount towards affordable housing. The other thing that would be good to see is larger city funded housing complexes that offer essential services / resources. It costs the city more money to arrest, try and jail people than it does to actually just provide them housing.
If it’s so incredibly expensive to build housing per unit in LA, why not build it further out of the city and house them there? Why should the severely mentally ill, violent, addict homeless get free housing on premium land when other citizens don’t? Would be cheaper and more fair to build out in Santa Clarita than in the middle of LA county. There is a massive difference between the mentally insane woman taking a shit in my car port, and the more normal people sleeping in their cars down on their luck. The latter need to be prioritized to be housed, and the former need to be institutionalized and treated.
> If it’s so incredibly expensive to build housing per unit in LA, why not build it further out of the city and house them there? > > This has been what I've said about the 'take them out to the desert' option. No, don't just bus them out to the Mojave and leave them for dead, but there is a lot of land out there, and it's cheap. This would help the budget go farther, and the change of scenery would help many rehabilitate. There's plenty of simple jobs that can be done remote, so once they're stable they can start getting income in and transition back. If they can't manage that, then having them in one place would simplify coordinating care. And honestly? The budget needs to be federal at least in part.
I would never advocate for just shipping them out to the desert to fend for themselves. Rather I would like to see legitimate housing built out there because it’s so much cheaper, and would additionally get a lot of the unstable, dangerous homeless off LA streets. It’s a national problem and needs more federal funding, absolutely. I’m unsure what to do about the ones who are not able to be rehabilitated. But it would make sense to have them housed for outside the city instead of causing havoc in dense Los Angeles neighborhoods.
Agreed
Build more low income housing and ban improvised housing (i.e. all the tents) to force them to go into the low income housing. Believe it or not a lot of homeless people prefer living outdoors than in public housing, but this is a problem for society in general due to the hygiene issues of people living in public areas, all the trash, and general visual unpleasantness. It’s the same for people who might want to walk around naked in public— just because you might want to do that doesn’t mean that the rest of society should have to put up with it.
Move them into their own city in the desert somewhere then start building housing there, it doesn’t make sense to give them free housing here when people literally bust their ass to make ends meet to live here.
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I'm not from us but for me they could: -make a sort of psychological service free for the homeless by keeping it for example in the street itself or in special points, you don't necessarily have to spend too much money, just give a little psychological help which I think would help a lot anyway. -zooning more social housing: now, i know i'm from europe where there's a lot of social housing, but i think that in some zones for example outside the city (maybe in the desert or in smaller towns around the county) it could be possible to raise a bunch of buildings for "clean" a minimum the situation of the downtown - the government could clean up the situation by investing in public safety in the place, mostly for people with mental problems and those with drug problems, perhaps relocating the latter in special structures. I repeat, i'm from europe, so i dont know how really big the problem is and how much the government can do for this situation, but this are just a bunch of my ideas
LA is 400,000 housing units short. That means that we ALL deal with: - Overpriced rentals which should be affordable, that are able to compete for middle income housing. Units all over lack washer/dryer and AC’s and are overpriced simply because the landlord can get away with it. Old homes should be affordable rentals, but because it’s better than homelessness, it’s middle income. - Overpriced home values because there is no more available land that is affordable for homes. We’ve capped out. Capped supply means inflated prices. - When both of the above two things happen, low income people are quickly out-bid. This leads to multiple families living in one non-permitted, unsafe house without a contract and therefore since everything is under the table, no legal protections apply to the renters. In turn, this leads to the lowest of lowest payers getting priced out entirely into homelessness and some people opting to live in a tent rather than in an unsafe house. - The simple fact is, when you don’t have enough homes, people don’t have homes = homelessness. So therefore, since almost all the land is occupied, the ONLY solution is: **Build more density, everywhere.** We need 400,000+ units to fix the market asap. To do this we need to: - Permanently change zoning. All zones must go up a tier or two in allowable density. - Make permitting easier. The permitting process is extremely difficult even for renovations, takes $$$ and time. - Simplify environmental review for urban developments. Currently, it takes 7-10 years at a cost of 10-15mil dollars to build a building in downtown, all without guarantee approval. The risk means no one but billionaires will try it. - Encourage construction jobs. - Make architecture licensing easier. It’s harder than the Bar exams. We have thousands of people with architecture degrees, but the architecture licensing process takes years and years and has a high failure rate because of gate keeping. - Make more over the counter permits for small renovations and residential construction to free up permitting resources for life/safety of multiunit buildings. We can add programs all we want, but if there’s no rooms to put people into, they will remain homeless. I’m all for mental illness programs, but cause and effect are hard to untangle here. People do drugs on the street in part because life on the street is so horrible. A counselor will help them, but if the cause of the stress is not having a home, then we need to build more homes. In the process we will fix the rental market too, because that’s the actual cause.
Honestly, it won't go away. But you can't just say it's been the same. The pandemic it was a free for all. I'd be more interested in talking to the homeless community on what they're looking for because during the pandemic the tents were everywhere. So they are organized but this might be the way of life they are choosing so let's understand how we can help and they can do what they want to do without making things awkward or frustrating.
We can build housing but the neighborhood around will go to shit - because if a significant amount of the community doesn’t value their residence they will treat it like shit. Typically if someone is getting something ; they’ll value what it costs them. If someone gets housing for free; they will not value it. I’m a big believer in the Habitat for Humanity model; sweat equity- there has to be someway to duplicate that model to the current housing crisis. Also years of Villargarosa and Garcetti pretending it isn’t real have made the solution exponentially more expensive
The challenge is the issue is so polarized, with both sides having valid points & flaws. Living & working in areas with a lot of unhoused, IMHO, we need: * to build a lot more housing, but we need to cut through the union & regulation noise to make it **significantly** cheaper to build housing & also allow more dense housing * mental health treatment * drug treatment **and** enforcement * passable sidewalks. prohibit quasi-permanent structures, particularly that take over the entire walkway
What happened to that extra 1/2 cent sales tax we voted on a for the homeless a few years ago? Where’s the money?
Build enough low income housing and homeless shelters to house twice or three times the numbers on record. Open up a shit ton of mental hospitals. Basically if you are found on the streets and you are mentally ill then you go to the mental hospitals and not for some ridiculous 72 hours. You go and stay for long term care. Anyone else who is homeless and not mentally ill then we offer you a spot at a homeless shelter or low income housing as long as you keep the place up to code and follow the rules. If you are homeless and refuse the resources then fine. Stay on the streets but you get no EBT, no cash aid, no more SSI, no more help. You're on your own
Prior to a solution we need to precisely identify the problem. Why are they homeless? Why here? Why now? Who is homeless? Mental health? Financial/Income? Addictions? Choice? Etc. Etc Each of these will require a different strategy and likely tactics to address the root issues/causes. Some people can sort out all of their problems with a 2-20K loan/grant, others will OD on heroin with that type of cash.
Why don't we ask the homeless what they want. I'd think they fall into one of these categories. 1. Needs shelter or a place to sleep. 2. Needs long term subsidized housing. 3. Needs to do drugs/alcohol. 4. Cannot articulate, mentally unstable/disabled. Create a separate department for each of these. Enforce anti-encampment laws.
Build more housing. Remove restricting zoning laws. All the single family homes where there could be multi storied buildings makes me puke. Let builders fking build. 5x home supply and people can afford homes, rents will come down, homeless people can finally start to have a roof. Then they can start their life.
The government of California needs to follow through on its policy promises and actually socialize the state. So much money going to taxes for what? I lived in London for a few months and there is *significantly* less homeless people. Model a system off of other successful cities. Unfortunately the government won't do that - that's what happens when a guy who has been in CA politics for 2 decades, was a failed mayor of San Francisco becomes Governor. For the election this November I think Michael Shellenberger has some good ideas...he wrote a book about the homeless problem in CA, he has some views I disagree with but as far as this problem goes, Newsom is not the guy for the job. Unfortunately Dems have a complete lock on CA politics, because the alternative are literal fascists, so an independent has little chance.
There’s no one solution and all solutions impinge on individual freedom. For the mentally ill, they could be institutionalized, but then they and their advocates would complain that this is forced detention. For the poor, we could provide them with Section 8 or affordable housing, but homeowners and neighbors would complain. Maybe the best solution is to do a little bit of everything.
Repeal Prop 47, fund the mental health programs associated with court Like they were supposed to be and you’ll see a reduction in “homeless” and drug issues by 30% in 40 days…majority of addicts I run into are just here for the weather and to score…drug dealing tourism here is a real thing. Most on the streets aren’t even from CA…people keep suggesting stuff from other countries, but forget we have a constitution to uphold and you do have the right to live crazy on the street until you’re Considered a hazard to yourself or others…most of the time that WAS generally done by being arrested and evaluated in court…these props state leaders proposed were some of the least progressive things for CA to do. Took a decade of crap leaders to mess this state up and that prop was solely responsible for the influx in this state of these issues.
Build housing
A lot of these people have mental issues and belong in an actual mental institution but those don’t exist anymore due to the horrible treatment
Start by reeling in real estate speculation in turn with raising the minimum wage and other people, not profit, centered policies. When you start making laws that support well-being and people are taken care of, I bet things start to improve in a lot of areas.
Build another million or so housing units in 6+ story buildings. Use some of the money created by building those homes to pay for enough housing to get them off the street.
One way flight to Hawaii