Mija Town Homes, 4501 S. Figueroa, Los Angeles 90037. One of the all-too-few affordable housing complexes in Los Angeles.
A daunting complex of causes stands behind Los Angeles’ crisis-level lack of affordable housing. Too few houses and too expensive ones, along with very low wages, are the single biggest causes of the city’s huge homeless population. According to Professor Dennis P. Culhane, an authority on homelessness at the University of Pennsylvania, “It’s not personal vulnerabilities of drug use or illness driving homelessness. It’s a lack of access to housing. If there were lots of available housing, all of these vulnerabilities would be hidden.” (8-2-2017 LA Times)
In January and February, 24 people from 15 organizations, calling themselves the Los Angeles Central Providers Collaborative, conducted an audit of toilets available to the homeless in Downtown’s 50-block Skid Row. Their shocking findings became headline news when they released their 64-page report, “No Place to Go,” in late June. For a nighttime unsheltered population they listed at 1,777, they found only 9 working public toilets, all of them at a single location: the Midnight Mission shelter, 601 S. San Pedro Street. This is eight blocks from the northeast and northwest corners of Skid Row and 9 blocks from the southeast border. A long walk at night. The number of estimated users was taken from the 2016 homeless count, and is today more than 2,000.
The number seems shocking. Even impossible. The total homeless in LA County from the January 2017 official count only came to 57,000. But the number is real and actually understates the total, as it does not include UCLA, USC, or the Claremont colleges.
Chris Ko, Director of Homeless Initiatives for United Way and manager of Home For Good, addresses June 13 press conference in front of Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors' building on West Temple Street, announcing the supervisors' approval of a $1 billion budget for the first three years of the sales tax money for the homeless from Measure H.
The LA County Board of Supervisors approved the recommendations of the 50 member Measure H Revenue Planning Group for the first three years of income from the sales tax increase for the homeless, which passed in last March’s election. The quarter-cent sales tax increase is expected to generate $259 million in its first year and as much as $1 billion in the first three years. The money is to be divvied up between six basic strategies to contain homelessness, adopted by the county in February 2016.
Mayor Garcetti at October 2015 Mayoral Summit where he announced his goal of getting linkage fees from developers to finance affordable housing.
Los Angeles has the least affordable housing in the United States. It is short some 500,000 units of housing for its population. Rising population, which pushes up land, materials, and labors costs, has made affordable housing in California a mostly unprofitable investment. Cities throughout the state have found themselves facing chronic and deepening housing shortages, with increasingly unaffordable rents. The response has been to look to government subsidies to try to fill the gap.
County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas at May 31 homeless count press conference. Mayor Garcetti and CD8 Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson look on.
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) announced the results of its January 2017 countywide homeless count May 31. Since January 2016 there were now 13,940 more homeless people in LA County and 5,725 in the city, increases of 23% and 20%. There are now 57,794 homeless in the county, of which 42,966 are unsheltered, living on the streets. For the city it is 34,189, with 25,237 unsheltered.
