Progress in Addressing Homelessness in Los Angeles?

by Bill Pitkin, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation

Los Angeles has often been referred to as “the homeless capital of the world” and has a reputation as a bit of a basket case when it comes to addressing homelessness. With more than 70,000 homeless persons on any given night (a third of them chronically homeless), a highly visible concentration of street homeless in Skid Row, and famously uncoordinated public safety net systems, Los Angeles County is often thought of as beyond hope when it comes to successfully ending – or even reducing – homelessness. The current economic crisis, in the context of a long-term affordable housing crisis, is placing a severe strain on already overburdened emergency shelters and social safety nets.

Despite these great challenges facing Los Angeles – and probably surprising to many because it is largely happening behind the scenes – there has been progress in addressing homelessness, especially chronic homelessness, in recent years. These advances are due to several factors.

First, there has been increased – if sporadic – public pressure to address the homelessness problem in Los Angeles, due in large part to high-profile coverage in the media. There have been several stories in local media about “dumping” of people onto Skid Row by hospitals and law enforcement, which have led to several mea culpas and policy changes. More significantly, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez unveiled the horrid conditions and consequences of street homelessness through an in-depth series of articles on Skid Row in 2005, which caught the attention of local elected officials and the public at large. He also wrote a number of columns about the friendship he developed with Nathaniel Ayers, a mentally ill homeless man, which provided a personal look into the challenges of chronic homelessness. That story has been recounted in a book titled The Soloist, which was turned into a movie by the same name starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jaime Foxx that is slated to be released in theaters on April 24, 2009.

Second, the increased public attention to homelessness has opened the door to necessary systems change and innovation. One of the structural barriers in successfully addressing homelessness in Los Angeles County – with a total population of nearly 10 million people – has been the lack of coordination, and even enmity, between the County (with responsibility for health and human services) and its 88 cities (which have jurisdiction over land use and most housing dollars), with the City of Los Angeles obviously the most prominent. Foundation and civic leaders have placed pressure on the county and city to better coordinate their efforts, with some actual progress being made. As documented by the Urban Institute’s Martha Burt in a series of reports on the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation’s grant to the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH), public systems are aligning much better to increase the pipeline of permanent supportive housing units, even if not at the scale necessary to address the needs in the short term.

One innovative approach that highlights this trend is “Project 50,” an effort to replicate Common Ground’s “Street to Home” model of outreach in New York City. Employing the Vulnerability Index methodology developed by Jim O’Connell from the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, project outreach workers created a registry of the 471 persons sleeping outside in Skid Row on December 7, 2007 and did in-depth surveys over the next several days to measure personal health and disability vulnerabilities. The 50 most vulnerable were targeted to receive housing and supportive services to ensure housing stability. Preliminary results presented at the recent one-year anniversary of the program are impressive: 49 people were placed into housing and 43 remained in housing after the first year. Utilization of major public systems such as ERs and prisons has declined sharply for participants, offsetting costs for taxpayers. And, perhaps most importantly, dozens of county and city agencies have collaborated in new ways for the benefit of the participants. Organizers of Project 50 have called for expanding the program, “turning 50 into 500; and then 500 into 5,000.” This targeted approach is being replicated in various parts of LA County, such as in the City of Santa Monica, which has seen an 8% drop in street homelessness over the last year.

Finally, the capacity of the housing development system and local jurisdictions to build permanent supportive housing has increased substantially, due in large part to the work of CSH providing training and identifying financing opportunities. At the initiation of our most recent grant to CSH in 2005, there were just five nonprofit housing developers engaged in permanent supportive housing in Los Angeles. Over the past few years, dozens of developers and service providers have been trained and received capacity building grants through CSH, bringing thousands more units on line and into the development pipeline. Developers and service providers are learning a common language and approach to ensuring that homeless persons receive the support necessary to access and remain stable in permanent housing. In addition, Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and community partners have been working with cities and public agencies around the county to build their capacity to address homelessness throughout the region.

With more than 22,000 chronically homeless persons in Los Angeles County according to the 2007 homeless count, the scale of the challenges remain daunting. To meet the need, Los Angeles probably needs to develop around 20,000 permanent supportive housing units. However, the quiet, but significant, progress that has been made in just the past few years provides something on which to build. Community ownership of the problem is an important step in successfully ending homelessness, and residents of Los Angeles are increasingly demonstrating a desire to step up to the plate. Thousands of residents have participated in the past two years in Homewalk, an annual 5k family walk organized by the United Way of Greater Los Angeles to raise awareness and resources to end homelessness in Los Angeles County. Over 3,000 people participated in the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s 2009 Homeless Count. Through these and other educational and volunteer efforts, Angelenos are becoming personally engaged with addressing homelessness and recognizing that with sufficient community and political will, we can end it.