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.

Report from New Orleans: A national disgrace and local dreams

By Bill Pitkin, Poverty and Inequality

I spent a couple days in New Orleans recently learning about the recovery effort from Katrina. It was, in a word, stunning. I was stunned by the endurance of the devastation more than three years since the storms, as well as by the resilience and passion with which residents are rebuilding their great city. Katrina ended and destroyed thousands of lives and ruined thousands of homes and businesses. Moreover, it generated a national dialogue on poverty and race, the ugly issues we don’t like to discuss in polite company. I remember hearing from friends in developing countries who saw the coverage of Katrina in 2005 that they were shocked to see that such poverty existed in the U.S. Yes it did exist and let me tell you that it still does.

We toured several of the most affected neighborhoods, such as Gentilly, Lakeview, and the Lower Ninth Ward, where we saw just islands of homes in a sea of vacant lots and abandoned buildings. There is a lack of street life in these formerly dense neighborhoods, with buildings waiting for repair or demolition and a general sense of trepidation in the air. Looking even closer, there is despair. We entered abandoned buildings – old homes, vacant public school buildings, even a city-owned property – with homeless outreach workers and saw evidence of people sleeping in dark, smelly, rubble-filled spaces that barely offer a roof over their heads. In one room in a large public building, one person had set up a mattress (hauled up three flights of stairs) with a few worldly possessions, including a metal bar next to the mattress that we could only guess was for personal defense. We met and spoke to elderly disabled people living in the most precarious conditions, happy to have someone showing interest in them, but hoping for a more permanent solution.

Katrina has obviously exacerbated long-standing poverty and housing challenges in the city. According to the latest New Orleans Index, there are about 65,000 abandoned or blighted properties in New Orleans, fair market rents have increased by nearly 50%, and almost 14,000 people in the region are at risk of a severe housing crisis when their Disaster Housing Assistance Program vouchers are set to expire in March 2009. Perhaps most telling is that the homeless population in New Orleans has doubled from about 6,000 to 12,000 since Katrina (while the overall population is at just 70% of that before the storm).

Despite these challenges, there is evidence of hope. I asked Albert Ruesga, who recently moved to New Orleans to serve as CEO of the Greater New Orleans Foundation, about the most surprising thing about the city that he has noticed, and he pointed to the deep pride and sense of place that residents have. Coming from California , where everybody is originally from somewhere else, I was surprised to learn that the vast majority of New Orleans residents were born in Louisiana. We witnessed this local pride in the form of renovated homes by property owners fortunate to have insurance or other means to rebuild and beautify their homes (Mardi Gras was coming up, after all). Civic, philanthropic and nonprofit leaders are coordinating to make key investments in building affordable housing and a viable community development system. We saw first hand the smart, compassionate work of outreach workers from UNITY of Greater New Orleans, which is leading the charge to move chronically homeless people from the streets or abandoned buildings to permanent supportive housing. Public sector funds have unfortunately been slow to get on the ground; but
at least the city government is beginning to think more holistically about their work and interface with private and nonprofit efforts.

The problems facing New Orleans are great, but from the short time I was there, I saw evidence that its people are stepping up to the challenge. But, they need our help. In a future post, I will highlight some ideas on what you can do to help in the recovery effort in New Orleans.

Read "Report from New Orleans, Part II: What you can do to help" at the Poverty and Inequality Blog

Learn more about Funders Together's tour at the 2009 Grantmakers in Health Annual Conference on "Systems Change and Supportive Housing in New Orleans"