LOS ANGELES, CA — Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is proposing spending $20 million dollars on building emergency shelters in each of the 15 districts in Los Angeles and providing the city with more police and sanitation workers for homeless sweeps in the city’s A Bridge Home program. This proposal is not viable as a solution to the homeless crisis in Los Angeles and will not work as a temporary fix.
The most important reason his solution will not work is that the numbers don’t match. Garcetti’s proposal to put a shelter in each district will not have enough beds to serve all of the homeless in those areas. For example, a proposed shelter in Korea Town would provide 65 beds to an area with 368 homeless. Where are the other 303 going to sleep? Providing a shelter with only 65 beds would put the other 303 people at risk for being arrested or being given tickets for sleeping on the sidewalk which they would not be able to pay, and possibly ending in incarceration for not paying a ticket. This creates a situation where housing and employment would be more difficult to find.
Shelters are not permanent housing, can be dangerous and have time limits for those staying in them. These time limits can be a couple of days, weeks or months. If at the end of their stay in the shelter a person has not found permanent housing they are sent back to live in the street. Many people staying at shelters experience violence from others staying in them or sometimes from staff. The large numbers of people staying in a confined area make it hard to properly insure personal safety. People down on their luck financially are mixed in with drug addicts and felons creating dangerous conditions.
There is no follow up from staff to what happens to or where people end up living after leaving a shelter. Because of the time limitations, very few people leaving a shelter end up with permanent housing, as it is not available. I personally was in a shelter where I was asked to leave one week prior to my having a place to stay. The staff at the shelter knew I had a place to stay in one week and made me leave anyway. This left me with nowhere to stay for a week. This shelter and its staff failed to keep me safe, took 30% of the income I was making and intentionally made me homeless again.
I call this the circle of homelessness where one is given shelter for a short period of time and sent back out on the street. Being homeless is a barrier to employment as employers require workers to have an address, making it hard to get housing, as most housing requires some type of income. This creates long periods of homelessness for many people.
The only solution to homelessness is permanent housing. The $20 million that Mayor Garcetti wants to spend on temporary shelters and homeless sweeps by the police and sanitation workers would be better spent on permanent housing. The homeless do not need shampoo, backpacks or socks. The homeless need housing.
