(Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the Westside Current on July 24 and is reprinted with permission.)
By ANGELA MCGREGOR
Councilwoman Traci Park was able to facilitate the removal of RVs that lined in an environmentally sensitive area at the Ballona Wetlands.
In the five months since the Current’s last interview with Traci Park, there have been a number of important developments in the City’s struggle to contain its homelessness crisis.
Late last month, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling – Grant’s Pass v. Johnson — that allows cities a much broader range of options with which to limit street camping. On the very same day as that decision came down, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority issued the results of their latest annual count of L.A’s unhoused population, and, along with the Mayor, rejoiced in in what they called the first decrease in the city’s homeless population in six years.
The day before our July 13 interview, news came that a lawsuit had been filed, accusing the City of stalling a controversial affordable housing project in Venice in violation of fair housing laws (in particular, it accused Park of having the ability to unilaterally veto the project, and states that she is doing so out of “racial animus”).
There was much to talk about. Our interview has been edited for clarity.
CURRENT: My first question is, are you satisfied that LAHSA’s latest count accurately represents what’s really going on with the homelessness issue, considering LAHSA’s past issues with accuracy?
PARK: I think that there have been and continue to be challenges with data collection and transparency in LAHSA. You may recall, that during last year’s count, there were concerns about the accuracy, and we were never even provided with the by-neighborhood breakdowns, right?
I am seeing some more efforts this cycle from LAHSA to be more transparent about it. But, I deal more in what the reality on the ground is on the day to day. And there are challenges, with how data is collected, how it’s reported, how it’s analyzed.
They hire third parties to come in and make sense of it all and then report it back. I don’t know that anyone fully has their questions answered about the accuracy of the data.
What I can tell you, is just from the work that we do in CD 11, we see areas where we have progress. We see areas where we have setbacks and continued challenges. But overall, we know that the reductions are real in our council district. I feel reasonably optimistic about where we are. In a year and a half, it’s night and day compared to where we were and where we are. It’s a dramatic difference, and that’s true in every part of the district.
We’ve housed hundreds of people off the streets and gotten them into shelter and interim housing, and we continue to move folks through our systems now that we have things working together much better than they were when I took office. But systemically, the same challenges that have contributed to the problems year after year remain. But I do think the trend is in the right direction.
CURRENT: But on the question of sustainability – a lot of what’s going on out there is the result of Inside Safe, and getting people off the streets and into motel rooms and hotel rooms. But as has been pointed out in this publication and others, that approach is really expensive, and there are some serious questions about whether that approach is economically sustainable. What do you think?
PARK: That’s a really good question. So, one of the areas where I think the city of LA went wrong over at least the last decade was the over-emphasis on trying to solve the homelessness problem by building its way out of it, and what we did was spend an awful lot of money on new construction of permanent supportive housing – new brick-and-mortar housing, instead of focusing on shelter and interim housing. Those were the beds that would have been necessary to move people off the streets and into a safer setting that isn’t a brick-and-mortar new build.
What Mayor Bass has been able to do through Inside Safe and the acquisition of new motels and master leasing was, in a very short amount of time, make up for a massive deficit in interim housing solutions, which was a critical missing step that we have been facing for a long time.
You will remember after the Boise decision in 2018 when the Ninth Circuit said we had to offer shelter in order to enforce no camping ordinances, the City of Los Angeles did not focus on shelter. It continued to focus on very expensive brick and mortar new builds. And so, I think that the mayor has been very successful in bridging that gap.
But economically, is it sustainable? No, of course not. Nor is it economically viable for us to build our way out of this. That would be 50 to $100 billion just to solve the current problem on the street.
And we don’t have, and will never have, an amount of money sufficient to do that. Investments in the interim housing supply are going to continue to be necessary, and that’s a step that enables us to get folks who are living on the streets in tent encampments or living in vehicles inside and in the pipeline to permanent housing.
Remember that the needs of the individuals are also really important in determining what the ultimate outcome and proper setting is.
There are certainly some people for whom an affordable housing unit may be all it takes. There are other people for whom it may be a very affordable housing unit plus ongoing continuous supportive services to enable them to live in that environment. And for other individuals we need to have some residential medical care settings — hospitals and residential rehab facilities and places like that.
So no, I don’t think that our spending on either front is sustainable. We’ve been throwing a billion dollars or more at this year after year after year and basically getting nowhere. It was not until we finally saw the city make an investment in interim housing over this last cycle of a year and a half or so that we started to see those citywide drops.
CURRENT: Given that the decrease is within the margin of error, is it too soon to call this a long-term trend?
PARK: Way too to call this a long-term trend, and I think it’s way, way, way too premature for any celebrating or backslapping about it. Maybe it is just a flat line, and we have to really ask ourselves, what are we getting out of these investments? Is it enough?
I continue to struggle with that. I am not satisfied with the results. I would like to see things moving much, much more quickly in CD 11, but that is a product of limitations, even now with our expanded interim bed inventory, coupled with the inadequate legal tools and regulations to deal with it…which brings us to the interesting moment in time in which we find ourselves.
CURRENT: Before we get to Grant’s Pass, and while we’re on the topic of temporary beds, what’s being done to mitigate the effects of the closing of the Venice Bridge Home?
PARK: Well, this is a challenge that we have thought a lot about and continued to wrestle with. One of the things that we have benefited from, and that has contributed to our success in CD 11 in addressing the street camping has been the availability of the beds at the Venice Bridge Home, which is slated for closure at the end of the year.
The white building, located on Metro property was the site of Venice Bridge housing.
Our team in CD 11 is working very closely with LAHSA, PATH and SPY to ensure that those who are currently at the Venice Bridge Home will have another alternative.
We’re not going to allow folks to come out of there and go back to the streets. My team and I are continuing to assess moving some or all of those beds to another location, but we continue to be challenged in terms of finding suitable places on the Westside, so we are working with the mayor and her team on that.
We’re thinking about some long-term strategies. We are also looking to supplement our interim bed supply through additional motels, and it is an expensive proposition to do that. No matter what, operating these kinds of beds is going to come with a price tag.
But as we think about the next steps that we’re going to take as a city in addressing homelessness, the types of beds that we’re providing and where we’re providing them, all of that needs to be on the table, because we simply do not have unlimited funding to keep throwing at this problem without results, and we’ve got to address our policies and shape them in a way that allows us to continue regulating our public spaces.
And so, you know, as we shut the Venice Bridge Home down (and I think that is the right outcome for the Venice community because this was a commitment that was made when the Bridge Home was opened) the time has come now for Metro to take back control of that site.
I think it may cause some challenges for us, but I am going into it with my eyes wide open and working very diligently to make sure that our operations and managing this problem in the district are going to continue to be successful.