Mayors, experts discuss the solution and barriers to ending homelessness

Los Angeles has found housing for 21,000 people since Mayor Karen Bass took office a little more than a year ago. They’ve done it, she said last week, by putting an emphasis on finding temporary places for people to live for up to a year and a half.

“The de facto policy in Los Angeles basically was that you stay in a tent until we have something built,” Bass said. Now, though, the city is putting thousands of people into short-term spaces—often renting entire motels for that purpose—to take care of their most pressing need.

People experiencing homelessness can be reluctant to move from their tents on city streets, she added, but often that’s because they want to stay near their neighbors.

“We found that people were willing to leave the streets, especially if you took them together,” Bass told an online gathering for the Bipartisan Policy Center. “What people didn’t like is if you would move one person someplace and another to another part of town. So we would lease out an entire motel and move the entire encampment.”

The first-term Los Angeles mayor emphasized the need for “housing first” policies on a call with other proponents of the approach. The idea is to get people who are experiencing homelessness a place of their own to stabilize their situation, and then get them other services as needed. The approach has helped to drive down homelessness in places like Houston and New York City.

But Bass said there are still some problems the city has encountered with how it has rolled out its strategy. First, it is “way too expensive” to move people into motels. Second, she said, the effort to provide support services to people in temporary housing has been complicated by a lack of consensus about what kinds of services should be provided and what outcomes they should be held accountable for.

Bass, who previously worked as a nurse and a physician assistant, said the health care system is not well integrated into efforts to prevent homelessness.

While recently participating in an outreach effort to people experiencing homelessness, Bass said she wanted to take the first five people she met with directly to a doctor’s office, rather than the motel. One man had staples in his stomach to treat a stab wound. A woman she met was recently diagnosed as an insulin-dependent diabetic.

“Over the years, housing people have dealt with this issue [of homelessness], and health care has been a secondary or tertiary concern,” Bass said. “So now I’m on a crusade in the health care community to say that health care needs to step up. … They need to be accountable with outcome measures. For too long, we have measured everything by process: ‘How many people did you talk to?’ but not, ‘What happened to them?’”

Former Houston Mayor Annise Parker, who Bass credited for providing a “model” for reducing homelessness during her six years in office, said one of the most important things she did to get those results was to coordinate the efforts of various government agencies and nonprofit groups that dealt with aspects of homelessness.

“We used a centralized command center approach,” she said. Her administration quickly discovered that there were hundreds of beds available every night, “but each agency had their own criteria for who they wanted in those beds, and it didn't match what we had in our population.”

“Artificial barriers” in government were part of the problem, Parker recounted. Harris County, where most of Houston is located, wouldn’t spend money inside Houston city limits. The Houston office of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs had never worked on housing, even though there was veterans-related housing money available to it.

Once Parker resolved some of those barriers, she focused on nonprofit housing groups and then service providers like soup kitchens.

Parker said her administration had to tell groups that it wouldn’t give them money unless their criteria matched the needs of the unhoused community. “Frankly, I burned through a lot of political capital to make that happen,” she said.

More than a dozen years after adopting a housing-first model under Parker, Houston has reduced its homeless population by nearly two-thirds. 

To get broad coordination, Parker said, the city needed current data on what the homeless population looked like and what services were available.

Rosanne Haggerty, the president and CEO of Community Solutions, which works with cities to reduce their homelessness rate for targeted populations to “functional zero,” also stressed the need for cities to get real-time information on people who need housing.

Haggerty, who rose to national prominence in the 1990s after redeveloping the Times Square Hotel and reducing homelessness in the surrounding neighborhood by 87%, said detailed data is “an absolutely necessary complement to having the right kind of housing in place.”

“If you can’t see what is happening in the housing dynamics of your community in close to real time, you’re always playing catch-up. You can’t be active on the prevention front. You can’t be optimizing all of your resources if it’s just a big, anonymous-feeling problem coming at you,” she said. But having a “unified structure” to aggregate data helps clarify where the needs are, Haggerty said. “The common language is the data on what’s really happening with the individuals who are here and needing help.”

In Los Angeles, Bass said the city’s biggest category of people experiencing homelessness is people in their 60s and 70s. Many worked in the service industry and have no retirement savings. Now, they can’t afford the ever-increasing costs of housing in Los Angeles. If the public realized that older adults were the biggest component of the homeless population, it could “generate the political will to do something,” Bass said.

“There are a lot of myths in the city, and one myth is that the majority of the homeless population come from some other cities and other states,” she said. “The No. 1 driver is just the incredible cost of housing.”

The city’s homeless population also includes 9,000 children in tents and in cars, she added. Other significant populations include foster children who aged out of state custody, veterans and people dealing with mental illness and substance abuse.

Bass said she opted to leave Congress and run for mayor because the homelessness problem had really “tainted the city.” Residents were in a “very negative, hostile place” because they had raised taxes on themselves three times but only saw the homelessness problem grow, she said.

The mayor declared a state of emergency on homelessness on her first day of office. She used an executive order to fast track building, so a permitting process that used to take six months now only takes 37 days. There are now 10,000 units of permanent supportive housing under development, she said.