Amid news of dismal public opinion about how Los Angeles leaders have handled the homelessness crisis, a committee hearing held by state lawmakers in Skid Row on Tuesday opened with some sobering statistics.
Over the past six years, the number of homeless people who have died in Los Angeles County nearly doubled from 536 deaths in 2013 to 1,047 deaths in 2018.
And with the increase in their population factored in, the mortality rate is up by a third among those who are homeless, said Will Nicholas, a director with the County Department of Public Health.
The top two causes for death are coronary heart disease and drug and alcohol overdose, he said. Another top cause were injuries suffered in traffic-related collisions, often while the homeless person who were walking or riding a bicycle.
Nicholas said for all causes of deaths, the homeless population had a mortality rate that was 2.3 times higher than the general population.
Those stark figures set the tone for a meeting that was aimed at stoking what Assemblyman Miguel Santiago described as more “immediate” ideas for addressing the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles County, where voters and elected officials have already poured large amounts of taxpayer money into the problem.
There was a slight shift in how the issue was approached Tuesday. “I think it’s fair to call it a public health crisis,” Santiago said. “It hasn’t been deemed that.”
For Nicholas, whose primary concern was the death rate among homeless people in the county, one idea is to provide more temporary shelter. That has often taken a backseat to providing permanent housing that often take several years to be built.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley Thomas also advocated setting up more shelters, while affordable housing gets built.
“Affordable housing, (that is an) aspirational objective that we still maintain,” he said. “For now, we have to deal with short-term solutions. We cannot allow people to stay on the street. It takes two to three years to build affordable housing. It is way too long to tolerate.”
Meanwhile, Phil Ansell, director of Los Angeles County’s Homeless Initiative, proposed that rental subsidies were the “fastest solution to this crisis.”
He said that currently the county has “assessed” 30,000 people and learned they want to be placed into some type of permanent housing.
“The most immediate barrier to that is a lack of funding for rental subsidies,” he said, even though he considers it faster and “cheaper too,” than building new housing.
Assemblywoman Holly Mitchell sought from the panelists solutions to a problem that she said has stymied lawmakers: people who rank lowest on the economic ladder have faced cutbacks in aid, and there is not a sustained stream of funding to address their needs.
The homelessness crisis is the “result of a slow boil,” Mitchell said. “We didn’t get here overnight.”
Mitchell said she believes that cuts to Calworks, a welfare program, have had a “direct relation” to families falling into homelessness.
“New buildings, grand openings are sexy, I get that,” she said. “Those are important to do. But there’s other work that we have to do to make sure that the least among us continue to have resources to continue to afford the rent, whatever the rent is.”
The group also alleged gaps in leadership.
Ridley Thomas noted to the state lawmakers that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a joint city and county agency, is looking into restructuring its governance structure, and the focus will need to be on making the agency more agile.
The agency had previously functioned more as a pass-through agency, but has undertaken massive changes over the last five years as local leaders ramped up efforts and pulled in more funding to tackle the growing homelessness crisis.
“I don’t think we were adequately prepared for what we were contending with,” Ridley Thomas said.
Ridley Thomas also proposed that there be more focus and leadership from the state. He suggested that there should be more recognition that cuts in funding by the state have been a contributor to the homelessness crisis..
“It has been a conspicuous absence of leadership and engagement on this crisis,” he said.
