MORE Homeless camps sit near Main Street in Santa Monica. A group of prominent philanthropists, academics, nonprofit executives and other civic leaders called the Committee for Greater LA thinks it’s worth creating a new homeless agency to try to fix the crisis in LA. Photo by Amy Ta.
One obstacle to solving LA’s homelessness crisis is that everybody is in charge and nobody is in charge. Between the 15-member City Council, the mayor, the five-member Board of Supervisors and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority or LAHSA (a city-county agency), not to mention the other 80-plus cities within LA County, there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Would adding another help?
Committee for Greater L.A. Calls for New Entity to Address Homelessness Crisis
LOS ANGELES A coalition of civic leaders called May 19 for the city and county of Los Angeles to create an independent entity to address the homelessness crisis through data, measurable outcomes and greater accountability.
The “Homelessness Governance in Los Angeles: Centering the System” report was commissioned by the Committee for Greater L.A. in partnership with the University of California–Los Angeles Luskin School for Public Affairs and the University of Southern California Equity Research Institute.
It asserts that Los Angeles’ governance problem stems from the lack of a central entity to address the problem of homelessness, and calls for officials to create one.
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ANYA MCNICHOLS moved to Los Angeles from Cincinnati when Eartha Kitt died. She says she is on a mission from Jehovah. Asked how she spends her days, she fires off four words: “Shower, wash, read, pray.” Ms McNichols lives surrounded by her possessions on the street in front of the Union Rescue Mission, a non-profit that serves the homeless of Los Angeles’s Skid Row. Reverend Andrew Bales, who runs the Mission, sees Skid Row as a humanitarian disaster. “It couldn’t be a worse situation”, he says, “unless it was hell itself.” He has experienced this hell first-hand. While delivering water in the area, Reverend Bales contracted a painful infection that resulted in the partial amputation of both legs.
The Committee for Greater L.A. released a report identifying some of the “underlying problems” and are now proposing a new solution for how Los Angeles handles its homelessness crisis.