This portion, local community and Homelessness Prevention advocates talked about the causes of homelessness in their area, and what they need. The audio issues in the start will go away shortly. Our second Panel Includes mr. Tim watkins, president and chief executive officer, watt Community Action committee, and mr. Joe foyer, the local support corporation, becky dennison, executive director Dennis Community housing, anthony hayes, speak up, advocate corporation for support of housing, erica hartman, and chief Program OfficerDowntown Womens Center, and chancellor of alman corps, and executive director of the housing center. Alma vizcaino, downtown speaker of the violence against women and services center, and also, the chief and executive Community Leader of friends, and without objection, your written statements will be part of the record. Each of you will have five minutes to summarize your testimony, and i will give you a signal by tapping the gavel lightly when one minute remains and at that time, i would ask you the wrap up the testimony so that we can be respectful of the witnesses and the Committee Members time. And mr. Watkins, you are recognized for five minutes to present your oral testimony. Thank you, and i wont spend too much time saying what an honor it is to be here, but i really appreciate your work and always have on all fronts. Having been here for 66 years, always being a boy of watts and born and raised in watts, i have been blessed to be around the watts labor Union Action Committee in its lifetime as my father was a founder 54 years ago, and you will get to see a lot in 54 years. But as an organization that has consistently and constantly and without interruption provided service and helped to support the underdog in society, id say that today, maybe im here to represent the brothers on the ground floor. I dont know if you have ever heard that term, but in watts, there is a network of people who live under peoples houses that have razed foundations. They live there with the cooperation of theor the renter and they bump around at night, and nobody is alarmed, but they are allowed to subsist in the basement, and not the basement, but the Foundation Space of those homes. We have seen over 54 years, we have seen yorty, and mayor riord riordan, and mayor braun and mayor garcetti and others who have talked about the broken promises of the past, and maybe this time, we will see a promise kept, but over the 54 years, we have seen a trail of broken promises. The waoc was around when across the country, Mental Health institutions were being shutdown, and we saw the earliest evidence of homelessness in watts when people had nowhere to go and we started to survey Homeless Populations before there was a response to South Central los angeles, and we have been serving since. I think that it is important to recognize that although we made the powerful steps early on, lasa has been at the forefront of providing i guess that you would stay mainstream of the service for funding, and the support and the services that Homeless People need, but it is just not enough. We are all here maybe even some of you, you know, because i remember some recent congresspeople who were just a check or two away from homelessness themselves. So it is important for you to realize that in this audience, lots of us are just a couple of checks away from being homeless. Perhaps, you know, along with what we do with homelessness, we think about the problem of poor Public Policy and poverty and what that means, because we keep talking about poverty as though that is the problem, when poverty is but a symptom of poor Public Policy and what drives us into these conditions that are not easy to sustain, and yet, we find ourselves with less than selfsufficiency, and certainly with less than selfdetermining, and we are watching the descendents of people who up until 1865, they could get what they want and still do, and here we are hundreds of years later, and still just trying to find that socalled level Playing Field there. Is no level Playing Field. The Playing Field is full of empty gold mines, diamond mines, water holes and oil wells and you name it. We look for the scraps on the surface, and every night, it is disparaging for the people in my community to get disparaged and treat them as subhuman, because they have the nobility to go through our trash. They dig through our trash to find recyclables and line up as if they should be carved up getting pennies on the dollar as if that is for, how do we prevent the problem in as many ways as we can that are not the traditional ways. Well talk well talk and well talk about hundreds of millions of billions of dollars, but it takes too long to get the help that people need. When you think about Public Policy versus poverty and how this all happened, how much of it is by design . Why does someone have to be homeless for a year before they can qualify for service . Maybe their condition doesnt allow them to survive a year of waiting. How many of our people can stand the product of geopolitical injure ma gerrymandering in our community . Its very difficult to get the kind of representation that we need that is watch specific. What are the impediments . Certainly weve got persecution, human blight, transitional housing thats been torn down only to be replaced by transitional housing. Weve got a lot of resources, and id like to talk about that in the follow up if possible. Thank you very much. Thank you. You are now recognized for five minutes to present your oral testimony. Thank you. Chair waters and members of the committee, im a Program Vice President for the local Initiative Support corporation established in 1979, listed as a National Nonprofit dedicated to helping Community Residents transform neighborhoods into communities of choice and opportunity. We provide local Community Development organizes with loans, grants and Equity Investments as well as technical and management assistance. We have a National Footprint with local offices in 35 cities and a program. We invest approximately 1. 6 billion each year in these communities. Weve developed more than 11,000 units of Affordable Housing in the region with community partners. More than 37 million in investments with Affordable HousingCommunity Developments have been made in californias 43rd district alone. Our l. A. Team is deeply embedded in Community Based efforts to provide assistance to those experiencing homelessness or are in need of Affordable Housing. And how nonprofit organizations and others can improve their lives. Id like to focus my time on whats needed to address this issue. First, this country has to be committed if we want to end homelessness and these efforts must be supported through sufficient funding resources. Our nations commitment to reducing chronic veteran homelessness has resulted in declines. Huds continuing care provides the main resources and incentivizes local cocs approaches. Pleased to support represent waters ending homeless act of 2019. This bill would increase the assistant grant resources for new permanent Supportive Housing, authorize Additional Resources for special purpose housing choice vouchers, increase National Housing trust fund funding, authorize funding for outreach to Homeless People, and better integrate Affordable Housing and health care activity. This bill recognizes the resources the federal government has to provide if our country is going to continue to make advances in reducing homelessness. Now its worked since its conception to provide assistance to providers. We provide grants to organizational capacity and one of the most important federal Capacity Building tools we utilize for this work is hud sections for Capacity Building program. It helps nonprofit one for example people assisting it homeless to develop west carson villas. This development consists of 110 units, 55 which are reserved for formerly homeless residents. Also provides financing for Affordable Housing development and we typically use low Income Housing tax exwitty. The housing credit is the nation our subsaidiary is on of the largest nonprofit sipdicators and using housing credits to finance Supportive Housing for people experiencing homelessness. Cmf is a competitive housing award administered by the Treasury Department which can be used flexibly and Nonprofit Developers for affordable rental housing for poorhouse holds. An example of the impact cmf and the housing credit is recent support for the irma family campus. Once a homeless shelter operating as a former motel, it completed its transformation into a campus that offered health, housing and other services in san fernando valley. Targeting chronically homeless single adults. They invested nearly 13. 6 million in a 27 million project. The history of supporting Affordable Housing projects for those experiencing homelessness has shown us progress can be made when resources are made available to address need. We urge congress to adequately fund and support federal Housing Assistance and tax programs and to support programs that build the capacity of nonprofit organizations serving these communities. Thank you for the opportunity to testify and i look forward to working with you and your staff on ways to end the homeless crisis here in l. A. Thank you. Thank you very much. And now we will hear from ms. Dennison. Good morning to everyone. Im with Venice Community housing. We own and operate Affordable Community husing focused on ensuring Inclusive Communities on l. A. s west side. For over 30 years weve been providing housing and support to those in need and we are currently building new Supportive Housing in venice which is home to about 1,000 unhoused residents. Were also active in Community Organizing and advocacy efforts that promote the rights of tenants and unhoused residents. We simply as everyone said need vastly more resources to produce extremely low income and Supportive Housing. So affordability matters in production. We cant just produce and expect the results to trickle down. The federal budget for Affordable Housing was cut by 80 in the 80s and as we notice we continue to see cuts chipping away at it. And locally production is nowhere near the documented need. In the last Housing Element incity projected to produce 75 of its housing need but only 17 of the extremely low Income Housing need. So with the largest production gaps at the lowest income levels and overproducing luxury housing homelessness continues at crisis levels in l. A. L. A. Has also produced Supportive Housing and the Ballot Initiatives that people have discussed are incredibly important and will do good work. But are a drop in the bucket in the overall need. We need the city and county and the state to create permanent and sustained resources, and we need the federal government to supplement those resources. Most specifically we need to increase rental subsidy as people have said. Right now were making decisions in the scarcity environment. We have to balance the need for new Supportive Housing, Affordable Housing, tenant housing choice vouchers within this limited pool of subsidy. And theres just nowhere near enough to cover even a portion of all of those needs. The federal government must also help us address the issue of underproduction of extremely low Income Housing because while the Tax Credit Program is incredibly important, it just is not designed to produce extremely low Income Housing, and then therefore thats where we see our biggest gap. Yon housing production, we must put more effort into the prevention of homelessness and the preservation of all affordable rent stabilized and other subsidized represental housing must be prioritized. And while these are largely issues at the local and state level and our local government and State Government must make preservation more of a priority, we also do need targeted federal investment to make this a comprehensive effort. Prevention of homelessness also requires increased tenant protections and proactive enforcement of those protections. Tenants too far regularly face unjust and illegal eviction and other force displacement. And again some of these challenges and solutions are focused on state and local issues and our States Government has some local policies pending, but the federal government can help ensure proactive enforcement of tenant protections, and then the prevention of any policy that would produce displacement such as the proposed policy that was also discussed. Government eptintities must als eliminate the overrepresentation of black people experiencing homelessness. Los angeles has studied this recently and has a report and recommendation that mr. Lin discussed that really look at the long history of institutional racism and further exploration of that from this committee is recommended. And lastly, l. A. Must end the criminalization of homelessness. This is an area where l. A. Has been uniquely horrible in its efforts. Without creating any significant housing alternative l. A. Has invested incredible financial and political resources in policies explicitly intended to criminalize homelessness and other initiatives that result in harassment and forced displacement among homeless residents. These lengthen the time people remain homeless and discriminate against people for their current unhoused status. This simply must end and be replaced with health based street based interventions until l. A. Provides housing for all in need. In closing we know l. A. And california must enact substantial new policies and funding that focus on production at the lowest income levels and homeless prevention as well as eliminate harmful policies. But l. A. And all regional efforts cannot succeed without more investment at the federal level. It reflects a significant step forward and additional efforts will be needed to solve this crisis. Thank you. Thank you. Now i would like to ask mr. Hanes to give his testimony. You are now recognized for five minutes to present that testimony. Good afternoon. My name is Anthony Hanes and im a csa speak up advocate. I grew up in an average middle Class Community with six siblings and a mother and a father in a home. And they my mother and father used to shelter me from what was around the corner until one day i found out what was around the corner and i became an alcoholic. I became a functioning alcoholic. Over the years my disease got worse, but i was still able to find a job, keep an apartment until i could no longer work suffering from Mental Health issues. Until i found myself ten years of homelessness, i ended up on skid row, and id go to jail for one year, exactly one year for possession of marijuana. And when i got out of jail, i knew i needed Something Different. I knew i wanted to do Something Different with my life. So with that year clean from alcohol and drugs, i got on a wait list and it took a long time for me to get permanent Supportive Housing. But when i finally got in, it made a big difference in my life. Supportive housing is very important. Not only just housing a person but with the wrap around services. With the case manager on site, the therapist, psychiatrist right at my disposal. It took me a long time to find my work. You know, they had so many groups to offer, art group, Journal Group until i ended up doing a knitting group. And coming from the streets im like im not fitting to sit in a circle and share my feelings. So i took a knitting group for exactly one year. And in the group they sat a watched oprah and knitted. So after one year i never learned to knit, but i sat with a group of women that helped me regain who i am, you know . It gave me so much perspective on lif