Los Angeles City Council Considers Creating Department Of Homelessness

At a Los Angeles City Council meeting on Monday, City Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez pushed for the creation of a Department of Homelessness to help streamline the city’s current patchwork of homeless programs and groups under the direction of one department.

The L.A. area has seen a continued rise of homeless people since the 2010s, with the only years showing little to no growth in that timespan the skipped-over 2021 count because of COVID-19 and the 2022 recovery year count. However, the 2023 count saw a massive jump of homeless people, going up by 10% within the city, and 9% around the county. The 2023 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count study specifically found that there were an estimated 75,518 homeless people in Los Angeles County, up from 69,144 last year, with a total of 46,260 in the city, up from roughly 42,000 in 2022. The 2024 count, due later this year, is expected to have an even higher count.

At the same time, Mayor Karen Bass’ signature Inside Safe project, designed to house more of the city’s homeless in motels, hotels, and other places, has been seen largely as a failure. Many hotel and motel owners have also complained about the program, leading to a strong backlash against it.

However, programs like Inside Safe, as well as others, are pieced together from different departments and other areas across the LA government, based on what that specific program wants to do. Seeking to consolidate homeless efforts in the city, Councilwoman Rodriguez proposed anew Department of Homelessness on Monday.

“A Department of Homelessness can help verify what each level of government is doing to solve the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time; I cannot say with certainty that we have an efficient and effective operation free of redundancies,” said Rodriguez. “With a mutual goal of creating a responsive system, we must also be prudent and judicious with resources to assure we can accelerate our impact and aid more individuals, because urgency can and should also be efficient and the Department of Homelessness may be a key part to delivering these goals.

“The City Administrative Officer, the Housing Department and the mayor’s office each dedicate significant staff time and resources to managing “overlapping homelessness interventions. Within this system, determined efforts to evaluate city-funded homelessness programs often run aground, as the providers of services produce irregular and imprecise reporting on contractually obligated metrics and outcomes.”

Department of Homelessness Proposal

While homeless program consolidation is part of the proposed Department, she also noted that the department would help better spend where the city’s $1.3 billion in homeless funds would go. However, many homelessness experts told the Globe that other methods at a city-wide level would be better at serving homeless people.

“A Department of Homelessness just brings a lot of problems with it,” said Mark Wagner, a Philadelphia-based researcher on homelessness, to the Globe on Monday. “You create a new department, and suddenly you have to staff it, get office space for them, and so much more in costs. You need to show the figures first and that this would help people and be more cost-effective than the current system is.

“There have been a lot of cities that set up homeless programs that brought together other scattered programs before that wound up eating away a lot of homeless funding. So, before this advances, show how much this Department would save, as well as how people would be better served by it. It’s not really there right now. There are better common sense measures to take here, including the usual job training assistance measures that cities keep ignoring. So prove this is good for LA.”