CommentsDEEGAN ON LA-A few days ago at a County Board of Supervisors hearing where the supervisors unanimously voted on two motions designed to provide support to the homeless, Mitchell Katz, head of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, declared, “I can actually cure homelessness -- the cure is a house.” But neither motion included a house.
Realistically, the top priority in approaching the issue of homelessness is to diligently and relentlessly address the plight of the mentally ill homeless. Housing will not be their cure. Nor will knowing that a “state of emergency” has been declared. Those are exterior remedies. An internal restructuring is the only way to fix the suffering of the mentally ill homeless. Their “home” is what goes on inside their heads and their “cure” must be medical attention that opens the door to helping them achieve some balance.
This is something the County Department of Health Services attempts to do in programs like HOME which addresses the needs of the homeless mentally ill using teams of professionals that go out searching for the mentally ill homeless.
Would the Supervisors like to make a motion to triple the number of deliverables from the HOME program? Clients can be found on any street in the city, sheltering in place beneath a tent or in the open, visibly ignored. Who knows how many of them are mentally ill?
For the broader population of homeless, newly elected Supervisors Janice Hahn and Kathryn Barger joined Hilda Solis, Sheila Kuehl and Mark Ridley-Thomas in a unanimous vote, declareing homelessness a “state of emergency.”
They also unanimously moved to put a quarter-cent sales tax on the March ballot to support homeless social services that would raise about $355 million annually over a decade. The Supervisors’ expectation is that this tax will fund rental assistance, subsidized health care, mental health and substance abuse treatments, and other services to help people get off and stay off the streets. It would complement the $1.2-billion general obligation bond measure approved by Los Angeles city voters last month. Two-thirds of voters must approve the new county sales tax in March.
These two moves, the Prop HHH housing bond measure, approved by 77% of LA City voters in November, and the County Supervisors’ Approved Strategies to Combat Homelessness could make 2016 a landmark year, a turning point for helping the homeless in Los Angeles.
Finally, we have a plan with funding and a future. In 2016, Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas fought all year, failing in his attempts to get Governor Brown and legislators in Sacramento to help. Instead there was a defeat of the “Robin Hood tax” requiring millionaires to provide funding for homeless programs, no unlocking of the state’s Rainy Day Fund to provide program financing, and a gubernatorial veto of a request for declaring a statewide “state of emergency” to provide emergency relief for the homeless. However, Ridley-Thomas did have some success advocating for the city’s homeless housing bond measure, the countywide declaration of a state of emergency on the homeless, as well as the placement of the March 2017 ballot of a 1/4 per-cent sales tax to help pay for social services.
“All around us, we find human beings living in utter squalor – a shocking number of them families with children,” Supervisor Ridley-Thomas said. “With this historic vote, we are taking a bold step towards ending this humanitarian crisis, the defining civic issue of our time.”
Los Angeles will continue to be a mecca for the homeless, attracted by the climate and easy lifestyle that is the envy of most of the world. We will never have the capacity to house all of those who come. However, these new measures passed by the City and County of Los Angeles may provide some important help to at least stabilize the homeless issue.
The first priority must be to bring the mentally ill homeless into a state of stability. It is the weakest link in a whole chain of actions needed to provide essential help for the homeless that surround us. It must happen now if we want to claim any real success or call what we have done a “cure.”
(Tim Deegan is a long-time resident and community leader in the Miracle Mile, who has served as board chair at the Mid City West Community Council and on the board of the Miracle Mile Civic Coalition. Tim can be reached at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
Katz: ‘I Can Actually Cure Homelessness’!
