Housing the Homeless in a Parking Lot:  Folly or the Future?

The mirage of calmer seas for our homeless, given all the money -- over $1 billion in Measure H  funding alone – that is being directed toward the problem, was suddenly ripped apart by the bad news, as if a shark named “unreality” was lurking beneath the best-intended plans to deal with it. 

More negative headlines in the LA Times immediately followed: “L.A. Wants More Money For Homeless Encampment Sweeps”  and “As Homeless Camps Explode In L.A. Suburbs, Residents Fear They Will Become Permanent.”  

It’s not just the Times that is highlighting this urgent problem. Mayors, including our own Mayor Garcetti, are appealing to Sacramento for more money to spend on the homeless. A few days ago, the Sacramento Bee reported that “Mayors Seek $1.5 Billion From California to Help Homeless.”  

Somebody’s Excel spreadsheet must have just blown up, because yet another looks-good-on-paper or makes-a-great-photo-op political spin job was made clear: city and county leaders seem to be stymied in their attempts to get a grip on the citywide and countywide tragedy of tens of thousands of homeless using the sidewalks as their homes. 

Is this because they can’t solve the problem or because nobody can solve the problem? Maybe it’s just too big, even for a big city with big plans to attack it. Los Angeles is like the Spanish Armada attempting to invade the British Channel in huge, hulking, wind-powered, hard to maneuver ships while being faced by small British rowboats that were completely maneuverable and able to circle the galleons, fire their cannons at the waterline, and sink or disable the invaders. The Spanish had met their “shark.” Have we met ours? 

The city council’s Homeless Parking Lot Plan is pretty simple: use a city lot at 711 North Alameda Street, near the Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument and Union Station, for homeless housing. Little could the many hopeful original immigrants to Los Angeles who settled around the Pueblo in what's now downtown Los Angeles, imagine that their foothold in the new world would centuries later become a social laboratory for many with no hope at all: the homeless. 

The mechanics of the plan are straightforward:

• Create a temporary facility to provide emergency shelter beds, storage, personal hygiene facilities, supportive services, and community engagement services for up to 60 homeless individuals.
• Do this with three leased 24’ x 60’ housing trailers that can accommodate up to 20 individuals each, with space for a bed and personal storage; one leased 24’ x 60’ office trailer for administrative work and case management; and one leased 12’ x 60’ hygiene trailer with restrooms, showers, and laundry facilities.
• The raw start-up cost to construct the shelter and operate for six months is $2 million.
• There is no cost for land by using City Parking Lot 5.
• No breakdown of trailer rents or other fixed costs was made available.
• No consideration of, or comparison to, renting hotel or motel rooms was presented as possibly a more cost-effective means of temporarily housing the homeless, even though the council is also considering a motel-housing-homeless program.  

A corporate Suite executive could not have put this proposal together, jamming twenty people into the equivalent of a 1,500 square foot single family residence -- a plan that lacks full transparency as to how the $2 million breaks down. This is a lot of money for very little. Without a request for proposals and competitive bidding, it's impossible to know how viable this plan is compared to a typical hotel or motel per-bed-night-rack-rate, which the city could hope to have discounted. 

The “parking lot plan” is housing 60 of the region’s 58,000 estimated homeless in a few trailers in a city-owned parking lot downtown, for three month cycles, until they can get into what is today “mythical” affordable and supportive housing -- all for a raw start-up cost of $2 million. The “parking lot plan” will address homelessness for less than 1% of the region’s estimated 58,000 homeless population. While a C-Suite executive in the private sector may not call this a cost-effective measure, it’s a model that politicos believe may eventually work when dramatically scaled up. However, they have been wrong before. 

Could disappointment as to how the politicos are handling the homeless crisis finally signal it’s time to thank them and then turn the situation over to the private sector which could monetize relief and create incentives and a profit motive for solving the problem? What CEO would look at the “parking lot” model of homeless sheltering and say it’s cost-effective, or accept the constant miscalculations about costs and results of other schemes to help the homeless that we hear about almost daily? 

Is it time to consider City Attorney Mike Feuer’s recommendation to appoint a Homeless Czar and have the County Supervisors and the Mayor jointly name someone from the private sector with broad ombudsman authority and executive powers to address this growing problem? 

Perhaps a C-Suite executive from the private sector would consider it a civic duty to roll up their sleeves, engage their colleagues in the corporate world, and get to the bottom of the problem. Has anyone like that even been asked? In 1984, corporate CEO Peter Ueberroth became the Olympics Czar and with great success. Is there another CEO out there who could become LA’s Homeless Czar in 2018? We need a land shark that thousands of homeless could depend on.

(Tim Deegan, is a civic activist whose DEEGAN ON LA weekly column about city planning, new urbanism, the environment, and the homeless appears in CityWatch. Tim can be reached at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.