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iAUDIT! - This column probably isn’t about what you may think given its title. Its not about the life decisions some people make that may result in them becoming homeless. As I’ve said many times before, people are homeless for a huge number of reasons, and some are not always within their control.
Rather, I am talking about the deliberate, planned decisions made by elected leaders. Have their decisions, now and in the past, made the homelessness crisis worse? The answer, unfortunately, is an emphatic yes. The worst decision federal, state, and local leaders have made is embracing the Housing First model as a one-size-fits-all solution. By prioritizing housing before treatment or any other intervention, the City has deliberately chosen the most expensive and time-consuming solution to homelessness, and yet leaders can’t understand why homelessness hasn’t decreased.
As Jack Humphreville recently wrote, LA is broke. The Council adopted a budget based on unrealistic revenue targets (e.g. Measure ULA is generating about half its projected revenue), and unsustainable long-term spending commitments. Many departments have incurred substantial budget reductions as the city tries to achieve the semblance of a balanced budget. According to the City’s budget detail, $968 million has been set aside for homeless programs in fiscal year 2024-25; while this is a 25 percent reduction from the previous year (mostly driven by Measure HHH and COVID relief money drying up), it is still seven times the amount budgeted in 2016. Recently, the state decided to send the City an additional $160 million from the sixth round of Homeless Housing and Assistance Program (HHAP) grant funding. Once plugged into the budget, it will bring the City’s total homeless funding to $1.1. billion, slightly less than fiscal year 2023-24. Of the $968 million, at least $117 million is dedicated to acquiring and developing homeless housing ($37.2 million in ULA and $80 million in HHH). As former City Controller Ron Galperin reported, units cost between $500,00 and $660,000 each, with some approaching $1 million.
There is no statutory requirement for the city to build separate housing units for every homeless person in LA. Rather, that is a deliberate decision on leadership’s part. That decision causes ripple effects throughout the homelessness system. Forcing people to wait for housing has burdened Los Angeles with one of the highest rates of unsheltered homelessness in the country. According to the latest Point In Time (PIT) counts, about 50 percent of the homeless people in San Francisco were unsheltered; in New York, which has a “shelter-forward” policy, it is around five percent. In LA County, unsheltered homelessness exceeds 70 percent of the homeless population. (For some reason, local leaders saw this as a reason to brag, since it represented a 12.7 percent increase in sheltered homelessness—2,584 more people out of a total population of 75,312). According to the City Controller’s 2022 report on the use of Measure HHH funds, only five percent of HHH funding has been designated for interim housing, which is less expensive and quicker to provide than permanent housing. The report states, “Despite a mounting death toll of unsheltered residents, the City has focused almost exclusively on building supportive housing—typically from the ground up—which is expensive and takes several years to complete”.
Leaving thousands of people unsheltered on the streets increases other costs. According to the City’s budget detail, it spends at least $50 million on CARE and CARE+ encampment clean-ups, even though people often move back the same day. Because of the dearth of interim and transitional housing, people often wait months for a bed. Leaving people on the street, many of whom have serious mental health or addiction problems, is both dangerous and costly. An LA Times article from 2021 reported 54 percent of fire calls were related to homeless encampments. MacArthur Park and its surrounding community have descended into near-chaos as it has become home to open-air drug sales, many of which are made to the homeless people populating the park, and disturbed people roam nearby streets. The City spends $2 million on street medicine, in addition to the millions the County departments of Public Health and Mental Health, as workers search for and try to treat the unsheltered population. Because the unsheltered homeless are transient and mobile by their nature, providing consistent care in almost impossible.
The current housing-focused system is expensive, wasteful, and ineffective. For the hundreds of millions spent, no more than a few thousand people have been housed, and many of them fall back into homelessness due to lack of support services. It is a system that will never meet the needs of more than 75,000 unhoused people.
An effective alternative to new permanent housing construction is the use of temporary buildings like Sprung Structures to quickly build interim shelters, where people can receive centralized and consistent services in a safe, clean environment. In September, I spoke with a representative of the RPM Team, a company that works with Sprung Structures to create temporary housing throughout the country, including the cities of San Diego, San Francsico, and Tracy in California. RPM provides a wide range of shelter facilities, from simple dorm-style units to complete navigation centers, with separate buildings for client services, showers, kitchens, and meeting spaces. The costs are a fraction of new permanent housing. The representative estimated the cost for a full-service facility for 125 clients at $3.5 million, or about $28,000 per bed. Providing new permanent housing for 125 people at $600,000 per unit would cost $75 million, and that does not include services or support facilities. The RPM representative said a new shelter can be up and running in as little as six months, far shorter than the years it takes for new construction.
Properly designed Sprung Structures are a far cry from the “carceral” facilities many advocates condemn. They can be segregated by gender and familial relationships, and have space for private storage, as well as communal spaces for socializing. Sleeping areas provide some privacy by using partial walls between beds. Navigation centers contain private office and treatment space where clients can meet for job counseling, medical exams, and mental health sessions.
Sprung Structures, or any other congregate housing, are not perfect solutions. At best, they offer semi-private sleeping arrangements, and by their nature, they have to offer structured meal services and shared bathrooms. Properly staffed and managed, however, they can serve far more people, and serve them more consistently than any amount of street outreach.
Advocates have two primary arguments against congregate housing: the lack of privacy and its unpopularity with the unhoused. To some extent, both arguments have validity. No congregate shelter can offer 100 percent privacy. While many provide secure storage of personal items, they are limited in the amount a client can bring into the facility. Surveys have shown that, while many homeless people will accept congregate shelter, they strongly prefer private rooms. Unfortunately, there are two problems with that preference; as previously noted, it is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to build, and it can be as isolating as life on the streets. A survey by an advocacy coalition shows 45 percent of people in Inside Safe rooms have received no social services of any kind, and 75 percent have never obtained mental health services. Nearly four in 10 don’t know who their case managers are. People are moved from the streets to a motel room, and then left to their own devices, and in many cases, to fight their own demons without help.
Providing permanent, private housing for every unhoused person is financially irresponsible, unnecessary, and virtually impossible. The homeless population is neither monolithic nor static. Many people—as much as 60 percent in some surveys-- lift themselves out of homelessness with no assistance; for these, entering the shelter system would actually prolong their homelessness, and unnecessarily burden interim housing availability. Los Angeles’ homeless population is so much larger than any other city, housing everyone would consume even more money than it does now. Assuming there are no reforms to current programs, it would cost $20 billion over 10 years to reduce homelessness to “functional zero”. Of course, that assumes current programs are effective which they are not. $20 billion would require doubling the $1 billion per year the City spends now, and because current programs have had virtually no effect on homelessness, there is no reason to think the extra money would do any good.
In addition, anywhere between 50 and 65 percent of the unhoused population suffers from untreated mental illness or substance abuse issues, and would require consistent treatment and supervision. That burden falls on the County, which we know from auditors reporting to federal Judge David Carter, cannot meet its obligations to the current shelter and housed population. Housing every homeless person would make the situation worse, because the County’s workload would increase astronomically.
As compassionate as it may seem to aspire to provide all homeless people with a home of their own, government has an obligation to use its limited resources to benefit as many people as possible. Creating private housing units at a cost of more than a half-million dollars each would benefit a small portion of the homeless population; increasing the budget to house everyone would rob equally valuable and necessary programs of funding. On the other hand, creating more temporary and interim shelter would allow some people to stabilize their finances and exit homelessness on their own. Those needing more intensive services could receive them in a stable environment, instead of sending teams randomly searching for clients in the streets.
Of course, this would require a fundamental policy shift among government and provider leaders, many of whom have vested ideological and financial interests in maintaining the status quo. It would also require restructuring the service system, so providers are held accountable for delivering effective services to their clients. It would be extraordinarily difficult to make such foundational changes, but the rewards could be life-changing—and life-saving—for thousands of people currently stranded on the streets with no hope for meaningful help.
(Tim Campbell is a resident of Westchester who spent a career in the public service and managed a municipal performance audit program. He focuses on outcomes instead of process.)
