When I talked to Los Angeles City Councilman Jose Huizar, I got the feeling that the city may be moving away from its punitive approach to homelessness and considering something more humane and practical.

Huizar, whose 14th District includes Skid Row and its almost 2,000 homeless, is co-chair of the council Homeless and Poverty Committee, sharing the duty with Councilman Marqueece-Harris Dawson. I was interested in the committee’s final report, which is expected to be released at its January 27 meeting.

Huizar said there would be “a fundamental change from where we have been in the past. This report goes in the direction of decriminalizing homelessness.”
Huizar referred to a city policy of sweeping the streets of homeless, along with their possessions, tents and tarpaulins and jailing those who won’t move on. Court decisions have halted the sweeps for the most part, leaving the city with its present policy of neglect.

He said he thought the committee would recommend a “housing first” approach. Housing first, supported by many homeless advocates, envisions placing the homeless in apartments or other housing and then providing them with counseling, substance abuse rehabilitation, care for physical and mental ailments and other services. That’s in contrast to the practice of getting the homeless to pledge sobriety and begin treatment before they are admitted to a shelter.

Housing, of course, remains the biggest obstacle in helping the homeless. It will take a combination of county, city, state and federal funds, along with private investment. And, it will require neighborhoods that won’t protest affordable housing nearby.

As Huizar noted, housing first also requires an intensive effort to reach out to homeless people and persuade them to buy into the program. The council homeless committee will recommend increased outreach teams. The teams of about four people are made up of social service workers from Los Angeles County health, social welfare, and rehabilitation departments. County workers run almost all homeless services, but the city has a hand with policing, street (and sidewalk) sweeping and refuse removal as well as and operating parks, where many homeless now live. Thus coordination between the county and city is essential.

Huizar said he “was shocked to see” there was so little city-county cooperation when Skid Row, along with the rest of downtown, was placed in his district in the last reapportionment. Actually, a pilot program conceived by then-Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky had pioneered the effort but nobody followed up on it. Huizar said his city-county-community program has already put a limited number of outreach workers in Skid Row. The homeless committee will recommend a big increase, putting 20 to 24 workers on the streets five days a week, This will require unprecedented cooperation between city and county departments, but Huizar said he was sure it would happen.

He said the committee would also recommend appointment of a homeless coordinator to oversee the city’s efforts and work with the county. Other recommendations will be for more storage facilities, where the homeless can store their possessions and more mobile showers and provisional housing until permanent housing is found.

Nobody says putting all this together will be easy. But the fact that these ideas are on the table may mean a future for the homeless that doesn’t include streets, tents and jail.

A missing ingredient in Wednesday’s Los Angeles County town-hall style meeting on homelessness was a frank discussion of the difficulties in filling the homeless’ great need for affordable housing.

I watched the afternoon-long session online and was impressed with the sincerity of the people in the homeless aid field. They’d come to express their opinions on a draft of a plan that will be presented to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. The ideas in the draft are good, but they are the same ideas that have been batted around for years by those providing services to the growing numbers of homeless.

Afterward, I called John Maceri, executive director of OPCC (formerly known as the Ocean Park Community Center) and the Lamp Community. The combined organization assists the homeless in a wide area of Los Angeles, reaching beyond city limits up to Malibu.

“I very much appreciated that the county and the city are working toward a fully integrated strategy,” Maceri said. But he said the ideas offered by the county staff “have been recommended before. That’s not a criticism. It is a recognition that the county and the city are catching up to what the providers have been saying for a long time…now they are working together, or beginning to, in a focused way.”

Finding housing for the homeless—and providing them with care for physical and mental illness and with substance abuse rehabilitation—is a first priority for many advocates for the homeless. They favor a policy known as “housing first”—settling people in apartments and then providing the care and job training they need. The county draft proposals noted that homeless people couldn’t afford rent in high-cost Los Angeles County. And, the Republican Congress has drastically reduced funds to subsidize rents for the poor. The county staff failed to single out the Republicans for the blame they deserve. Nor did they say where the funds should come from.

The county staff also failed to mention another stumbling block. Los Angeles and the other 87 cities in the county control zoning in their areas, and residents have long been opposed to building affordable housing in their neighborhoods or encouraging landlords to open their properties to subsidized housing for the poor.

Los Angeles County runs services for the poor—mental health, drug rehabilitation, county hospitals, foster children programs, general relief aid and, of course, the jail, where too many end up because of punitive city laws. But it has no control over the city zoning laws and regulations that permit or deny construction of low cost housing.

Maceri noted the obstacles, including Nimbyism (not in my backyard) among residents who exert pressure on elected officials. “There will have to be compromise,” he said. “Residents will have to have affordable housing in their neighborhoods.”

There is more, of course, to this complicated issue, and more talks will no doubt be held. Fresh ideas, anyone?

“No one should expect the problem to be solved overnight,” cautioned former Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky when I asked him about the latest and most promising aid proposal for a homeless population now suffering through El Nino’s driving rain.

Senate President pro tem Kevin de Leon, a Los Angeles Democrat, along with Democratic and Republican colleagues, has proposed the state issue $2 billion in bonds. Money from the sale of bonds, combined with federal and state funds, officials said, could pay for construction of 10,000 to 14,000 housing units over a several year period. The bonds would be repaid from funds from a state tax levied by the voters in 2004, to provide services and housing for the mentally ill, many of whom are homeless. In addition, de Leon and the others would allocate $200 million for rent subsidies to provide shelter while the new housing is built.

Yaroslavsky likes the proposal but noted it has a long way to go. I called him because, while supervisor, he was behind the most creative solution for the county’s homeless crisis, worst in the state and probably the nation. It was a pilot project giving some of the most chronic homeless apartments. Then, safely housed, they were treated for mental illness, addiction or whatever else pushed them into homelessness. Success rate, Yaroslavsky said, has been 90 percent. This approach, called “housing first,” is in contrast to the more traditional approach of big homeless shelters. Critics say that in such shelters homeless are separated from family, friends and possessions and required to pledge sobriety and to accept treatment before they are given a bed-- an approach that doesn’t work as well as housing first.

“It takes time, but we know it works,” said Yaroslavsky, who was term limited out of office and now teaches at UCLA. He told me the story of a chronically homeless man, once a UCLA engineering student, who had been on the streets for years. A social worker for a non-profit homeless agency worked for many months to persuade him to move into an apartment, where he settled into a safe life and then accepted treatment for his ailments. Such efforts would have to be multiplied, Yaroslavsky said.

The de Leon proposal must be approved by Gov. Jerry Brown and the State Assembly, in addition to passing the Senate. Also pending are proposals by the city and the county to put money into homeless programs.

If all these proposals get beyond the talking stage—which would be somewhat of a miracle—the funds would be administered by a little known agency, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, whose members are appointed by Mayor Eric Garcetti and the county Board of Supervisors.

The agency, Yaroslavsky said, should direct its efforts toward housing first programs. Money should go to “people who give the homeless homes.” He said there “should be an unconditional commitment for housing first.”

As Yaroslavsky said, there is a long way to go before something is put together. With the El Nino rains, the homeless issue has become big news. With sunshine it will recede. What is needed is someone to take hold of the matter and focus all attention on plans as they lumber through government agencies. Sounds like a job for Mayor Garcetti, the most visible and potentially influential elected official in the county.