In the morning, Lila Omura went to the beach to check on the woman who had been kicked out of the evacuation center again for not taking a shower. By noon, she was comforting a man in tattered clothes who wouldn’t stop crying outside a coffee shop and offered help to a woman sitting on a bus bench, but the woman said, “You need more help than me.” I need it,” he replied.
It was a predictably unpredictable morning for Omura, a housing navigator employed by the City of South Bay and a field leader for an aggressive program to reduce street homelessness to a minimum.
In the first six months of this year, the city achieved a milestone. The median time it took Omura and her colleagues to remove homeless people from the streets was reduced to 14 days. That was more than was needed to earn it the rare designation of “functional zero,” a term that broadly refers to a balance between homelessness and services.
This recognition comes from the South Bay City Council of Governments, which selected Redondo Beach with the goal of solving homelessness in the region.
Redondo Beach housing navigator Lila Omura spoke with an elderly homeless woman living on the streets of Redondo Beach in October. The homeless woman declined Omura’s offer of assistance. Omura said he will continue to try to get her off the streets.
Since 2017, the city of 68,000 people has fallen from 11th to 51st among the county’s 56 cities with homeless people, according to a Times analysis of homelessness data.
“We felt like our city was doing well,” said Ronson Chu, the city’s senior project manager for homelessness and senior services. “We were making a lot of progress, especially in Redondo Beach. We wanted to measure our progress and hold ourselves accountable so we could tell our constituents that these services were working. , we wanted to educate the public.”
Three more cities, Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach and Torrance, will accept the challenge, Chu said at a ceremony this week recognizing the city’s achievements.
Redondo Beach was already on track to reach zero functionality in 2022 when the Council of Governments launched the program.
The first step, born of quality-of-life complaints that put pressure on the City Council, was to get the city’s misdemeanor problem under control. Homeless people were being arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct, and drug offenses. In 2020, City Attorney Mike Webb ordered Superior Court near Torrance to send a judge to Redondo Beach one day a month and conduct a homeless court, using the court’s power to guide defendants into protection and treatment. I persuaded him to do so.
Next, the defendants needed a place to go. The city built a village of 20 tiny homes, rented five one-room hotel rooms, and developed a relationship with home-sharing nonprofit SHARE!. Soul Housing provides cooperative housing and low-income housing. The program has grown by raising $300,000 from its own budget and adding county, state and federal grants and contributions from service providers. The city currently leases 18 SRO units and is adding 25 tiny homes.
Laila Omura (right) persuaded Brooke Owens to move into one of the small houses in Redondo Beach. Owens and her daughter are homeless in Redondo Beach.
This summer, he opened 20 permanent housing units in a motel conversion with funding from the state’s Project Homekey, and also won a county grant to double the size of his small hometown village.
The number of homeless people on the streets is steadily decreasing.
In 2017, the annual homeless court found 105 people sleeping unsheltered on the city’s streets. This year, the tally carried out in January was reduced to 18 vehicles. The number of vehicles carrying homeless people has also decreased from 79 to 47.
The city is currently developing a pilot mental health response program with the help of a $570,000 grant from health plan Health Net.
Lila Omura looks through a wall of photos of some of the homeless people she helped house at the Redondo Beach Pallet Shelter.
Since 2020, the first year of full records, 169 defendants have participated in homeless court, said Joy Ford, the city’s quality of life prosecutor. Currently, 35 people are in progress, 63 are in temporary housing, and 74 have graduated to permanent housing. Less than 2% of people return to court with new charges.
A key element of the courtroom was human intervention. Omura and other case managers were on hand to guide those who accepted shelter treatment in lieu of sentencing.
Webb, who is leaving office after his fifth term, has cobbled together a fragile system that relies on funding and subsidies that may or may not be renewed.
He hopes his legacy will be the ability to maintain zero functionality as the system shrinks.
“I would like to see some of these programs eliminated,” Webb said. “Some will have to stay in place. We’ve always had homelessness. Council housing navigators need to be permanent. I don’t know if we need to keep pallet shelters forever. yeah.”
The Council of Governments declared Redondo Beach “zero-functional,” highlighting it as the first city in Los Angeles County to achieve that status.
But that’s an unofficial claim. The term “zero functionality” is not a difficult term. This spring, the city of Signal Hill declared its capacity at zero after moving all 45 homeless people to a Long Beach shelter.
In designing the program, the Council of Governments consulted Beth Sander, who leads the Built for Zero program at Community Solutions, a nonprofit that promotes the concept nationally.
Built for Zero’s definition of Functional Zero is that a community “measurably resolves” homelessness by making it rare and short-lived when it occurs, and at least includes a list by name that is updated monthly. Progress must be documented.
Lila Omura speaks with a homeless man on the street in Redondo Beach. The man declined Omura’s offer of assistance.
The Council of Governments has created its own standards. The law requires cities to move people off the streets and into shelters or housing within a median of at least 90 days, ensuring more people exit homelessness than fall into it.
Redondo Beach reached that equilibrium in the first six months of 2024, with the anonymous list increasing by 65 people and removing 66 people from the streets. Of these, 31 were moved to shelters, 14 to permanent housing, 11 to mental health, detox, or domestic violence facilities, and 10 were reunited with their families.
Tracking median time on the road is more of an art than a science, especially for coastal cities where mild summer weather is a draw.
“People stay in Redondo, go to Riverside for six months, and then come back to Redondo,” Chu said. In some cases, the city may learn through word of mouth that a client is in jail.
“I don’t blame the city for not getting them off the road if we haven’t seen them for months and don’t know where they are,” Chu said.
As part of the Functional Zero program, Omura and outreach workers from Harbor Interfaith Services meet monthly with City Attorney Webb and City Attorney Thieu at the Council of Governments. They are discussing the cases and adding new names to a list of about 300 people, some in shelters or housing, some still on the streets, and others listed as missing. There are some people.
Lila Omura (left) shares a bright moment with Wesley Hesson, 78, a Vietnam veteran she found homeless at Veterans Park in Redondo Beach. Omura was able to contact Kenneth Berry, a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs peer specialist in the area, who placed Hesson in housing.
Omura started out by providing food, clothing, and prayers at the New Life Church in Harbor City. The energetic 56-year-old, who has been homeless herself, was lured away from a 30-year career in commercial purchasing to become a full-time outreach worker at Harbor Interface. Omura made such an impression on Webb that the city hired her in 2022.
Her first success was connecting with a woman who had been a regular at the 405 Freeway and Inglewood Avenue for years. After the woman known as the “405 Lady” was released from her mental health duties, Omura defied repeated rejections and passed. Finally she accepted a shelter and later got an apartment. Next, Omura dealt with an encampment along a storm drain behind the Hilton Homewood Suites.
During recent surveillance, only one tent was discovered and appeared to be abandoned.
A day’s journey with Mr. Omura shows how difficult it is to quantify a particular person’s condition, let alone help them. Hours or even days of effort can go by with no results.
After lunch that day after comforting a crying man, Omura drove the woman from her broken down RV to a strip mall to cash her disability check, and asked the woman in a tent by the railroad tracks to accompany her to a shelter. I urged him to do so and listened to his story. It was the incomprehensible story of a man I had never seen before, sitting on a bench outside Redondo Beach City Hall.
A few days later, Omura looked back on what had happened.
The man couldn’t stop crying and called his mother, who arranged to meet him at a nearby park. Using two phones in his city car, Omura determined that his case manager was in nearby Hermosa Beach, where he usually hangs out. The incident has been resolved.
The woman along the tracks had agreed to go into one of the small houses in the city, but then disappeared, leading Omura to think that she was probably closer to Hawthorne’s roots. Omura also secured a small home for the woman inside the RV, but she also went missing.
Then, while touring the business district, she spotted a woman talking to her on a bus bench. Omura said she is known only as Jane Doe because she refuses to give her name. She had her bare feet on her knees, picking at her open wound.
Omura parked his car and approached. She was rejected again.
Obtaining her cooperation will be a project, Omura said. The city’s mental health team, made up of police officers and clinicians, later determined she was suitable for psychiatric custody. Omura reserved a bed at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and scheduled transportation by county ambulance. At the last minute, an ambulance made an emergency stop and the flight was cancelled.
Karen Ford (right) looks around at the new SRO that Redondo Beach housing navigator Laila Omura helped her purchase in Wilmington.
Some days it just goes that way.
However, the new day brought limited success. In the morning, Omura picked up customer Karen Ford from a mini-mall hangout and drove her to SRO in Wilmington. Ford saw the vacant room and agreed to move in.
Meanwhile, Omura is feeling stressed about her mother and daughter, who have overstayed their welcome with a friend who took them in after her flower shop went bankrupt. She had secured two small homes for them, but their mother, Brooke Owens, did not return her calls. At noon, she had to release her tiny home to the next person on the waiting list.
Finally, my mother came to pick me up. Omura drove home, but only his mother came out. Her teenage daughter changed her mind. Three days later, the mother ran out of the small house and apparently returned with a friend.
Later that day, Omura investigated a small park where an angry man with a pit bull had been reported.
She finds Billy Schmidt II, absorbs his expletive-filled rants, and befriends his dog, which turns out to be adorable. Finally he calmed down and explained that he was angry because he thought he was being ignored. Yes, he wanted to be part of the program, he insisted. Omura immediately called Exodus Recovery Safe Landing, a walk-in shelter that accepts referrals from the city.
Karen Ford hugs Laila Omura in gratitude.
There were no open beds. She kept calling and after three days a bed opened up. She drove Schmidt there.
