Los Angeles County got a gift from voters. Measure A would pass a half-cent sales tax on the dollar that would provide $1 billion annually to provide services and housing to homeless people.
Providing homeless people with the help they need is a difficult, time-consuming and expensive task, but residents clearly still believe in the mission. But we can probably expect visible progress in the near future, especially considering this is the second tax measure county voters have passed for this purpose. The first was 2017’s Measure H, which now repeals the quarter-cent sales tax and replaces it with Measure A, which generates twice as much money.
It is imperative that Los Angeles City and County officials and civic leaders use those funds efficiently and transparently to provide people with the assistance and housing they need. Voters tend to measure the success of homelessness programs by what they see on the sidewalk.
The latest homeless numbers showed long-awaited progress. The number of unsheltered homeless, or people living outdoors rather than in a shelter or other temporary housing, decreased by 5% in the county and by 10% in the city. However, there are still 75,000 unhoused people in Los Angeles County, approximately 45,000 of whom live in the city of Los Angeles.
The county now has the best chance to contain their significant numbers and dramatically reduce the spread of encampments.
One of the goals of Measure A is to prevent homelessness, and more funds are allocated to that purpose than Measure H. It is important to stop the flow of people into homelessness. Otherwise, the county’s efforts to get people off the streets will not make a noticeable difference for many people and will not bring us any closer to solving the problem.
The county made 27,000 permanent housing placements in 2023 (a number that represents multiple placements for some people), but the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority It estimates that an astonishing 50,000 people have experienced homelessness in each of the past two financial years. As of January, the total homeless population in the county, including both sheltered and unsheltered people, was about 75,000, about the same as a year ago.
Part of the challenge of preventing homelessness is simply finding people who are at risk of becoming homeless. Not all of them show up to social services for help. Address this issue by developing data-driven strategies to identify people at risk of homelessness, said Janie Rountree, executive director of UCLA’s California Policy Lab and an advisor on the measure. It is said that
Measure A also funds eviction defenses, helping more people win or settle their cases and stay in their homes. It also could lead to more people avoiding eviction records that could make it difficult to secure new housing.
Another goal of Measure A is to reduce the number of people living on the streets who suffer from severe mental illness, which affects more than 15,000 of the county’s homeless population, according to the most recent census. These people are in dire need of help in a county notorious for lacking all levels of short-term and long-term psychiatric care. And even housing with supportive services is not enough until treatment is available.
Providing this type of care is made difficult by a shortage of behavioral health professionals. What’s more, the county and state are fighting over paying for it.
Measure A won’t solve all of these problems, but it’s expected to bring in $1 billion a year just in case. Some of that should be spent on providing lots of desperately needed beds.
Of course, supportive housing, and even more housing, is the ultimate solution to homelessness. The problem is always building fast enough and at the scale you need.
Officials can use Measure A money to do more with that score. More consideration should be given to long-term master leases of apartments and hotels as supportive housing. And we should provide more than the usual 30% to 50% funding for affordable and supportive projects. As a result, developers tend to spend years scraping together remaining funds from other sources.
All of this work is certainly rewarding. But Los Angeles now has a significant infusion of sustained and dedicated funding to end homelessness. Doing so is as much a moral necessity as it is a practical one, to ensure that voters’ patience and generosity are not exhausted.
