LOS ANGELES (AP) \u2014 It\u2019s no secret to people who walk or drive the streets of Los Angeles that homeless people \u2014 tens of thousands of them \u2014 are everywhere.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, having looked at numbers showing the city\u2019s homeless population has increased more than 10 percent over the past two years, officials announced they have decided enough is enough.<\/p>\n
Mayor Eric Garcetti and several other elected officials stood outside City Hall \u2014 a few feet from several homeless people dozing on a lawn \u2014 to announce they plan to declare a state of emergency on homelessness and spend $100 million to eradicate it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are our fellow Angelinos,\u201d the mayor said. \u201cThey are those who have no other place to go, and they are literally here where we work, a symbol of our city\u2019s intense crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n
Six blocks away, on the city\u2019s notorious Skid Row, thousands more live permanently in tents, makeshift cardboard shelters and sometimes just on the sidewalk itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you walk five blocks south and one block over, you\u2019ll enter the largest concentration of homeless in the country \u2014 about 4,000 homeless living in Skid Row,\u201d said Councilman Jose Huizar, who co-chairs the City Council\u2019s homelessness & poverty committee.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnfortunately, that is just a small percentage of the city\u2019s homeless population,\u201d he continued. \u201cYes, 85 percent of the city\u2019s homeless population lives outside of Skid Row, throughout the city.\u201d<\/p>\n
The emergency declaration and the funding will require action by the full City Council. Officials didn\u2019t say exactly where the money will come from, but Council President Herb Wesson promised it would be found \u201csomehow, some way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Huizar spokesman Rick Coca said afterward that officials anticipate it will come from the city\u2019s general fund, adding \u201ca more robust financial forecast for the city\u201d is anticipated in the months ahead.<\/p>\n
Councilmembers said they hope to have a draft strategic plan on homelessness by December.<\/p>\n
The first rollout of funds \u2014 projected for Jan. 1, 2016 \u2014 would go toward permanent housing and shelter, according to Wesson\u2019s office.<\/p>\n
Garcetti had already announced plans Monday to release nearly $13 million in such newly anticipated excess tax revenue for short-term housing initiatives. The bulk of that money would be dedicated to housing homeless veterans.<\/p>\n
Alice Callaghan, a longtime advocate for the homeless on Skid Row, said the proposed funding would not be nearly enough to stop the loss of affordable housing, especially in rapidly gentrifying areas of downtown and on the city\u2019s west side.<\/p>\n
Skid Row itself has been touched in recent years by that gentrification as aging hotels and abandoned buildings have been turned into expensive lofts, condos and apartments. Upscale coffee shops and restaurants now compete for space with homeless shelters and flophouses on the area\u2019s 50 square blocks.<\/p>\n
\u201cA hundred million dollars won\u2019t even buy all the homeless pillows,\u201d Callaghan said, contrasting LA\u2019s proposal with New York City\u2019s $41 billion affordable housing plan unveiled last year. \u201cA hundred million certainly won\u2019t build much housing \u2014 and what we really have here is a housing crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n
Experts blame that crisis on several factors, including the long recession, the city\u2019s gentrification and its rapidly rising rents and home prices. Those events have combined to push the homeless population steadily higher since 2013, to a figure now estimated at 20,000.<\/p>\n
Those factors also have helped push some out of Skid Row and many more all across the city. Some homeless now reside on bluffs overlooking freeways, in ocean-front parks and in hillside nooks and crannies. Others have moved right into suburbia.<\/p>\n
A graphic map published by the Los Angeles Times in June \u2014 and drawn from statistics provided by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority \u2014 revealed people living in cars and tents in such fashionable areas as Brentwood and the wealthiest sections of the San Fernando Valley.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, a study by the city\u2019s top budget official found Los Angeles already spends $100 million a year to deal with homelessness \u2014 much of it on arrests and other police services \u2014but its departments have no coordinated approach for addressing the problem. Without clear guidelines, departments instead tend to rely on ad hoc responses, according to the report by City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana.<\/p>\n
Callaghan said she fears this latest initiative is aimed more at \u201creducing the visibility\u201d of the homeless ahead of a proposed bid to bring the Olympics to Los Angeles in 2024, rather than getting homeless people off the street permanently.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey can spend billions on getting the Olympics,\u201d she said of the proposal that anticipates spending $6 billion in public and private financing to bring the Games to LA. \u201cBut not on getting people off the sidewalks.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LOS ANGELES (AP) \u2014 It\u2019s no secret to people who walk or drive the streets of Los Angeles that homeless people \u2014 tens of thousands of them \u2014 are everywhere. On Tuesday, having looked at numbers showing the city\u2019s homeless population has increased more than 10 percent over the past two years, officials announced they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-9724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9724\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9724"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=9724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}