Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses ...?

[dales]

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles officials said Tuesday that they would declare a state of emergency on homelessness and proposed spending $100 million to reduce the number of people living on city streets.

City Council President Herb Wesson, members of the council's Homelessness and Poverty Committee and Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the plan outside City Hall — as homeless people dozed nearby on a lawn.

"These are our fellow Angelinos," the mayor said. "They are those who have no other place to go, and they are literally here where we work, a symbol our city's intense crisis."

An emergency declaration and the funding will require action by the full City Council. Wesson didn't specify where the money would come from, but he said budget analysts would find it "somehow, someway."

The first rollout of funds — projected for Jan. 1, 2016 — would go toward permanent housing and shelter, his office said.

The action came the morning after Garcetti proposed to release nearly $13 million in newly anticipated excess tax revenue for short-term housing initiatives. The bulk of that money would be dedicated to housing homeless veterans.

If approved, the pair of initiatives could steer additional resources toward the city's homeless population, which recent estimates have put at more than 20,000 and growing. The majority live on the streets.

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 downtown and on the west side.

"A hundred million dollars won't even buy all the homeless pillows," she said, contrasting LA's proposal with New York City's $41 billion affordable housing plan unveiled last year. "A hundred million certainly won't build much housing — and what we really have here is a housing crisis."

Details of the councilmembers' proposal weren't immediately available. Officials said broadly they would look to expand outreach and services for those living on the streets, boost the number of local shelters and create programs aimed at diverting people from homelessness when they are in the care of the city.

Garcetti said he wanted to see he wanted to see increased capacity and longer hours at shelters ahead of the anticipated arrival this winter of El Nino, an ocean-warming phenomenon that sometimes brings months of heavy rains to Southern California.

Earlier this year, a study by the city's top budget official found Los Angeles already spends $100 million a year to deal with homelessness — much of it on arrests and other police services —but 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.

Callaghan said she feared the bulk of the new money would go toward "reducing the visibility" of the homeless ahead of a proposed bid to bring the Olympics to Los Angeles in 2024, which includes about $6 billion in public and private spending.

"They can spend billions on getting the Olympics," she said. "But not on getting people off the sidewalks."

Councilmembers said they hope to have a draft strategic plan on homelessness by December.

[rubato]

More and more cities are learning that the right solution is also the cheapest: Give them housing.


We're one of the richest societies in world history. We don't have to be mean and stupid fucks, that's optional.


yrs,
rubato

[Big RR]

Housing is only part of the equation; we also have to provide them medical and mental health and other services. We need to address the underlying issues of their homelessness and try and work with them on those.

[Long Run]

Housing is only part of the equation; we also have to provide them medical and mental health and other services. We need to address the underlying issues of their homelessness and try and work with them on those.

Seems obvious, but if the answer were easy, it would already be implemented. That said, this has become a national problem (and warmer weather places, especially September to May, attract the homeless from other places and it is unfair for LA or some other city/state to take on the lion's share of funding problems created on a national scope). The federal government needs to help states/cities grapple with this, perhaps with grants for programs that look like they have a chance of being part of the comprehensive solution.

[Big RR]

The sad thing is that there are plenty of homeless, even in cold areas like NYC or Boston. But I do agree, it's not just a local problem, we need a much broader based solution. Unfortunately, the homeless are easy to ignore, or conveniently hide when you want to do something like put in a bid for the Olympics.

[rubato]

Housing is only part of the equation; we also have to provide them medical and mental health and other services. We need to address the underlying issues of their homelessness and try and work with them on those.

In practice, the other services go with the housing. Once someone has a home you can find them to take their TB medicine, anti-psychotic medicine, you can ensure they are getting proper nutrition &c. This is in fact how the programs have worked.

And it was always simple, we just needed to prove that it was cheap as well.

There is a large part of the electorate who believe that the only way to change behavior is to make people suffer and they needed an economic motivation of self-interest to counter-balance sadism.


yrs,
rubato

[Big RR]

That's a start, but we'll need money for that outreach and treatment; right now it's a lot cheaper to just ignore the problem altogether.

[rubato]

That's a start, but we'll need money for that outreach and treatment; right now it's a lot cheaper to just ignore the problem altogether.

No it isn't. They have proven conclusively that leaving people on the street is so expensive in ambulance costs and emergency room costs that housing them is cheaper. A lot cheaper. The stories about this have been running in the papers for years now.


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/housing-hom ... ave-money/
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/home-free
http://nationswell.com/yes-true-giving- ... ers-money/
http://www.tacoma.uw.edu/uwt/features/r ... ns-dollars

Housing for homeless alcoholics saves millions of dollars

Michelle Garner is a member of a UW research team that conducted an eye-opening project five years in the making. The study determined that providing housing for some alcoholics actually saves taxpayer money — a lot of it.

Reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the peer-reviewed study found that providing housing to chronically homeless people with severe alcohol problems who use the most community resources can dramatically cut public costs.

The innovative goal of the Housing First program in downtown Seattle is to end chronic homelessness by providing low-cost apartments, with vital medical, mental health and other support services available on site. In its first year of operation, the program saved taxpayers more than $4 million, compared to the costs of health and social services of similar people not in the program. During the first six months, the cost for services used by the 95 residents was reduced by 53 percent. This is a savings of nearly $2,500 per month, per person.

This population, which tends to cycle through publicly funded health and criminal justice systems, is a common urban challenge, Garner explains. Traditional responses, such as emergency shelters, abstinence-based housing and treatment programs, fail to reverse these patterns. This study found that providing housing — without the attached string of sobriety or being in treatment — reduced hospital and criminal justice costs and prompted a decrease in residents’ use of alcohol. ... " .

yrs,
rubato

[MajGenl.Meade]

Gee, I could think of a way to save $4,717 per person...


Plank #42 in Donald Trump's program for America

[dales]

Trump would probably deport the homeless to Mexico just like many "undesirables".

[BoSoxGal]

The homeless also end up mixed up in the criminal justice system, creating more substantial costs to society that far outpace the cost of providing affordable housing and social services.