In our district, we have demonstrated over and over again that homelessness responds to focused, relentless work. Here’s what we have accomplished:

• We moved more than 500 people off the streets in our district and into shelter and housing.

  • We bought every single resident indoors at more than a dozen major encampments across the district, including at the Coldwater Canyon/101 underpass and Van Nuys Blvd/Riverside Drive in Sherman Oaks, at the corner of Highland and Franklin in Hollywood, the Hollywood Bowl Park and Ride in Studio City, at Berendo St and Hollywood Blvd in Los Feliz, and more.

  • We brought about 100 people indoors from along the LA River Bike Path, thanks to motel vouchers we secured for the district from Governor Newsom and from Congressman Schiff.

  • We worked with Mayor Karen Bass on the first implementation of her Inside Safe program and her first RV Inside Safe along Forest Lawn.

• We built the first and largest dedicated Homelessness Team of any council district.

• We doubled the shelter capacity of the district and opened a multi-year city-run hotel shelter facility, the first of its kind in LA. We also secured funds for motel vouchers for our district from Governor Newsom, Assemblymember Laura Friedman, and from Congressman Adam Schiff.

• We expanded mental health and substance use services in the district to supplement programs offered by LA County, bringing street medicine, treatment beds, and Multi-Disciplinary Teams into our neighborhoods and passing legislation to expand street medicine across the city.

• We brought the CIRCLE unarmed crisis response program to Hollywood, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and Sherman Oaks, creating new options for constituents and businesses seeking assistance with non-violent homelessness-related issues

Today, our district has the lowest unsheltered homelessness of LA’s fifteen districts – and with the largest in-house team of any district, we’re equipped to tackle homelessness with urgency whenever someone ends up on our streets.

I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished in just one term – but there’s still so much left to do. Last year I was appointed the Chair of the Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, and I’m pushing every day to improve the strategies we use to fix homelessness everywhere in LA, working in close partnership with Mayor Bass and with the rest of Council leadership.

If I’m reelected to a second term, here’s what we can accomplish together:

• Create a comprehensive, city-wide response to homelessness. LA’s response to homelessness is highly fragmented within the City of Los Angeles.

  Firstly, LA’s response to homelessness can be radically different depending on where somebody happens to end up on the street. This is because, unlike any other service being provided by the city, LA’s approach varies widely by Council district. Council offices can decide whether or not to provide extra outreach and case management support, who gets access to scarce shelter beds in the district, when and where to open shelters, when to deliver sanitation services at encampments, and more.

  Secondly, after years of underinvestment in homelessness response, services and support are now being provided by both the County and by many departments within the City (individual council offices, the CAO, LAHD, and now the Mayor’s Office) without a clear system for internal communication and coordination.

  This approach leads to inefficiencies we truly cannot afford: it leads to people being unserved, shelter beds being left empty, and to the potential duplication of services. By centralizing this process, we’d create a much more effective system.

  I’m pushing centralization forward operationally and legislatively within the city. I am using my new role as Chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee to coordinate between the Mayor’s Office, the CAO, LAHD, and HACLA, including through the Homeless Strategy Committee. I’m also pushing forward policies to centralize intervention and response in the city, including developing a citywide RV strategy, managing outreach better, and most importantly: creating a shelter and permanent housing investment plan that will help us secure the resources we need to actually *reduce* homelessness over the next decade.

• Rapidly increase shelter bed availability. New York City has a far higher homeless population than the city of Los Angeles, but because they have enough shelter beds for every person experiencing homelessness, many fewer people live on the streets there than in LA. In Los Angeles, we have only a third of the shelter beds we need for our homeless population. We simply will not be able to address encampments effectively if people have nowhere to go.

  Over the short and medium term, we need more shelter beds in LA to move people indoors quickly. However, our current process for finding locations for new shelters is almost entirely dependent on council offices who lack expertise in real estate and often face significant community opposition for shelter construction. Not surprisingly, this system has yielded nowhere near the number of shelter beds as we need. I am pushing for a Request for Proposals for interim housing beds for the city, which will allow for private property owners to propose appropriate locations to the city. An RFP process could allow us to circumvent political opposition, may offer lower costs compared to the current ad hoc negotiation process with individual property owners, and would allow us to speed up the process of finding beds.

• Make it easier to move into permanent housing. In 2022, thousands of housing vouchers allocated to people who are homeless in Los Angeles went unused. Among cities in the region, LA has one of the worst records of connecting people with housing. That’s unacceptable, and it’s partly the result of a poorly-designed and inefficient voucher matching system. Our office has worked to fix this system by ensuring that vouchers are allocated effectively and improving the housing navigation process overall, including by adding housing navigation support at interim shelter sites to help people move from shelters into housing more quickly, and by asking the Housing Authority of the City of LA to report on their voucher work regularly to the Council for first time in many years.

• Expand and improve services for people still on the street. I’ve expanded the CIRCLE unarmed crisis response team to most of my district, but there are still huge sections of LA that don’t have enough services available to address homelessness-related issues or navigate people off the street. We’re leading the push on the Council to expand alternative crisis response, street medicine, and other services citywide, bringing more people into care as quickly as possible.

• Create greater accountability in the homelessness system. Over the past few years, for the first time in LA’s history, the city and county started making significantly larger investments in homeless services. Local investment was supplemented by large influxes of federal pandemic relief funds and new homelessness funding from the state government. This rapid expansion in our homeless services system urgently requires better data about outcomes, and updated contracts that tie funding for service providers to their performance. In the Housing and Homelessness Committee, we are working with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) to produce that data for the first time in the city’s history, and to utilize that data in our city’s contracting.