In First Place… Housing First

The Los Angeles Times reports today on the movement spreading across the country, and within Los Angeles, toward solving homelessness through “permanent supportive housing”—or what many call, “Housing First.” Here's the article.

The idea is to place people who are homeless—specifically the chronic homeless—directly into an apartment, with the support services in the building. It is an idea that organizations, like Los Angeles-based Beyond Shelter and Washington, DC-based National Alliance To End Homelessness, have promoted for years.

The Bush Administration has embraced it as their strategy toward funneling HUD dollars.

Here are some of the points:

- Concentrate on the chronically homeless. These are the people who have been homeless for longer than one year, or have been homeless at least three times in the last four years. You know them as the ones who visibly wander our streets.

- Critics say that this emphasis on chronically homeless is because the business community is “pushing” to make their streets clean.

- Those who support Housing First say that the old system of social services doesn’t work. The old system is called the “continuum of care.” This was created by HUD when Clinton was in office and when Andrew Cuomo was the HUD secretary. This system helps a homeless person transition from program to program—street outreach, emergency housing, employment, mental health or substance abuse care, to permanent housing. Critics of the “continuum of care” say that this won’t help the chronic homeless who usually drop out of the system before they reach permanent housing.

- Critics of “Housing First” say that helping only the “chronic” homeless ignores the rest of the homeless, including homeless families.

- Critics of “Housing First” also say that this is just another expensive form of creating public housing for the poor. They say that public housing didn’t work back in the 1960s, and we don’t know if it will work today.

I think that we need to do both “Housing First” AND develop a better, more strategic “Continuum of Care” here in Los Angeles. With 90,000 homeless—35,000 of them who are chronic—we have a large problem.

Building 35,000 permanent supportive housing units would be expensive. If it costs $50 million to build 300 PSH units, it would cost $4 Billion Dollars to build 35,000 PSH units! And we would still have 55,000 non-chronic homeless on the streets.
So our community needs to develop a comprehensive, strategic, and cost-effective approach to reaching all of the homeless.

A simple “Housing First” approach is not realistic, unless our community is willing to invest Billions.

(Maybe the Governor would be willing to set aside $5 Billion of his $222 Billion Infrastructure Bond money for L.A. County’s homeless problem? I wouldn't hold your breath.)