Mental Health Plan Approved By L.A. Supervisors

The Mental Health Services Act that will provide an estimated $280 million was approved by the L.A. County Supervisors last Tuesday. The hope is that part of these newly funded services will help the mentally ill homeless on our streets. The plan now goes to the state for review.

Here is the L.A. Times article about this:
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The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has approved an ambitious plan that will use an expected $280 million from a statewide tax on wealthy Californians to reshape mental health services over the next three years.

The Community Services and Support plan now goes to the state Department of Mental Health Services for review.

If approved, the county could begin receiving funds by January.

The plan provides a broad blueprint for providing housing and substance abuse treatment for more than 45,000 children and adults with severe mental health problems, with other services for an additional 100,000 family members and individuals with less severe conditions.

One of its centerpieces is forming partnerships with neighborhood agencies that provide recovery, counseling, employment and housing services under one roof.

The county supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to approve the plan.

In coming months, county officials said, they expect to fill in details of how the plan will be implemented, including identifying service providers, which also must be approved by the supervisors.

Proposition 63 — the Mental Health Services Act — was passed by voters in November and imposes a 1% surcharge on taxable income in excess of $1 million.

The new tax will raise an estimated $600 million each year for mental health services statewide.

The Chorus Continues, “Stop The Dumping!”

The Downtown News continues to push the issue of homeless “dumping” in downtown Los Angeles. Here is the article. Clearly, the paper wants to continue this debate. Those in downtown Los Angeles don’t want the surrounding region to forget that “dumping” homeless people in Central City East will not be tolerated.

The article begins: “Stories have rumbled over the decades about one of the most disgusting practices ever to occur in Los Angeles. Recent clear evidence of the offensive ritual, thanks to an unimpeachable source, has turned the rumbles into a roar: The shameful custom of "dumping" humans on Downtown streets has at last been unmasked.


“Now it is time for the discarding of homeless, and physically or mentally ill people in Downtown Los Angeles, to cease. This is not the way a modern society should behave. This is not the way people who need help the most should be treated.”

The points of the editorial are clear: to praise Captain Smith, the LAPD commander who made these allegations public; the fact that the finger of blame is pointed at numerous law enforcement agencies—not just the Sheriff’s department; the revelation that hospitals are also to blame for “dumping”; and that the solution must be a shared responsibility throughout the county—not just downtown.

Counting On New Numbers To Distribute Federal Homeless Funds

USA Today reports on this past year’s national homeless count. Here's the article. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) mandated that every community that receives HUD dollars for homeless services and housing must perform a homeless count.

The carrot for doing such a count? Receive a portion of HUD’s annual allocation of $1.6 billion for homeless services and housing across the country.

Los Angeles County performed its count earlier this year resulting in an “official” count of 91,000 homeless people.

HUD will use this number as “a baseline, a tool to gauge the effectiveness of local programs.” These counts will be repeated every two years. USA Today tabulated a nationwide number of homeless pegged at 727,304.

Some other interesting insights: Affluent areas also have homeless people. Cities with warmer climates have more homeless on the streets. In Los Angeles County 88% of the people who are homeless are on the streets. Many people living on the streets also work daily jobs.

LA Alternative Press Has Some Strong Words For Los Angeles

“Time To Grow Up L.A.”, they write in an editorial piece (here it is). Here is the full text:
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Nobody is going to agree that dumping homeless people on a desperate corner of skid row is good social work. Sheriff Lee Baca needs to stop protecting his deputies, apologize to the city and agree that dropping off released prisoners on skid row, blocks from homeless shelters, is a bad idea and that it will not happen again.

The Sheriff tried his hand at shifting homeless people around way back in 1993. He suggested building a homeless shelter near the Twin Towers county jail, but downtown business leaders quickly nipped that idea in the bud. He then proposed building the shelter in South Los Angeles, and again he was rebuffed, this time by local community leaders. And there’s the rub: nobody wants homeless people in their neighborhood.

This is where Los Angeles city officials should step in, show some political will and use the recent events, in which Byron Harris was hand-cuffed and taken to skid row, as a springboard to finally tackle homelessness downtown. As the second largest city in the nation, we shouldn’t be surprised that homeless people congregate (or are dumped) around the city’s center. It’s where the homeless services are, it’s where the least expensive hotels are and it’s where the drugs are. This will always be the case, no matter how many billions of dollars are spent on redevelopment.

The mayor and city councilmembers should stop whining about small suburban cities dropping off their problems on Los Angeles’ doorstep, it comes with being a large urban center, and work with the county on ways to finance the creation of better facilities to treat and house the homeless. With last year’s passage of Proposition 63, which taxes incomes over a million dollars a year 1 percent to help pay for mental health services, and with the county’s recent promise to spend over 20 million dollars on homeless shelters, it could be the right time for some real reform.
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USA Today Provides A Comprehensive Update on the State of Homelessness, and Describes New Solutions Sweeping The Country

If you want a quick course on Homelessness in America 101 read the recent USA Today article, “Nation taking a new look at homelessness, solutions.” It’s excellent. Here is the article. Here are some excerpts:

- An update on the latest HUD mandated Homeless Count: “That snapshot tally was 723,968 homeless people nationwide, meaning about one in 400 Americans were without a home, according to a USA TODAY survey of all 460 localities that reported results to the Department of Housing and Urban Development in June.”

- Hurricane Katrina and Rita nearly doubled the national numbers of homelessness. After the $23 billion in housing aid for hurricane victims, officials think there will still be 23,000 Katrina evacuees without a home in a year.

- People are starting to see hope: “Many city and county officials are beginning to conclude that homelessness is a solvable problem, not an intractable social ill. Cities from Philadelphia to San Francisco show decreasing numbers of homeless people, in part because of a federal policy that concentrates on housing homeless adults who are the most visible to the public. A new kind of solution to homelessness is sweeping the country—Housing First: “The Bush directive boosted a concept called Housing First, pioneered in New York City and Los Angeles about five years ago. It abandons the traditional cycle of moving those who are down-and-out from the street to a shelter to a detox center to jail to a psychiatric ward, then back to the street. Instead, people are guided into apartments with on-site counseling for mental health problems and substance addictions. Staffers ensure that residents take prescribed medications and show up for job training.”

- Families have become the “new face on homelessness.”

LA Times Editorial Board Highlights PATH

In today’s editorial, the Times writes about downtown Skidrow, Proposition 63, and highlights PATH. Here is the article:

Homing in on a solution

October 11, 2005

WITH LOS ANGELES COUNTY about to receive nearly $300 million in funding to help the mentally ill, it has no more excuse for using downtown's skid row as a one-stop dumping ground for the ill and addicted. History, however, offers precious little encouragement that it will halt the practice.

Skid row, just east of the downtown financial district, was virtually written off not long ago. Isolated efforts at revival in the 1980s and early '90s, such as the acclaimed but doomed L.A. Theater Center on Spring Street, died of their patrons' fright over the neighborhood. Government officials mostly looked the other way; the concentration of need and crime in a few filthy square blocks might have represented a humanitarian disaster, but at least the problem was "contained" to one area.

Now the housing market is doing what government revival efforts couldn't. With high-priced dwellings sprouting in the distinguished old buildings near skid row, a widely ignored problem has become an urgent crisis. The "dumping" of the homeless downtown by outside agencies now attracts far more attention than it used to.

Blame is easy to assign. Efforts to move the mentally ill and addicted off the streets are mired in a lack of funding, imagination and cooperation among county, city and private nonprofit entities. The city-county coordinator and funding agency, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, has "imploded" — Councilman Eric Garcetti's word — in a financial mess that has left nonprofit agencies scrambling to meet their payrolls. County Sheriff Lee Baca, whose jails the city police keep filling, champions housing and service options, while Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton seeks arrests on skid row, calling the area a "national disgrace."

It is a disgrace. But the situation is not without hope.

At least two members of the City Council, Garcetti (whose district includes the seediest parts of Hollywood) and Jan Perry (whose district includes skid row) are committed to more than lip service in dealing with those who are on the streets or at imminent risk of ending up there. They have aggressively sought good sites and competent providers for shelter and services. Useful models include Hollywood's nonprofit People Assisting the Homeless, which provides a one-stop service center that helps people obtain healthcare and government services, such as Social Security benefits. Part of the organization's success, however, is that it is not on skid row. It can offer counsel independent of the sometimes ill-run shelters and the grim, disease-ridden street culture.

Los Angeles County has put together a required plan for how it would spend its $280 million over three years from Proposition 63, which imposes a "millionaire tax" to benefit mental illness treatment and prevention. (A single-use tax is a poor way to fund services, but the money still should be spent wisely.) Whether that plan, scheduled for a vote by supervisors today, translates into progress depends foremost on the county finding better ways to work with the city of Los Angeles, where most of the county's homeless problems are concentrated. And the city needs to show that it is prepared to address the homeless issue in a systematic way.

Aside from Perry and Garcetti, members of the City Council need to be more engaged on the issue and willing to allow clinics, housing and services in their districts. Too many worthwhile plans have died of NIMBY-ism because of council members' veto powers in their districts.

The county's Proposition 63 plan should give supervisors and the City Council a framework for action and the political cover to shed their timidity. If they aggressively pursue solutions, the misery of the worst parts of skid row will no longer rest on their consciences.

Hire A Homeless Person, Receive A Tax Cut

A Board of Supervisor in San Francisco is proposing a unique new proposal… If a business hires a homeless or disabled person, they can receive payroll-tax credits. It becomes a win-win scenario—a homeless person gets a job, and a business gets a tax cut. Here's the article.

San Francisco has 6,000 people who are homeless, and is leading the way in trying new innovative approaches to reducing that number. This new proposal is just another creative idea.

The big question for budget analysts looking at this proposal is how much will this cost the County. Perhaps if they also look at the cost of taking care of homeless people—emergency rooms, shelter, law enforcement, etc.—the cost of tax breaks might be the same as the cost of helping a homeless person.

Let’s see what happens.

SOS For SRO’s

The Downtown News titled their article appropriately, “SOS For SRO’s: City Seeks Ordinance To Protect Housing For the Needy.” Here's the article.

The Los Angeles Housing Department reported that 982 SRO (Single Room Occupancy) units have been lost between 2002 and 2003. In a city that desperately needs more affordable housing, this statistic is disturbing. We should not be losing affordable housing units, but increasing them.

Without affordable housing, homelessness will increase. As it has happened for the last two decades. I have the 1985 L.A. County Task Force on Homelessness study when they reported that there were 25,000 homeless in Los Angeles. A decade ago it was 84,000. And today, the number is 91,000 homeless people. Lack of affordable housing is one of the reasons for this increase.

The renovation of these old SRO buildings into upscale lofts is part of the reason for the reduction of SRO units. I am not against redevelopment. We need to continually make our city better. But let’s not forget the poor and homeless when we are fixing up our community.

Thankfully, the Los Angeles City Council is pushing for an interim ordinance to stop developers from converting low-income housing units into market-rate units.