LA CAN: There’s Hunger in Skid Row

The Los Angeles Community Action Network, a nonprofit advocacy group, released a study that reports there is rampant hunger in the Skid Row (Central City East) area of Los Angeles. This, of course, is not surprising. Where there is homelessness, there is hunger.

The LA CAN volunteers surveyed nearly 200 people who are homeless on the streets. Here are some of the facts from their survey:

• 60 percent of respondents don’t get enough fresh fruits or vegetables on a daily basis.

• 50% of those with housing rely on charitable donations of food for one or two meals a day, while most homeless people count on donated food for all of their meals.

• Incidences of medical conditions tied to diet—including diabetes, high blood pressure and hypertension—were higher than usual for respondents.

• 40% of respondents reported that they did not use food stamps, including some who didn’t realize they were eligible.

• 25% said they have been discriminated against while attempting to enter retail stores or restaurants because they are—or appear to be—homeless.

• Many residents of low-rent hotels in the area cannot prepare their own meals because they lack kitchen facilities, storage space and refrigerators.

Here is an article about the survey.

Save The Date: A Dialogue On The Real Solutions To The Absurdity of Homelessness in America

During the week of National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, we are putting on a dialogue on the subject of homelessness and a book signing of my book.

There will be a panel that includes The Honorable Richard Bloom (Santa Monica City Councilmember), Grace R. Dyrness, Director of Community Research & Development at USC, and Leepi Shimkhada, Lead Organizer for the L.A. Coalition to End Hunger & Homelessness. I will be moderating the discussion.

The discussion will be on how mental health contributes to homelessness and on the current homeless “dumping” debate.

The event will occur on Thursday, November 17, 2005 at 7:00 pm.


It will be at the Dutton’s Book Store on 447 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210.


Mark your calendars if you are in the area!

LA’s CRA Purchases Property In Hollywood For Homeless Housing

The secret is now out... The Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency finalized the purchase of a large piece of property owned by the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood. The goal is for this to be used for permanent housing and services for the homeless.

LA’s Voice, a local grass-roots advocacy group in Hollywood, started this “dream” of such a center a couple of years ago. Their hard work, and their ability to network with other groups—such as Corporation for Supportive Housing, and local agencies like PATH—have proven successful.

CRA plans to design a RFP (Request For Proposal), announce it to the community, then receive bids for developing and operating the facility.

An LA Weekly reporter is already starting to look into this new community effort. She told me that the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) groups are gearing up to fight it.

Helping people in need is never easy.

L.A. Supervisor Steps In To Help The Santa Clarita/Castaic Drama

Is a Winter Shelter program happening in Santa Clarita or not? Thankfully, it appears as if it is on again. Here's the LA Times article.

After getting turned down by a local town council, then receiving approval and funding by the Los Angeles Homeless Authority, only to have the local County Supervisor withdraw his support, the Winter Shelter in Santa Clarita is now on again.

L.A. County Supervisor Mike Antonovich has found another site for the NIMBY-prone (Not In My Backyard) homeless program. The site is a parking lot at a county jail.

It only shows that NIMBYism can be overcome when local politicians use their political capital to help site a homeless program. Homeless agencies, alone, cannot beat the pressure from local neighborhoods. They need local political leaders to help. And why not site homeless programs on county or city property? Is a good idea.

The Winter Shelter program provides a safe bed for people living on the streets from December 1st to March 15th every year. (As I’ve shared often, people on the streets are homeless year-round, not just 3-1/2 months of the year. But at least this helps.)

With a Winter program in Santa Clarita, it means this year, Los Angeles doesn’t have to receive busloads of Santa Clarita’s homeless. A good thing, given the current anti-homeless “dumping” sentiment.

Non-Governmental Efforts To Fund Affordable Housing Is Welcome

Century Housing, a well-known nonprofit affordable housing lender, has created a $15 million pool of funds for affordable rental housing in Los Angeles. They did this by putting together 15 lending institutions and one foundation as backers. Here is an article about this.

These types of creative community collaborations are important to the cause of homelessness. Government, alone, should not have to bear the burden. The idea of creating corporate and private partnerships for funding housing and services is a model that others should replicate.

Century Housing was the lending agency that helped build the PATH Mall. Their start-up investment in this project allowed PATH to develop a national model of integrated homeless services.

L.A. Sheriff Baca: “Let’s Make Sure The Prop 63 Funding Goes Toward Homeless Services”

Late this afternoon, Los Angeles County Sheriff Baca hosted a meeting in downtown Los Angeles to ensure that the Mental Health Services Act funding will go toward homeless services. This is the funding that taxed wealthy people in order to pay for new mental health services. Los Angeles County will receive $280 million in the next three years.

The Sheriff’s meeting was in the basement of the Downtown Mental Health Center in Central City East. Among the invited guests were the leaders of the state and county Mental Health Departments, law enforcement, numerous representatives of public officials, many county workers, several service providers, business leaders, Assemblyman Mark Ridley Thomas, and Phil Mangano, the director of the federal Interagency Council on Homelessness.

With just a few days notice, the Sheriff was able to draw a significant group of stake holders.

After much discussion, the Sheriff proposed the following for funding:

- A regional oversight commission on mental illness and homelessness
- Coordinated technology and information system
- Mental Health Court initiative
- Law enforcement training for dealing with Mentally Ill
- Stabilization centers
- Mobile mental health clinic

With law enforcement playing a key role in interacting with the homeless on the streets, it is encouraging to have the chief law enforcement officer of the county try to provide humane solutions to homelessness.

Fix “Broken Windows” Or Fix a Broken System

In today’s Los Angeles Times, they highlight LAPD Chief William Bratton’s “Broken Windows” theory, and how it worked in New York City. Here's the article.

The idea is for the LAPD to concentrate on the “little things” in a neighborhood—petty crimes, graffiti, neighborhood blight, and “broken windows”—this would result, so the theory goes, in the reduction of major crime.

Homelessness is part of the “broken windows” theory. Reduce homelessness and crime is reduced, they say.

In 1994, Bratton is quoted, "We are going to flush them [homeless people] off the street in the same successful manner in which we flushed them out of the subway system." Unfortunately, not a politically correct statement.

But Los Angeles is not New York City. The geographical expanse of our community is great. And the concentration of homelessness in Los Angeles is significant. With 91,000 homeless people, Los Angeles’s numbers overwhelm any other American city in comparison.

There is an interesting theme in today’s article. In New York City, when the availability of affordable housing increases, the numbers of people living in shelters decrease. That makes sense. However, with so many more people on the streets of Los Angeles, we would have to shelter everyone before we could see the phenomenon of shelter numbers reducing.

In other words, if we increased affordable housing units today in Los Angeles, sure some people would leave shelters for permanent housing. But those still left out on the streets would just fill the empty beds.

On another note… Sheriff Lee Baca is entering the debate on downtown Los Angeles, homelessness, and mental health care. He has invited some of us to join him for a meeting on this subject tomorrow afternoon at 2:30 pm.

Councilmember Jan Perry: “Homeless Need Help, Not ACLU”

Let the debate begin… Los Angeles Councilmember Jan Perry represents most of downtown Los Angeles, including the much talked about Skid Row (or Central City East.) She begins the public debate over whether the ACLU should be on the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority commission.

Here is her commentary, published by the LA Times today:
__________

WHAT WAS Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa thinking last week when he nominated Ramona Ripston, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority?

This is a city with 91,000 homeless people — the largest homeless population in the nation. Of these, 42% are chronically homeless and have lived on the street for many years. All of these people have complex problems and complicated life stories, ranging from poverty to mental illness and substance abuse. Some have simply cracked under extreme life experiences.

These are people who need practical solutions. They need jobs, shelters, treatment, permanent homes. They don't need excuses.

But the ACLU has offered them just that.

For instance, the ACLU has litigation pending against the city seeking to prevent police from arresting people who sleep on the streets at night, arguing that the homeless should be "protected" by what they call a "necessity defense" because they don't have the resources to sleep elsewhere.

But what good does that do? If we leave people on the streets and don't create ways to bring them in for treatment, the problem will continue. Homeless people don't need their right to die protected. They need help.

We do have ways of helping them. Creating a system of year-round, emergency homeless shelters, for instance, has provided many with an alternative to life on the street and has helped thousands into better living situations. Public investment of more than $12 million has created 4,000 units of permanent affordable housing for the homeless in downtown L.A., and more is coming on line.

I have worked with the ACLU in the past, and I have witnessed firsthand how the group's determination and zeal on behalf of the civil rights of the homeless often outweigh its efforts to find real-world solutions to a tragic and growing problem.

Is it truly in the best interest of a person who suffers from mental illness and substance abuse to be given the pseudo-freedom to do harm to himself or to live among people who want to do harm to them?

The highest incidence of crime in skid row is transient-on-transient crime. Is it really in the best interest of the community to allow continued drug dealing and open-air narcotic use in a community where others have recovered and are living a more stable life? Don't the people who work and live in skid row deserve the same benefits of a healthy and safe community that we all want?

I think the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority should be made up of people with expertise in policy and people with access to funding for housing and services for mental illness. The ACLU — which likes to waste time on symbolic issues such as removing the cross from the L.A. County seal — has no place on this authority.