Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has started a new effort requesting the city’s wealthiest residents to support housing for the homeless.
In a State of the City Address given on Monday, she announced introduced a new funding campaign called LA4LA, which aims to create an exceptional partnership with Los Angeles’ most fortunate residents to address the homeless crisis.
The new initiative requests private businesses and philanthropic organizations to help the city provide housing options for the homeless by offering financial support for the construction.
“We have brought the public sector together, and now we must appeal to the humanity and generosity of the private sector,” Bass stated at the address.
Los Angeles is known for having one of the most severe homeless crises in the country.
“Los Angeles County’s homeless situation is different from any other in the United States,” reported McKinsey & Company. The March 2023 report indicated that Los Angeles has a estimated homeless population of 69,000 people, equating to about 1 in every 150 Los Angeles residents experiencing homelessness.
By the time LA hosts the 2028 Olympic Games, it is forecasted to have over 100,000 homeless residents. More than five people experiencing homelessness die each day. At the time of the report, the homeless population of Los Angeles was growing by an estimated 20 people daily.
Bass was elected mayor in December 2022, when LA’s homeless population was nearly 40,000, according to her campaign. She had promised to house 15,000 homeless people by the end of the first year of her term and eliminate street encampments completely. However, the homeless population in the city has only increased.
The failure of the local authorities to control the issue led the LA Alliance for Human Rights, a coalition of businesses and private individuals, to sue the City and County of LA.
“At a time when the City and County of Los Angeles are spending record levels of taxpayer dollars to address homelessness, somehow the impacts to individuals and neighborhoods are only getting worse,” stated Daniel Conway, a spokesperson for the LA Alliance for Human Rights, to Fox News. “We are long past due for a hard look at how these dollars are being spent, and the programs used to do the work.”
The legal action concluded with a historic settlement in federal court and an order from U.S. District Judge David O. Carter for a comprehensive independent audit of LA’s homelessness programs, alleging that the City had not taken sufficient action to address the crisis.
The LA City Council responded in April by agreeing to pay the outside firm chosen by Carter $2.2 million to audit its programs, according to Fox.
However, the transparency issues extend beyond the county and city levels. A California state audit report released this month found that the state failed to track the billions of dollars spent fighting the homelessness crisis in the past five years.
A senior spokesperson for the California Interagency Council on Homelessness, an organization that oversees the implementation of homeless resources and services across the state, told Fox News Digital that local governments are to blame.
The spokesperson said that the local governments are mainly responsible for carrying out these programs and gathering data on results that the state can use to assess how effective the program is.
Dallas has its own problems with homelessness. A survey previously done by The Dallas Express reveals that over 75% of Dallas residents are unhappy with the levels of homelessness, vagrancy, and begging in their neighborhoods and across the city.
Cities like San Antonio have achieved success with a “one-stop-shop” approach to addressing homelessness. The strategy has resulted in a 77% decrease in unsheltered homelessness in the city’s downtown area. The one-stop-shop approach has credited been viewed favorably by Dallas residents, but it is uncertain whether City officials will give the model a try. polled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has launched a new campaign urging the city’s richest residents to finance housing for the homeless. In a State of the City Address given Monday, she introduced a new capital campaign titled LA4LA, which aims to form an “unprecedented partnership” with Los Angeles’ “most fortunate” residents to address the homeless crisis. The […]
