Red tape affecting Angelenos on streets

Everyone, seemingly, has a common-sense approach to healing the human tragedy of homelessness right there in their back pocket.

If only “they” would try this! So it's especially sad, back in real life, to find that when taxpayer-funded solutions are already indeed available to help get the tens of thousands of unhoused people in Los Angeles County a roof over their heads, the bureaucracy bungles its task and leaves people out on the streets.

Such was the case for Yolanda Robins, who as Connor Sheets and Francine Orr of the Los Angeles Times report, was unhoused in December, and “received one of the 3,365 emergency housing vouchers awarded to the city of Los Angeles by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on July 1, 2021, to help get the most desperate people off the streets.”

But Yoland Robins is still unhoused: like “the vast majority of the more than 3,000 people and families who have received the emergency vouchers in L.A., she remains in limbo. Although the housing authority has distributed all of its vouchers, it has had little success getting recipients into permanent housing.”

“Vast” is an understatement. Out of more than 3.000 vouchers available, only 196 have been used to get a person actually housed. That's a pitiful success rate of 5.8%. So what's the problem? Homeless people eligible for vouchers, including many in actual possession of them, say that they try to jump through the bureaucratic hoops and end up never hearing back from the government agencies in question.

Leaders of those agencies say that while they try to prevent that from happening, they have “staffing issues,” and must obviously grapple with the plain fact that there is little housing available in Los Angeles County.

Still — (admittedly much smaller) Santa Barbara is not exactly a real-estate market with a lot of vacancies, and its housing authority got 89 emergency vouchers in July 2021, housed all those people and just got 25 more vouchers. If you can find housing for homeless people in that luxury market, with less than a half percent vacancy rate, you can find it here. Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, figure out how to do your job. People are dying out there when you don't.