California spending billions to combat homeless problem
LOS ANGELES — When homeless outreach workers first visited her encampment under a Los Angeles highway overpass last fall, Veronica Perez was skeptical of their offer of not just a bed, but a furnished apartment complete with meals, counseling and the promise of some stability in her life.
“They said they had housing for me, but it just didn’t seem real,” Perez said. “When you’re homeless, you become leery and you don’t trust people.”
Perez, 57, had been sleeping in cars or tents all over Southern California since she lost her job at a storage facility three years ago and couldn’t pay her rent.
The second time the outreach team came to the camp beneath Interstate 405, Perez decided she was ready to take a chance and make a change.
She accepted the offer and took residence in one of 6,000 new units built statewide over the past year as part of Project Homekey. The program started in June 2020 is repurposing vacant hotels, motels and other unused properties as permanent supportive housing.
Homekey is the linchpin of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s $12 billion plan to combat homelessness in the nation’s most populous state. California has an estimated 161,000 unhoused people, more than a quarter of the nationwide total of 580,000, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Newsom signed the funding bill July 19, calling it the “largest single investment in providing support for the most vulnerable in American history.”
Newsom’s office said $800 million — most of it federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act money — was spent on Homekey in 2020 to provide shelter for 8,200 people.
Now the administration plans to go even bigger: California will spend $5.8 billion of state and federal funds over two years to expand the program and create an estimated 42,000 housing units.
“If you think of last year as a proof of concept, you can think of this year as taking this strategy to scale and making it a centerpiece of California’s approach to housing the homeless,” said Jason Elliott, senior counselor to Newsom.
In California, Homekey is an outgrowth of Project Roomkey, a temporary effort during the coronavirus outbreak to find shelter at hotels, which Elliot said provided beds for 42,000 homeless people 65 and older or others susceptible to COVID-19. It has been extended through June 2022.
Under Homekey, the state buys the properties, covers all construction and conversion costs, then hands them over to cities or counties that contract with local service providers.
The state’s effort should be applauded but amounts to a “drop in the bucket,” said Eve Garrow, analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.
“This is substantial, but it’s nowhere near enough to meet the needs of all the people currently displaced from housing,” she said.