LA mayor seeks to prove homelessness can be solved
Critics say Bass is focused more on aesthetics
LOS ANGELES — When Karen Bass took office as Los Angeles mayor with a mandate to tackle homelessness, Venice Beach was at the top of her agenda.
By late 2022, more than 100 people were living there in wallto-wall tents alongside seven-figure bungalows, a shop selling $180 linen pillowcases, and the gold’s gym that Arnold Schwarzenegger made famous.
On a recent morning in the neighborhood, however, dog walkers navigated the wide sidewalks with little trouble. there wasn’t a tent in sight.
this is what Bass and her allies say is progress. more than a year into her term, the sidewalks and parks in Los Angeles are, on the whole, cleaner. But momentum in the nation’s second most populous city is fragile.
inside Safe, the mayor’s flagship program providing motel rooms for homeless residents who leave encampments, is too costly to sustain as the city faces budget problems. the people staying in motels say their lives are in limbo until they get permanent housing. And every day, more Angelenos become homeless and new encampments form.
Bass is operating on the borrowed patience of her constituents. Some homeowners say that she isn’t moving fast enough. And progressive activists have accused her of focusing more on the aesthetics of clearing tents than moving people into permanent housing.
When she decided to run for mayor, Bass, 70, was a six-term Democratic congresswoman who found success in Washington, D.C. She was also a former social worker and physician assistant who felt tensions rising in her hometown in a way that was unsettlingly familiar.
in the 1990s, Bass said, voters blamed people struggling with addiction for soaring crime rates. that led to tougher criminal penalties for drug offenses, which fueled a rise in incarceration. in recent years, she saw a similar sentiment taking root toward people living on the street.
“As i went around the city for a year and a half campaigning, it became crystal clear to me that the most important issue around homelessness was encampments,” she said in a recent interview. “i could build all the housing in the world, but as long as there were tents, people would not believe anything had happened.”
in november 2022, Bass won the mayor’s race by nearly 10 points over Rick Caruso, a wealthy developer who had proposed moving people off the streets — by arrest if necessary — and relocating them to large, emergency tents. When she took office a month later, she immediately declared a city emergency on homelessness to give herself greater flexibility.
Bass soon launched inside Safe, aimed at eliminating the most visible encampments that had long frustrated neighbors.
in the past, when outreach workers offered shelter, they would first put homeless people on a list and prioritized them, in essence, by how likely they were to die on the street. it would then take weeks, sometimes months, to find an available bed — plenty of time to lose contact.
miguel Santana, a longtime civic leader who was among Bass’s advisers, said inside Safe was premised on the idea that it was a problem “to use the street as a waiting room.”
in the mayor’s first year, outreach workers fanned out to about 35 encampments in the city. they approached residents collectively at each site and talked to them about moving inside. As much as possible, residents from one encampment were kept together at the same motel near the neighborhood they were familiar with. that helped to ensure that communities that were forged on the street could stay together.
A couple of days later, outreach workers with nonprofits and other agencies would return with buses. the residents were assigned case workers to figure out what aid they might qualify for and where they might go after the motels. City sanitation workers then cleaned up debris and any items left behind.
Eventually, word spread enough that other homeless people would sometimes show up at encampments in hopes of getting a motel room.
the city of Los Angeles is largely responsible for moving people off the streets, cleaning up encampments, and enforcing laws within its boundaries. But Los Angeles County runs the agencies that provide long-term housing, drug treatment, and health care.
Crucially, Bass made the short walk uphill from City Hall to speak before the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Longtime city and county officials described it as a rare show of humility by a sitting mayor.
“i actually have seen and felt the difference,” said Kathryn Barger, the board’s most conservative member, who represents a suburban expanse that gives way to ranch land and desert in the northern reaches of Los Angeles County.
Resistance has come more from progressives, who fear that Bass has reinforced the criminalization of poverty.
“When an inside Safe operation is occurring on the streets, that location is being shut off for unhoused folks to come back to,” said Shayla myers, an attorney for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, which previously sued the city for allegedly violating the civil rights of homeless people. “that is a necessary response to be able to show progress, but it completely ignores the reality of the cyclical nature of homelessness.”
At an old-fashioned diner in the San Fernando Valley in December, Bass met with business leaders who quickly steered the conversation to homelessness. At one point, a woman told the mayor that she had recently spent a day trying to figure out how to remove excrement that was blocking the doorway of a local storefront.
“Jesus,” the mayor gasped, leaning over a mug of green tea.
Larry Slade, who leads the homelessness committee of the influential Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association, said he is rooting for Bass. But he continued to see people in distress accosting diners or shoppers on Ventura Boulevard, a major retail thoroughfare in the area.
“it’s a deluge, and we’re trying to put up sandbags,” Slade said. “i start to wonder if this is a problem that can be fixed by government.”
Los Angeles does not have enough affordable housing — as it is, more than 29,000 people are on a Los Angeles County waiting list for housing vouchers. Bass signed an executive order designed to accelerate affordable housing construction, but experts say it could take more than a year for significant numbers of additional units to be built.
Still, Bass said she felt she had accomplished a pivotal first goal: convincing Angelenos that their homeless neighbors want shelter.