Homeless fix isn’t cheap

For years, many Los Angeles residents have watched with alarm as homeless encampments spread across the city, from the sidewalks of skid row to alleys in South Los Angeles, behind shopping centers in the Valley and even on the bluffs above the Pacific Ocean.

Next month, voters will have to decide whether these concerns are strong enough to approve a new tax to fight homelessness.

The ballot measure culminated more than a year of discussion and debate at City Hall and beyond aimed at getting past the rhetoric and putting significant money behind solutions to the homeless crisis.

It marks a major concession from city leaders that they cannot deal with the problem with existing city resources and need property owners to help foot the bill to move people out of homelessness.

Proposition HHH on the November ballot asks voters to authorize $1.2 billion in borrowing over 10 years to jump-start the construction of 10,000 apartment units with on-site social and clinical services for thousands of chronically homeless people.

Dozens of homeless services agencies, for-profit and nonprofit developers, city and county officials, labor unions, clerics and business leaders are backing the measure as the prime feature of plans to end the homelessness crisis.

Buoyed by several polls this year showing that homelessness has moved to the top of residents’ concerns, the “Yes on HHH End Homelessness in L.A.” committee plans a million-dollar campaign to secure the two-thirds majority needed for passage. The campaign is co-chaired by United Way of Greater Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.

Opponents, who call the proposal “a giveaway to the politically connected developers,” have appeared at political forums but have not formed a campaign committee or raised funds.

Advocates for the homeless and providers of homeless housing see Proposition HHH as the means to finally do right by thousands of people who live on the streets because of mental illness, disability or addiction, and at the same time to remove the blight of homeless camps.

“Prop. HHH is the most significant effort ever undertaken to end chronic homelessness in Los Angeles,” campaign literature states. “It builds the safe housing with on-site supportive services — like mental health and substance abuse counseling — that we need to break the cycle of homelessness and poverty in our city.”

That enthusiasm reflects more than a decade of frustration over unfulfilled plans to build thousands of supportive housing units. A mounting body of research has shown that such housing reduces the drain on public services by getting people permanently off the streets.

But Proposition HHH is no quick or easy fix.

The bond funds may be spent only on housing construction, not on homeless services, and targets only the most challenged of the city’s estimated 28,000 homeless people. Because permanent supportive projects usually take three or more years to build, the earliest that the new housing would become available in significant numbers is likely to be 2020.