Karen Bass vows to tackle homelessness

When it comes to a State of the ... whatever: City, State, Nation, World ... speech, symbolism isn't just important.

Symbolism may be the only thing memorable about it.

Politicians and their aides know this.

So all the decisions were certainly conscious ones when Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, just months into her first term in office, delivered her first State of the City address on Monday.

Location is the first symbolic fact about it. Former Mayor Eric Garcetti, for instance, went walkabout and gave his last State of the City address with the dramatic new Sixth Street Bridge as its backdrop in the great outdoors.

Bass made her State of the City debut in the plain, getthings-done confines of the Los Angeles City Hall council chambers. Symbolizing that she very much knows that no city, particularly Los Angeles, is an island, she welcomed remarks from crucial partners in anything she hopes to get done: Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Chair Janice Hahn and City Council President Paul Krekorian, alongside her own.

Bass' speech's focus was what it had to be: homelessness. Finding ways out of the all-encompassing homelessness crisis.

From staffer Linh Tat's news report: “Bass said she's proposing a record $1.3 billion investment to combat homelessness, including a $250 million investment to scale up Inside Safe,” a program to house more people.

Here, from our perspective, is what's going to have to happen to have any chance of success in solving the enormous problem: Once and for all, the city needs to firmly let the people to whom it is offering roofs over heads know that sometimes said roofs are not going to be right down the block from the sidewalk or freeway overpass where they've been camping out these last many years.

Los Angeles' job is not to house the homeless precisely in the neighborhood in which they are used to living. It's to help house them at all, efficiently. And then to provide the hands-up services, health care and job counseling that will soon enough allow them to live on their own.

Here's hoping Bass is the mayor to get that done. The crisis on our streets cannot continue.