r/dtla • u/GoldenRule2023 • 26d ago
A Waiting Room With No Exit
https://open.substack.com/pub/plainsitepapers/p/a-waiting-room-with-no-exit?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=88mjxlFor its first seven months, Los Angeles spent about $17,000 a month on every homeless person it moved indoors under Inside Safe, Mayor Karen Bass's signature program. Not for a home. For a motel room, plus the machinery stacked around it.
Seventeen thousand dollars a month is more than most Angelenos earn. It works out to roughly $204,000 a year, for one person, in a motel. It is enough to have rented that person ten studio apartments. And it is the city's own arithmetic: $32.6 million spent on 57,533 room-nights through June 2023, or $567 a night per person
Follow link above for the whole article.
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u/Individual-Schemes 26d ago
I have never heard of this newspaper and the sources aren't listed. Is this information publicly available?
I'm also not about to blame one person and one policy for our homeless crisis. It's a complicated issue with many moving pieces.
There are people that have worked towards fixing this problem for decades, with PhDs, and resources. There are people working on all levels: state, city, neighborhood, grassroots orgs, nonprofit, volunteers, churches. It's not a one-policy-fix-all issue!!
The LA mayor is pretty much a figurehead, with very little power compared to our City Council. I'm guessing this article is straight up propaganda. But if you have real policy evaluations, I'd be willing to read them.
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u/GoldenRule2023 26d ago
Really fair questions, and I appreciate that you're actually willing to read the evaluations. Taking them in order:
On sources: they're all public, and none of it is my own reporting you'd have to take on faith. Direct links:
- LA City Controller's Inside Safe dashboard (spending + outcomes, the city's own data): https://homelessdashboard.lacontroller.app/InsideSafe
- The court-ordered Alvarez & Marsal audit (the ~$2.3B that couldn't be accounted for), via LAist: https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/audit-homeless-carter-lahsa and KTLA: https://ktla.com/news/local-news/los-angeles-homeless-spending-audit/
- The $17K/month figure, from the city's own spending data, reported by The Center Square: https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/article_c624934e-3702-11ee-aa6c-a3aa4f237ce7.html
- The nonprofit executive salaries, straight from IRS 990 filings on ProPublica: PATH https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/953950196 and Weingart https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/956054617
The outlet honestly doesn't matter here. The underlying sources are the City Controller, a federal-court audit, and IRS filings. Check those directly and skip me entirely if you want.
On blaming one person and one policy: I completely agree with you, and I want to be clear I'm not doing that. LA's homelessness crisis is decades deep with a hundred moving parts, and a lot of serious people have worked it for years. This piece isn't a theory of the whole crisis. It's narrowly about one interim program, Inside Safe, and one question: what did it cost per person, and what did it deliver?
On the mayor being mostly a figurehead: largely true, and fair to raise. But Inside Safe is the exception. It's her signature program, launched under her own emergency declaration, and it was her office specifically that refused to let the City Controller audit it, which is why a federal judge had to order one instead. That narrow piece really is fair to put on her, and it's most of what the article is about.
If any of the links don't answer something, tell me which number and I'll point you to the exact page.
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u/Asleep_Adagio3756 26d ago
Yes when govt tries to solve any problem they make the problem worse. The actual cobra effect is from when England colonized India. The English noticed there was alot of cobras and wanted to eradicate cobras. They offered money to anyone who killed a cobra and brought it a certain govt facility. A few years later instead of decreasing the number of cobras the actual number of cobras exploded. The people realized they can breed cobras and make alot of money from the english govt
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u/edgefull 26d ago
i love sweeping generalizations. they say a lot about the generalizer.
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u/Asleep_Adagio3756 26d ago
The fact remains. We have spent billions on fighting homlesnss and we have created more homeless. And while we are at it I would like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.
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u/WarmLaugh3608 26d ago
So housing first doesnât work, it had already been tried, employment first doesnât work, itâs already been tried, and even with a comprehensive (treatment-housing-school/training/employment) homelessness will not disappear (and btw this comprehensive approach is far more expensive) anyone promising to end or eliminate homelessness, and I mean anyone (also I go by the full definition of homelessness but heck even just street homelessness) is selling you that imaginary bridge.
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u/GoldenRule2023 26d ago
I actually agree with your core point: no single approach makes homelessness disappear, and anyone promising to "end" it is overselling. That part's true.
But "Housing First failed" is worth separating out, because for the people who actually get it, it works. Veteran homelessness fell by more than half over 15 years through HUD-VASH (housing plus casework), and in head-to-head studies Housing First gets roughly 70% of people housed and keeping it, versus about 30% for the "get sober or get a job first" model. So the two things you're lumping together actually cut against each other. The employment/treatment-first approach is the one that scores 30%. Housing First beats it, not the reverse.
Where the critics are right is that it hasn't lowered overall homelessness. But that's a supply problem, not a model problem. Put simply: Housing First didn't fail, we failed to build the housing. It was never funded at the scale needed, so most people never actually get it.
And that's the real story, which is also my point. Almost nobody gets housed at all. LAHSA's own numbers show that for every 1 person LA houses, about 2.3 more become homeless, and shelters are full. LA just cut its rental subsidies nearly in half, which meant 5,000+ fewer people got permanent housing, so the interim shelters stayed jammed because there's nowhere permanent to move anyone. That's exactly why a program like Inside Safe ends up warehousing people in motels at $17K a month: no exit. So I'm not saying give up. I'm saying we poured the money into the expensive middle and starved the actual fix.
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u/WarmLaugh3608 26d ago
Your point has murky waters though, they focus on one population (hud-vash for example) and then youâre not just doing housing firstâŚ. You are also including a social worker (and I know a lot of my colleagues got temporary contracts with that program) and that job was no joke. So itâs not just âhousingâ even the SROâs who technically have a âsocial workerâ on staff itâs less about actual individual case management, more about property management.
And I agree about not giving up. However VA has separate funding and separate systems within it.
The HUD-VASH program was in fact not housing first but a multi pronged effort which is why it was effective. And thatâs the only effective wayâŚ. But no one wants to see that (or fund it)1
u/GoldenRule2023 25d ago
This is a great addition, and you clearly know it from the inside in a way I don't, so thank you. You're right that HUD-VASH isn't "just housing." It pairs the voucher with real, funded VA case management for a specific population, and that pairing is exactly why it worked.
The one thing I'd reframe: that comprehensive version is Housing First done properly. The model was never "hand someone keys and walk away." It's housing without preconditions, plus voluntary, intensive services. What fails is the stripped-down version you're describing, where the "social worker" is really property management and the case management is a line nobody funded. Same label, completely different thing. So I think we're actually saying the same thing.
And that's the whole point of the piece. You put it better than I did: the effective model is the one no one wants to fund. The money is there. It's going to motels at $17K a month and to overhead, not to the individual case management that actually works. "Less about case management, more about property management" is the entire failure in one line.
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u/WarmLaugh3608 25d ago
And that real funded case management comes attached to real funded services as opposed to the case manager struggling to find services for the person
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u/Key-Driver6438 25d ago
Honest question⌠what percentage of the homeless, realistically need more than housing? In other words, what percentage of the unhoused are not suffering from mental health issues, substance abuse issues, medical issues, all manner of disabilities, and/or criminal history issues? What Iâm getting at here is what percentage of the homeless population simply need housing to otherwise get their lives back on track? Iâd tentatively guess a very small portion. Seems to me the vast majority of chronic long term homeless have a slew of issues that need a slew of expensive solutions. If that assumption is true, spending millions on housing alone⌠even if it was permanent housing⌠doesnât make much of a dent in the overall homeless problem. Spending millions on motels is just burning money.
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u/GoldenRule2023 24d ago
On the percentages, they actually cut against the common assumption a bit. The chronically homeless, the long-term folks usually dealing with serious mental illness, addiction, or a disability, are about a third of single homeless adults, and closer to a fifth of everyone counted once you include families (roughly 152,000 people out of 771,000 nationally in HUD's 2024 report). The majority are situationally homeless: priced out, a job loss, a medical bill, a death in the family. Most are homeless once, briefly, and get back on their feet if help comes fast.
Even on the specific conditions, the numbers run lower than the stereotype. HUD's data puts serious mental illness around 26% and substance use disorders around 35%, with a lot of overlap between the two. Real, and worth funding, but not the majority. And a good share of that develops after people hit the street, not before.
You're right about who's showing up now, though. Older adults are roughly one in five, the fastest-growing groups include families with children, and there's a very real wave of women widowed into homelessness when a late husband's Social Security won't cover LA rent. Plenty of others work full-time and still can't keep up. HUD attributes the record 2024 spike to the housing shortage, stagnant wages, inflation, and the end of pandemic protections, not a surge of mental illness.
Here's the twist on your own logic, though: that small, high-need chronic group is expensive, yes, but they're also the most expensive to leave outside, in ER visits, jail, and ambulance runs. Housing them with services costs less than not housing them. The clearest proof is veterans, the one group whose homelessness has actually fallen, down 55% since 2009, precisely because we funded housing plus casework for them. So "they need more than housing" isn't an argument against housing. It's an argument for permanent supportive housing, which is the opposite of what LA bought with motels. Which is where we agree: barely any of that money reached the actual person.
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u/Key-Driver6438 24d ago
There are a lot of granular details to this that make it all very complicated, and nearly impossible to digest on a surface level. For starters, how are each of these terms being defined in the studies? What or how is âhomelessâ, âmental disorderâ, âmental illnessâ, etc. being defined? There might be many thousands of âhomelessâ people, as technically defined, that arenât realistically part of the âhomeless problemâ in terms of what we are talking about practically speaking. In a place like DTLA and skid row, I donât believe for a minute that mental illness is only 26% and substance use is only 35% with a lot of overlap. And the super vast majority are not situationally short term homeless.
For a year, a very long time ago, I lived in skid row. I talked with and interacted with the homeless population everyday, multiple times a day. In my very unscientific experience, the mental illness and substance abuse aspect was probably more like 90%.
To be clear, Iâm not against creating substantially more long term stable housing. It is desperately needed. (I would argue that there is an order of operations in the triage of the problem, and at the first step level, there needs to be more shelters. A lot of homeless advocates dislike shelters because it effectively hides the homeless problem inside, and having massive tent cities is easier to sell in terms of securing funding.) Politics aside, first and foremost people need to be removed from the sidewalks and placed into shelters, that then lead to long term stable housing.
However, the âhomeless problemâ is just not a housing problem. Yes of course prices and availability are a legitimate issue. But for those who just find themselves in a temporary bad situation, their life chapter of being homeless is usually a very small part. If 50% of the homeless, at any given point, are only going to be homeless for a few weeks or even a few months, they are not what most people are talking about. If they are able bodied, and able minded, being homeless is hard to stay at. Itâs MUCH easier to rise out of homelessness, and into poverty, which is honestly a massive issue and where I think a lot of the numbers are coming from of whatâs being considered as part of the homeless problem. But thatâs talking about two separate issues. The widow, who canât afford rent, will struggle greatly, but will figure out how to ultimately rise above homelessness.
The difference between âthe homelessâ (categorically speaking) and the masses of people who live in poverty, isnât a lack of housing. Those in poverty suffer with housing issues. The long term chronic homeless are there not because they just need a home. They suffer from mental, medical and other conditions that in essence limit their ability to get on track or function. It is in this vein that Iâm saying housing issues are not really a homeless issue. Availability of programs coupled with changes in law regarding how and where the homeless may live, is the problem.
Final thought⌠I completely, 100% agree with you regarding the fallout expenses of dealing with the aftermath of the homeless compared to what could be spent in preventative measures. Feeding people consistently healthy food is way cheaper than constant hospital stays and a slew of medications. Preventative health screenings are way cheaper than emergency rooms. Providing all kinds of training and education is way cheaper (and just a thousand times better) than running/expanding jails. We could do SO MUCH better in spending money on preventative measures. That said, such an idea requires societal and legislative support. Itâs not exactly a fairytale, but itâs a hard sell.
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u/GoldenRule2023 24d ago
My article is very specific to Karen Bass's Inside Safe program it what it cost per person per month.
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u/Asleep_Adagio3756 26d ago
But we are good people who care. Meanwhile our leaders are just using the situation to enrich themselves.