California Governor Gavin Newsom announced $827 million in funding to address the state’s homelessness crisis, including $380 million that will go toward Los Angeles and surrounding cities. The aim of these grants is to better connect unhoused people with housing, shelter, and services.
There are an estimated 45,000 unhoused people in the city of Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA. At Tuesday’s press conference, Newsom stressed the importance of accountability in addressing the crisis.
“No one is naive about the challenge of this issue. No one is naive about the public’s perception of our progress in this state. No one is denying how angry people are, how frustrated they are, and how heartbroken they are,” he said.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass pointed to a recent slight drop in the city’s unhoused population, and praised local officials for working together.
“We know that the system is complex. We know that there’s many areas of dysfunction, and one of the historic areas of dysfunction was bickering and finger-pointing between different levels of government. But this is an example, what you see today, of work that we have been doing for the last couple of years, which is bringing every level of government together,” she said.
However, Bass has received backlash for implementing programs like “Inside Safe,” which has been widely criticized for lacking support services and a path to permanent housing. But the governor said this new initiative is different.
“This is not status quo ante today. We are not announcing an old strategy. We continue to iterate and are advancing a much more targeted strategy that’s focused on results and accountability that people can feel and people can see, that are not just numerics that make no sense to them,” the governor said.
He went on to explain that the new system will require grantees to submit monthly progress reports that will provide live updates to the California Housing and Community Development website. Fund recipients will also need to submit quarterly outcome reports to the California Homeless Data Integration System.
In June, LAHSA announced that for the first time in six years, homelessness in the city was down -- but only by 2.2 percent.