Two Democrats, Jose Ugarte and John McKinney, running in competitive races for Los Angeles City Council and city attorney have a different approach to tackling homelessness in L.A.
They believe housing has been invested in and since the homelessness problem persists, resources should be diverted to treating homelessness as a mental health issue.
“If my run for office has one legacy impact it is to reframe the discussion around homelessness away from a housing shortage problem toward a drug addiction and mental health problem,” McKinney said.
McKinney is an assistant district attorney running against Marissa Roy, an assistant attorney general.
Ugarte is running against Estuardo Mazerigos in City Council District 9, which includes the USC campus. He told Annenberg Media that at least half of Measure H and Prop HHH money needed to be allocated to mental health resources.
In 2016, Prop HHH passed issuing $1.2 billion in bonds dedicated toward housing for the homeless and for mental health facilities. In 2017, Measure H passed instituting a quarter cent sales tax to fund homelessness services and prevention.
“If you house somebody and they’re not mentally stable to stay in that house and to be under a roof and have rules, no drugs, no alcohol, no paraphernalia, then if they don’t want to stay there they can leave,” Ugarte said. “That’s the problem. But they can go in and out and no matter what taxpayers are still paying.”
Ugarte described to Annenberg Media his three-pronged approach.
“I think they said about 30% of homeless people are tagged as aggressive or have warrants for assault and battery,” Ugarte said. “Those are the ones you see on TV, they’re swinging a machete around or chasing people around. They shouldn’t be on our streets. They should be in a mental health facility, a rehab facility, a detox facility.”
Once a doctor releases them, Ugarte said they would go to a job training facility to learn how to perform a job, before the city offers them housing.
“If you take the three approach, there’s a 90% chance they stay in that housing,” Ugarte said. “If you offer someone housing, they go in that housing, there is a 50% chance that they’ll leave and they’ll be back on the streets and they’ll be back to us to try to house them again and pay for it.”
McKinney said that he worked in a drug court in Compton in the early 2000s where he helped hundreds of people beat their addictions.
“Those folks were homeless until they came into the court system and got court ordered treatment. We have the same problem today except instead of calling it a drug addiction problem we’ve been calling it a housing shortage problem or illegal eviction problem,” Mckinney said.
He said the framing of the issue matters because that is how the city goes about tackling it.
“If it’s framed that way and we attack it that way we’re never going to bring down the number of people living on our sidewalks which is outrageous at 45,000 in the city alone, 70,000 in the county of Los Angeles,” McKinney said. “We are the homeless capital of the entire country.”