New Action Item on Homelessness
Hey all,
Hope everyone had a wonderful thanksgiving, and is doing well! Also thanks to all who were able to contact the city council next week. You can still sign the petition to oppose the city council motion that would have punished folks sleeping on the streets. As I mentioned in my (quick) update, this is an issue that unfortunately is not going away anytime soon.
This week, advocates are trying to mobilize in the face of another measure in the city council agenda tomorrow, that would allow the city to resume the city’s program of CARE+, which involves "cleaning" homeless encampments. In theory this is a needed service that the city provides to ensure the health of homeless encampments, while doing what the city can to keep the streets clean. When designed, the ideas was that pair outreach workers with sanitation crew, having the outreach workers make the encampment residents feel comfortable in having their space cleaned, while sanitation workers could clean without taking the belongings of the homeless
However Curbed had a great article from earlier this year about how the program never followed through on this:
Outreach workers, all of whom work for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA, have less influence now over what homeless residents living on the streets can keep with them, according to social service providers speaking on the condition of anonymity. Crews were retrained in late November and were told to toss out everything that does not comply with the city’s size limits for items stored on sidewalks and streets.
The city leaders had decided onlyfour4 week into the program, that cleaning the streets should take priority, even if it meant displacing the homeless and their belongings
City leaders are being barraged by demands for more humane treatment of LA’s unhoused population while simultaneously being inundated by complaints of blocked and littered sidewalks—and failing to deliver results on both fronts.
On on top of this, there is an paradox in local governments asking folks who are homeless are being asked by the county to “shelter-in-place” during the current surge of COVID, while also forcing them to relocate by displacing their encampment
While I sympathize with the desire to keep the streets clean, the until there is shelter for folks who are unhoused, efforts like these will not really clean the streets, because more and more people will be pushed out of their homes.
The motion will be on the agenda tomorrow at 10 AM. If you are interested in voicing your concerns with this program, you can do so by:
Following this link to give public comment to the city council (Council file #20-0147).
If you need help filling out the public comment, here is a sample script for public comment you can use!
Let me know if you have any thoughts or questions! Hope you have a great rest of the week!