It's Going to Get Worse
Los Angeles Already Is Dealing with a Spiraling Homelessness Crisis. More is to Come
It's Tuesday morning and volunteers are gathering supplies on the northwest side of Echo Park Lake. It's not an uncommon sight; there's been a small encampment of unhoused people at the park for some time, and a strong network of activists regularly hand out hygiene kits, food and other items to those in need across Los Angeles. But right now the need is greater, and demand could grow far more in the next few months.
If you spend even a little bit of time in Los Angeles you'll notice the tents. Homelessness has been a crisis for decades. Woody Guthrie sang about life on Skid Row in L.A. But it's been getting increasingly worse in recent years, and the coronavirus pandemic and its related economic collapse could break the already overtaxed network of volunteers, missions and official agencies trying to help people.
Well now it's going to get worse.
Currently a moratorium on evictions is in place as is a rent freeze, but rents are still adding up and will need to be paid. A study from the University of California Los Angeles' Luskin Institute said that when protections are lifted, a wave of evictions are likely, which would cause a massive increase in homelessness. And that's as economists nationwide speculate over a possible economic crash in the fall.
The situation is already bad in Los Angeles. In January, volunteers with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (the joint city-county agency overseeing homeless response) conducted a three-night count of unhoused people. The official results, released in June, found that 41,290 people are unhoused in the City of Los Angeles, a 14.2 percent increase over a survey from the same period in 2019, while in Los Angeles County the number sits at 66,433 people without homes, up 12.7 percent from last year. They do not reflect numbers since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. People have already lost jobs, struggled to get stimulus checks and unemployment benefits and some have already lost their homes. The approaching crash is going to be even more damaging.
In its report on the 2020 count, LAHSA noted that the homelessness situation is fluid; more than 52,000 people found homes last year in the county, but almost 83,000 people fell into homelessness. One of the main drivers, LAHSA emphasized, was economic precarity and the cost of living in Los Angeles. It’s that high cost and lack of affordable housing that’s behind the crisis, not addition or people being bused in from out of state, as some claim (many on the street do deal with substance abuse issues, and there have been some notable cases of dumping, but they do not represent the overwhelming reasons for the city and county's homeless crisis). As inequality increases nationwide, so too is it in Los Angeles, which has seen the number of unhoused people increase dramatically for two years running according to the official count.
In the last few months, activists and organizers have rallied people not just against systemic racism and massive increases in the Los Angeles Police Department's budget, but for greater protections for tenants. In the marches that have gone through Downtown Los Angeles since May, “Cancel Rent” is a familiar sign or slogan. Los Angeles is already an increasingly unaffordable place—new construction in Downtown favors luxury units and neighborhoods like Echo Park have been gentrified over the 21st century, displacing long-time tenants all while the cost of living continues to go up.
Even the preventative measures are going to fall short. LAist reported that the city's rent relief program, which has a $103 million budget, is going to help just 50,000 applicants. Approximately 221,000 people applied for help. Not even a quarter of those who knew of the program and applied are going to get assistance.
And where are people going to go if they do get forced out? City and county resources are strained. Even Project Roomkey, the ambitious state effort to move unhoused Californians into vacant hotel and motel units, has nearly stalled in Los Angeles County in the last month. Project Roomkey Tracker, which charts the progress via County data, found that it has 4,027 rooms contracted, with 3,930 ready and 3,538 in use. That's well short of the 15,000 room goal the County laid out at the program's launch. When I spoke to Heidi Marston, LAHSA's executive director, in May prior to the release of this year's Homeless Count, she said that if a crash happens and tens of thousands of people are suddenly homeless, LAHSA is not prepared to handle that increase.
On top of all of this, mass evictions and a spike in homelessness present a massive public health threat. The reason state and local officials even did the above measures is because having people out on the street during a pandemic, crowded into encampments, risks more people becoming infected with the virus. In the past few months, I've spoken with mission operators and service providers in Skid Row who talked about how hard it is to keep their already full spaces constantly clean and to make sure everyone who uses their services is protecting themselves. And that increase in tents around Echo Park Lake? Part of why encampments have grown is because the park has public restrooms where people can wash their hands and try to follow hygiene guidelines.
Unless some serious, drastic, outright radical action is taken, a lot of people are going to lose their homes. It's going to be a disaster, for so many reasons, and it is difficult to truly grasp the implications of what's coming. But it's coming and things are going to get worse.
Today's Panic Reading
To keep with the housing topic, the amazing journalists at The LAnd, a magazine formed in the wake of the takeover and layoffs at LA Weekly, are back with their second issue. One of the best pieces in it is this look at Chinatown's fight over evictions by Flora Adamian. I covered part of the fight at Hillside Villa while at Los Angeles Downtown News and Adamian does a fantastic job not only getting into the details of the struggle between tenants and landlords but also the wider context of the affordability fight in Los Angeles. And go support The LAnd, it's going great work.
Today's Music
Former Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker released this track in 2006 and 14 years later it's still pretty relevant. And catchy. Sing along if you know the words!
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="
frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>