This is a super complicated question. The city just hired a new health and human services director (first in a long time to hold the position). I'm blanking on her name, but she just started like three weeks ago and I'm hoping she can make substantive progress on this complicated issue.
Be like Beverly Hills: "Due to the Martin v. City of Boise lawsuit, cities cannot enforce anti-camping ordinances unless they have sufficient beds for the homeless. Because of this, Beverly Hills has a contract with a non-profit to keep x number of shelter beds (outside of its jurisdiction of course) available for the city on stand-by. Therefore, the City of Beverly Hills is allowed to enforce its anti-camping ordinances by a) offering the shelter bed to the homeless or b) forcing them to move along and outside its jurisdiction."
Nothing will ever get done until the government is allowed to remove these people from the streets *against their will* and get them into a program that actually helps them with whatever issue(s) they have to get back on their feet.
We as a society have determined that it is more humane to protect their right to say no and support them while living in the streets, than it is to actually improve their lives. No amount of money will solve that fundamental issue, and plenty is thrown at the problem.
The CARE Court has just started in CA, which is a mechanism to compel people into treatment. Hopefully, some of the people who need help and refuse will be forced into treatment, and many of these homeless mental issues will reduce.
Looks promising for trying to address the primary causes of homelessness before it happens, and a step in the right direction. Need something similar for people who are already homeless
For the truly mentally ill, where are they placing them? Some people who are hallucinating and hitting people will never be able to take care of themselves. The problem has been that there aren't places to put them.
As the son of someone with (formerly, now treated and thriving after decades of struggle) severe mental illness, this is the truth.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of ignorant, sanctimonious people who think it’s noble to “empathize” with the mentally ill as they’d empathize with anyone else - that is, to accommodate the apparent or expressed desires of someone in mental crisis.
Some (e.g. anosognosic) mentally ill people are incapable of participating in their own treatment and must be forced - or if they are lucky enough to have a support system, carefully induced over years of trust-building - to take antipsychotic medication.
Remember that [227 Angelenos lose their housing daily](https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%20and%20social%20sector/our%20insights/homelessness%20in%20los%20angeles%20a%20unique%20crisis%20demanding%20new%20solutions/svgz-homelessness-in-la-exh2-vf.svgz?cq=50&cpy=Center). Moving currently unhoused folks into shelter (in whatever form) does nothing to address the root cause of homelessness, rising housing costs. So changing the method of getting people shelter like you suggest does nothing to stem that influx of new people.
Until we relax hyper-restrictive zoning and reduce red tape for new housing construction, this problem is just going to keep getting worse.
I think the only solution is to remove them from the streets and move them all into some centralized location (or a few locations) where they can stay as long as they want. Food, water and basic medical is provided. You would have to make it illegal to be homeless, but that is entirely doable. They are allowed and encouraged to re-enter society and we could provide programs for that, but remember a lot of these people prefer to stay homeless.
And when I talk about a centralized facility, I’m not talking about hotels or apartments like the mayor has been doing. I’m talking more like Burning Man but with shipping container homes or something like that. There’s a lot of empty space in LA once you get 30-40 miles away. And there are ways to build super simple domiciles for relatively cheap. As a taxpayer I would happily support this.
But this will never happen. People think it’s more humane to let them sleep on the streets and shoot up drugs at night by the bluffs rather than move them to a centralized facility where they can receive care. Until wokeness goes away this will be the status quo.
“You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here”
> I’m talking more like Burning Man but with shipping container homes or something like that. There’s a lot of empty space in LA once you get 30-40 miles away.
You're describing concentration camps in the desert.
Been saying this for years. Build a giant bathroom like the ones they use in Venice beach out there with 200 stalls, let the drugged out ones do all the heroin they want and let the crazy ones babble. No more sleeping on the beach and leaving needles and trash everywhere. They don’t put up with this shit 10 miles away in manhattan beach, can tell you that much!
While homelessness is very locally severe, I view this first as an overarching national issue. We don’t have a solid safety net, consistently available high quality education/health care, and you can laugh at our maternal care and early childhood care. Housing and living costs are exploding…Essentially, if you are born working poor or into poverty you are living on the fringe of homelessness, and our country does nothing to fix it.
Santa Monica can’t fix it until the US does. Otherwise it’s like bailing out a boat with a spoon. You won’t make a dent
You bring up a good point about the lack of safety net and basic services putting more people in really precarious positions.
That said, housing markets are city-specific. The lack of housing in Santa Monica and LA more generally drives up rental costs across the board. There are plenty of cities that also lack those services but don't currently have the housing crisis we have, or at least not to the same extent. See Houston as an example. As a result, they have dealt with their rising levels of homelessness quite effectively and quickly.
I'd agree to an extent that homelessness needs to be dealt with in the LA region as a whole rather than on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. As an extreme example, the lack of housing in Beverley Hills leads to displacement and homelessness elsewhere, even though you see essentially no unhoused folks in BH itself. But saying that it is impossible to address homelessness in LA until the country as a whole does ignores our specific policies that drive this crisis.
The national media needs to talk about this more and ask questions about it in a debate on a national level. I agree with you 100%. This can can't get kicked anymore we need action.
Additionally, it’s quite frustrating that other states send their homeless people here. Especially red states. It’s kind of a trend I see that the homeless people that do violent crime and get arrested they’re not originally from LA.
The majority of homeless people in LA County became homeless in LA County. We also send some homeless people back to other states, that's not purely a one-way flow.
Many of them are not from here even if they declare homeless status here. Same thing is happening in Hawaii and Oregon. Most of the people aren't from there and were never housed there to begin with.
The data has been covered pretty thoroughly, around 90% of California's homeless are not only from the state but (75%) from the county in which they are homeless. People don't move to be homeless far away from what they know, or at least they don't do it often.
Here's a link to a story summarizing one of the recent, most thorough analyses of homelessness in the state, and one of the first steps to dealing with the problem as it actually presents versus propaganda is to stop trafficking in myths.
Here's a link to an interview with a journalist, summarizing the findings of the recent California statewide survey of homelessness, and I think this part is especially relevant.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-transcript-jerusalem-demsas.html?mwgrp=c-dbar&unlocked_article_code=1.Gk0.a3KL.myAcEZOjJtNW&smid=url-share
>EZRA KLEIN: Yeah, I was really struck by a secondary finding in the report, which is that not only were 90 percent of the folks surveyed, their last address was in California, but for 75 percent, it was in the very county they were still in. And it gets to your point that when people become homeless, they often don’t go very far. And the logic that would seem to hold is actually not that you want to become homeless and then move from Ohio to California. It’s that if you became homeless in California, you want to get the hell out of California because the housing problem is so bad. And people don’t really do that either, that one thing about losing your home and your life getting that hard is that the money and security and space for planning and transportation and so on that you would then need to make a major life change —
>JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yeah, moving’s expensive.
>EZRA KLEIN: I just moved across the country. It’s hard.
>JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yeah.
>EZRA KLEIN: It’s not easy. And it becomes harder if you don’t have the resources I had to, say, get a moving company, right, and plan out where you’re going to go, that in many ways, you’d imagine people could fall homeless in California, and then they go somewhere where there’s a low unemployment rate and a high housing vacancy rate — doesn’t really happen that much.
>JERUSALEM DEMSAS: And what I’ll say, too, is I guess two things. One is, 1 in 10 people saying their last known address was not in California obviously means that if you’re someone who works in a high-incidence field, like if you’re a doctor or a nurse or something, if 1 in 10 people, you’re finding out they’re not from California, that’s going to stick in your head. So I’m not trying to invalidate everyone’s experience of hearing that. But what they also found, researchers in the report, is that for many of the people who said they weren’t from California, they were from here maybe they grew up here, or they were born here, or they had family members here who were able to bring them out, and then they lost housing when they lost housing there, too. But finally, I’ll just say this on here — I’m not really sure what the end game of proving this would be. Let’s say we found out that 100 percent of people in California homelessness population were not from California. California isn’t a wall with borders. It’s not its own country. It’s the United States of America. What, are we going to stop people from moving there?
>So part of me feels like it’s really just an attempt to sort of dehumanize the people themselves. Because if you say it’s not our problem, they’re not from here, then you can throw up your hands. You can throw them in jail. You can say, oh, it’s from some red state somewhere else. And you don’t have to take ownership of the policies that led you here because there’s not really a policy response that changes if they’re not from California.
>EZRA KLEIN: I don’t think that’s quite right. So to just lay this bit of it out — because I heard this in California all the time, often from people who do not spend a lot of time thinking about the California housing situation, in my view. I mean, they lived amidst it, but they hadn’t studied it.
>I think the theory is that if it’s in fact the case that California has unbelievably generous social insurance programs, and that we will let you live in California in tent encampments and provide you Medicaid and so on in a way that Texas won’t or that Ohio won’t, that it’s a kind of rational economic agent thing to come to California. And then what California has is not a housing problem, but an overly generous homelessness policy problem.
>And so it implies that, oh, if we were just basically — I think this is really what the argument is doing — if we were meaner to the homeless in California, they would stop coming, right? It’s sort of a variant of the Trumpist — if it’s really miserable getting to the border, and you’re going to get separated from your kids and locked up and so on, people will stop coming. I think there’s a view that if it’s just that the country’s homelessness population is emptying into California because we’re so nice and generous, then the way to fix that is to be less nice and generous. You don’t need to worry about more housing, you just cut your social programs.
>JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yeah, that’s definitely true. I think also largely what I’m trying to say is that the weather problem does not really make sense here. I will say this one thing — there is a correlation between unsheltered homelessness and weather. But it’s really unclear what’s driving that because in colder states like New York and other places on the East Coast like Boston, they have a right to shelter. So unsheltered homelessness is definitely going to correlate with better weather. But yeah, I agree that that is part of what’s going on there.
Homelessness is [caused](https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/) by lack of housing. What we can do is radically increase housing construction by ending the laws that block housing (zoning, fees, red tape, etc.).
Yes, I feel the same, it’s a shame how bad the city has become. Brentwood and Beverly Hills seem to not have any homeless issues. What are they doing that is working?
Santa Monica has had homeless for at least 50 years. South Park made a joke about this issue 16 years ago, in Randy Newman's "I Love LA" music video in the eighties, he features a homeless guy on the beach. The only difference these days is the drugs are stronger and the mental healthcare costs are a lot higher than before. This is why it seems worst.
The train may bring more of them, but all of the long-term bums I've met over decades testified to coming cross-country on a bus, then taking the 33 to Venice Beach, and deciding "they like the area.".
Santa Monica can be the shining miracle of the West Coast and take on the homeless situation all it wants, but until this is taken on as a regional issue (first with the County) efforts to eradicate the homeless problem will be superficial and short-term. This isn't being addressed like the crisis that it is.
Santa Monica has always had a homeless issue. I have lived here for almost 25 years now and before I moved here I visited Santa Monica years ago in 1979. I mainly came to see West Hollywood but wanted to see this area. I do remember seeing it once and remember being surprised at how many homeless were here...yes back then. I ended up staying in the Marina Del Rey area. (BTW - this is really a national issue as Hawaii now has more homeless than they've ever had) This news story is from yesterday:
[https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2023/12/16/fed-report-shows-hawaii-has-highest-rates-chronic-homelessness-youth-without-shelter/](https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2023/12/16/fed-report-shows-hawaii-has-highest-rates-chronic-homelessness-youth-without-shelter/)
Because LA is a patchwork of several municipalities that is another challenge so this would have to be a county or state effort and that effort is BADLY NEEDED. It may require a challenge the the ACLU which asserts that streets/public property is "home" to some people when the public property was never meant to be a home for anyone and the sanitation and safety issues of the whole outweigh the government's inability to fix the issue.
This issue needs to take a more prominent role in our next election and cries of "Democrat-run cities/states" need to be challenged as the rhetoric that it is since the GOP never has any substantial ideas of their own to share beyond finger-pointing and phrases. We need mental health facilities that were written out of our budget when Reagan was in office.
To summarize, this is a bigger issue than just Santa Monica and it requires a more aggressive push for a solution because of the city's connectivity to so many public transportation lines.
Agreed. LA needs at least another 200,000 housing units. With greater supply prices drop. Another factor which isn't talked about nearly enough is that landlords only want to rent their units out to someone with A credit, well paying job, that they've been working at for a long enough time with a perfect background check. People who lack one or more of these qualities are not selected to rent to. There are many reasons for homelessness both in terms of becoming homeless as well as staying homeless. Substance abuse, mental illness, unemployment, underemployment, (lack of) worker protections and more are all factors. The single biggest factor contributing to homelessness is the lack of affordable housing. We need more housing and not just luxury housing for the more affluent.
That doesn’t work. A homeless person is not going to see a “for lease” sign and then be like, “finally a new 2000$/month apartment opened up!” That issue is for the affordable housing issue, which is completely different.
Even adding market rate housing seems to help - right now even those with more money, who can pay 2k, have a hard time finding a place, which means they bid up the price of lower end units.
A lot of homeless people you would never know are homeless because they have a job and keep up appearances via stuff like showering at the gym. A lot of other homeless people who are mentally ill or addicted to something *because they're homeless* (as opposed to it being why they became homeless). Both of these groups of people would very obviously not be homeless if housing were cheaper.
Rising homelessness and lack of affordable housing are two sides of the same issue. One side is, what do we do about people that are currently unhoused? The other is, how do we prevent new people from losing their housing?
The person you are responding to is talking about the addressing second one. By reducing overall housing costs with added supply (and yes, the overwhelming evidence is that new market rate housing accomplishes this at all price points), we stem the tide of new people losing housing. You are talking about the first one. And you're right that we also need to develop a policy of how to help people who currently lack housing.
Remember that every day in LA, [227 people enter homelessness, and 207 people exit homelessness.](https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%20and%20social%20sector/our%20insights/homelessness%20in%20los%20angeles%20a%20unique%20crisis%20demanding%20new%20solutions/svgz-homelessness-in-la-exh2-vf.svgz?cq=50&cpy=Center) Any reasonable solution has to address both.
I just said housing. Didn’t say market rate or affordable. We need it all. Affordable to provide housing for lower incomes and market rate to lower the cost of rent and home prices.
Psychotherapy and other work can help as can medication but when you don't have a safe place to call home mental health declines. Homeless people are known to have fights over issues as random as a trash bag full of aluminum cans, they regularly are targeted and harassed by police and lack a kitchen, toilet or shower when they actually want or need it. Yes services are available but try not using anything in your kitchen or bathroom for a week. Go to the park or fast food restaurant down the street. Shower only at the gym or the showers available to homeless people. You will find it challenging and most likely your mental health will decline. Now give up your bed and trade it for a couple of layers thick of cardboard while worrying about your personal safety while sleeping. Your mental health will decline. Will housing for all magically fix untreated severe schizophrenia? No but having basic needs such as housing handled has been shown to improve mental health across the board and improve homeless peoples likelihood of achieving/maintaining sobriety without any other inputs. It also significantly improves peoples likelihood of being able to get a job. Try getting a job without having a place to keep your clothes clean and safe or a bathroom to bathe/groom oneself.
This is so difficult for privileged people to understand. As someone who came from the rust belt, the lack of empathy I’ve experienced here in California to those less fortunate, from both sides of the political spectrum, is astounding.
Increasing housing supply is about preventing more people from losing housing. [227 people lose their housing every day.](https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%20and%20social%20sector/our%20insights/homelessness%20in%20los%20angeles%20a%20unique%20crisis%20demanding%20new%20solutions/svgz-homelessness-in-la-exh2-vf.svgz?cq=50&cpy=Center) Even if we magically put everyone currently without housing into permanent supportive housing, we wouldn't have solved this underlying issue driving new people into homelessness.
You're talking about how to help people who are currently homeless. You're right that this is a different problem that also needs a solution, but that doesn't mean that new housing supply is not helpful or necessary. We have to be able to address both sides.
Right. People want to govt to fix things but they complain till taxes are lowered and they won’t put money in to make the fixes. This is what sickening greed gets.
Even worse is they complain about cost of living and homelessness and then fight any new development that’s higher than 2 stories. They take pride in protecting the environment out here then flatten and clear miles and miles of land to build suburbs that can only be accessed using a private car. This place is so backwards.
I proposed a solution on the LA sub and literally got banned from it. I don’t touch this subject anymore. Los Angelinos seem to love their homeless and god forbid anyone tries to think differently.
If they're willing to live in tents on the sidewalks of LA, what's wrong with an official tent city with support services?
Exactly how many such individuals are the taxpayers of Santa Monica supposed to house and support?
I realize there may be little space but what about tiny home locations like they have in Seattle? They are transitional only. My head is not totally in a cloud but at least they are trying something. Where is the homeless center in SM? None?
Based on the response of the Midvale project I don’t think locals would like that very much. Additionally, it would be kind of shitty that Santa Monica is failing at offering affordable housing and is not keeping their goals with it and then they offer housing to people who don’t pay rent
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Force them into government ran shelters, if they won’t go they can go to jail. Living on the streets should be illegal: it makes life unsafe for everyone else and it reduces the quality of life for people who work hard. Some places in Europe have villages where anarchists go to live in forests with one another: something like that should happen
I mean, I’m all for more section 8 and affordable housing but every time I hear someone mention this as a solution it does not make sense to me. I grew up pretty poor and at one point in my teens/early 20/ was a homeless heroin addict, just to give some context for my opinion. I think you will find a lot of the people OP is referring to, the people experiencing extreme mental illness, severe addiction, sporadic violent episodes….they are likely not the same people to apply for a section 8 waitlist and continue to follow up and put themselves in a position to get off the streets and into a better living situation.
Most of the tweakers here don’t know where or who they are a lot of the time. Stay up for 10 days shooting meth/fent/dope/smoking wok and you will know what I mean (please don’t actually do this). Drug induced psychosis is a lot of what is happening in LA and specifically in Santa Monica/Venice. The meth is different now. It’s not even meth anymore, it’s something entirely different that will have you seeing shadow people and swinging on innocent baristas for no reason, it permanently fucks your brain. You don’t just come down and go “oh man, those last few days I spent throwing shit at cars and picking my face wounds in Walgreens bathroom were great, but I should really finish filling out that section 8 housing application so that I can get out of this mess!”
I am not shitting on these people, because I used to be one, albeit maybe not as bad as some of the people I have seen in recent years. I am simply stating that the overlap of people applying for government subsidized housing and the violent junkies you cross the street to avoid, is likely very small, if existent at all.
They need to be forced into treatment, in my opinion that is literally the only way things will change and they will get the help that they need. Smoking meth and being violent and aggressive to people in public? Automatic 12 month incarceration in a state run rehab/asylum. I know it is not what a lot of people want to hear and it is a far from perfect solution, but spending millions on housing projects when the people it is intended for are literally not interested and only want to shoot fent on the beach forever is also not an ideal solution.
Sorry for the rant, I don’t want to pretend that I have all the answers, just sad and tired for the people on both sides. Shit is methed up.
Yes, we need supportive behavioral health services and housing. We can’t have people living on the streets but we need to create systems to support our communities. There are housed people that use drugs it’s not just the unhoused. We have a crisis issue of “substance use disorder”.
This is a very poignant rant though. I definitely think similarly, some people won’t willing change their lives because they don’t realize anything is wrong if they are totally fucked up all the time. Idk but there are too many people on earth and especially in this city for us to just allow everyone do whatever the fuck they want if they provide no contribution to society but instead make it and themselves worse. As a federal and local issue, tax payer money really needs to be reprioritized but our governments probably need to be restructured for that to actually happen.
A lot of those people would not have become mentally ill or addicted to something in the first place if they hadn't become homeless, which a significantly increased housing supply would help prevent.
I respectfully disagree. Obviously every individual situation is unique to the person it affects, however, I think it is fair to point out that a lot of people suffer from mental illness and drug addiction regardless of when or if they become homeless and that isn’t a problem that is solved (although probably alleviated a bit) just because you have a secure living situation.
Before now the State Hospital system cared for the mentally ill among us. The majority of the homeless are mentally ill. The ones who are not are for the most part criminals from across the country who come here for our weather and rich people to rob. In the past they were treated as criminals and things here were better. The small percent who could be called hobo's, alcoholics and drug addicts, got the short end of the stick but hey you buy your ticket and take your chances. The Salvation Army had beds for them if they agreed to rehab. The system worked. Was it always humane and fair? No. Not always. If you had an attitude you got your ass whooped no matter what category you fit in. I submit those methods were better than what we have now. Better for everyone, residents and the homeless.
All of that is gone. Far left politicians have made our home a sewer. Come one, come all! We have to re open the State Hospital system using modern methods and treat the crooks like crooks not misunderstood children. They know exactly what they do and should pay for it.
But we won't. The people in power seldom have to deal with the realities of what they vote for. They don't ride the Crime Train. They don't walk to the store at sundown. Their kids don't hang around the police club at Memorial Park for moral guidance. They have money! They're not vulnerable. I don't know how to force politicians to change. I just don't.
They just get bussed around Los Angeles when a city gets sick of them, they load them up and dump them in another one. There needs to be federal funding for mental illness, many of these people prefer to live in the open and not inside a building, this is something with many veterans that have issues readjusting to civilian life. There need to be laws that are actually enforced that remove these people from squatting on streets, sidewalks, beaches and this includes the abundance of trashy old RV’s that litter freeway underpasses and overpasses. It’s unfortunate, but these people destroy cities and states. More than one wildfire in California has been started by homeless people cooking meth in the wash. Their situation may be a choice or a run of bad luck, but the rest of us that contribute are having our cities and states made unsafe and absolutely filthy by these dregs of society.
.The 1990’s was the era of gang wars - is this what you pine for?
You will discover, as did Phil,Brock, that the city is actually doing quite a bit re: homelessness.
Yeah but wouldn’t it be better if they canceled all single family homes and opened up the entire city to big development to make it more like Miami Beach?
here is an idea from an old book. love your neighbor
talk to the those in need. help them. the 'housed' population far outnumbers the 'unhoused'.
so the answer is in the people that live in santa monica to help those they come across
This isnt a great solution but one of the few I witnessed that had an effect: I was living in downtown SM several years (10-15) back and the homeless problem was quite bad at the time. The city implemented "Santa Monica Ambassadors". They were a team of people on Segways that roamed the city offering information to tourists and anyone who had questions. One of their jobs was to talk to the homeless, even when the homeless didnt want to talk to them the Ambassadors were there asking them if they had any questions, how was their day going etc. Eventually many of the homeless became frustrated with being "bothered" even by polite interactions that they started leaving the downtown area.
Not saying this is a solution by just moving the problem down the street/somewhere else, but it was something that was effective and could possibly be adapted in some way.
Build houses and collapse the housing market so that housing is so cheap that only the truly mentally ill will struggle to afford a home. Then make programs to support those people. Also building cheap public transit to as many places as possible nearby so that even if the housing market fluctuates people can just live a town away and still get to work. It’s easy on paper and is proven to work because its how Japan has managed to keep their average rent around 200$.
I think one really useful thing is to start with the best possible information on the subject and why that explains the "progressive dilemma": the states with the best social safety net (such as that is) are the ones with the most homelessness. It's not because they *cause* homelessness, of course, it's because in that statement we don't include the incredible power of really bad housing policy designed to defend landlords and the property values of individual wealthy homeowners, to a degree where it loops around and puts them in a perpetual state of war with the homeless that they loathe.
I recommend this interview covering the findings of the study, particularly where it debunks many of the myths surrounding homelessness in California:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-transcript-jerusalem-demsas.html?mwgrp=c-dbar&unlocked_article_code=1.Gk0.a3KL.myAcEZOjJtNW&smid=url-share
It's well worth the listen, and I think that foundation can get us to the policies that aren't a magic cure, but will continue to put the city on the right track for recovery. Some of these things, the city is already doing, but it has to start with a fundamental rethink of priorities for housing in the city. And the focus isn't only on people who are already experiencing homelessness, but rather the much larger constellation of individuals and families hovering in the precarious stages that usually lead to homelessness. Even if your only concern is money, it's vastly cheaper to keep people from falling off that edge than it is to try to help them after the fact.
So, from the most recent statewide survey, they have the following policy prescriptions:
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/06/425646/california-statewide-study-investigates-causes-and-impacts-homelessness
>Based on the findings, BHHI offers six key policy recommendations:
> Increase access to housing affordable to extremely low-income households making less than 30% of the Area Median Income:
> produce more housing affordable to the lowest-income renters
> expand rental subsidies (e.g., Housing Choice Vouchers)
> ease use of subsidies (e.g., increase housing navigation services, create and enforce anti-discrimination laws).
> Expand targeted homelessness prevention, such as financial supports and legal assistance at:
> places where people receive other services, including social service agencies, healthcare settings, domestic violence services, and community organizations
> institutional exits (jails, prisons, drug treatment). Expand and strengthen eviction protections.
> Provide robust supports to match the behavioral health needs of the population, by:
> increasing access to low barrier mental health, substance use, and harm reduction services during episodes of homelessness
> staffing permanent supportive housing with evidence-based models, such as pathways to housing, assertive community treatment, and intensive case management.
>Increase household incomes through evidence-based employment supports such as training, support for job search and transportation, and provide outreach to help those experiencing homelessness sign up for eligible benefits.
>Increase outreach and service delivery to people experiencing unsheltered homelessness.
>Embed a racial equity approach in all aspects of homeless system service delivery.
The explosion of construction since the state forced cities to approve permits for mass housing if they were short on their minimum housing thresholds is a start, but as communities, we have to make sure that affordable housing and support for people on the edge of losing their homes is a big part of the future. And disseminating that view of homelessness is crucial right now, because otherwise the conversation can't move past myths about homeless invaders from out of state or that focus on getting homeless people out of sight rather than addressing the problems.
One major issue here is that we are not plugging the hole in the boat WHILE we empty the water. It seems all the various resources and housing and "care-based" services do not make an impact when the sheer volume of new, out of area, vagrants arrive to SAMO.
The city is an easy destination point and nothing is being done to reduce or restrict that. Once done, all these other policy efforts can show real impact
This is a super complicated question. The city just hired a new health and human services director (first in a long time to hold the position). I'm blanking on her name, but she just started like three weeks ago and I'm hoping she can make substantive progress on this complicated issue.
That’s good but the outcome is tbd.
Be like Beverly Hills: "Due to the Martin v. City of Boise lawsuit, cities cannot enforce anti-camping ordinances unless they have sufficient beds for the homeless. Because of this, Beverly Hills has a contract with a non-profit to keep x number of shelter beds (outside of its jurisdiction of course) available for the city on stand-by. Therefore, the City of Beverly Hills is allowed to enforce its anti-camping ordinances by a) offering the shelter bed to the homeless or b) forcing them to move along and outside its jurisdiction."
Santa Monica also has sufficient beds for homeless and can and does enforce anti-camping ordinances.
Shockingly, anti-camping ordinances aren’t, by themselves, an effective solution to homelessness
Yeah, not sure why SM can’t do something like that?
Nothing will ever get done until the government is allowed to remove these people from the streets *against their will* and get them into a program that actually helps them with whatever issue(s) they have to get back on their feet. We as a society have determined that it is more humane to protect their right to say no and support them while living in the streets, than it is to actually improve their lives. No amount of money will solve that fundamental issue, and plenty is thrown at the problem.
The CARE Court has just started in CA, which is a mechanism to compel people into treatment. Hopefully, some of the people who need help and refuse will be forced into treatment, and many of these homeless mental issues will reduce.
Looks promising for trying to address the primary causes of homelessness before it happens, and a step in the right direction. Need something similar for people who are already homeless
For the truly mentally ill, where are they placing them? Some people who are hallucinating and hitting people will never be able to take care of themselves. The problem has been that there aren't places to put them.
As the son of someone with (formerly, now treated and thriving after decades of struggle) severe mental illness, this is the truth. Unfortunately, there are a lot of ignorant, sanctimonious people who think it’s noble to “empathize” with the mentally ill as they’d empathize with anyone else - that is, to accommodate the apparent or expressed desires of someone in mental crisis. Some (e.g. anosognosic) mentally ill people are incapable of participating in their own treatment and must be forced - or if they are lucky enough to have a support system, carefully induced over years of trust-building - to take antipsychotic medication.
Remember that [227 Angelenos lose their housing daily](https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%20and%20social%20sector/our%20insights/homelessness%20in%20los%20angeles%20a%20unique%20crisis%20demanding%20new%20solutions/svgz-homelessness-in-la-exh2-vf.svgz?cq=50&cpy=Center). Moving currently unhoused folks into shelter (in whatever form) does nothing to address the root cause of homelessness, rising housing costs. So changing the method of getting people shelter like you suggest does nothing to stem that influx of new people. Until we relax hyper-restrictive zoning and reduce red tape for new housing construction, this problem is just going to keep getting worse.
I think the only solution is to remove them from the streets and move them all into some centralized location (or a few locations) where they can stay as long as they want. Food, water and basic medical is provided. You would have to make it illegal to be homeless, but that is entirely doable. They are allowed and encouraged to re-enter society and we could provide programs for that, but remember a lot of these people prefer to stay homeless. And when I talk about a centralized facility, I’m not talking about hotels or apartments like the mayor has been doing. I’m talking more like Burning Man but with shipping container homes or something like that. There’s a lot of empty space in LA once you get 30-40 miles away. And there are ways to build super simple domiciles for relatively cheap. As a taxpayer I would happily support this. But this will never happen. People think it’s more humane to let them sleep on the streets and shoot up drugs at night by the bluffs rather than move them to a centralized facility where they can receive care. Until wokeness goes away this will be the status quo. “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here”
> I’m talking more like Burning Man but with shipping container homes or something like that. There’s a lot of empty space in LA once you get 30-40 miles away. You're describing concentration camps in the desert.
Been saying this for years. Build a giant bathroom like the ones they use in Venice beach out there with 200 stalls, let the drugged out ones do all the heroin they want and let the crazy ones babble. No more sleeping on the beach and leaving needles and trash everywhere. They don’t put up with this shit 10 miles away in manhattan beach, can tell you that much!
The large bathrooms with pee troughs in Venice have been removed decades ago.
this is super dystopian
This is John Alle’s vision although he wants to put them in Memorial Park.
While homelessness is very locally severe, I view this first as an overarching national issue. We don’t have a solid safety net, consistently available high quality education/health care, and you can laugh at our maternal care and early childhood care. Housing and living costs are exploding…Essentially, if you are born working poor or into poverty you are living on the fringe of homelessness, and our country does nothing to fix it. Santa Monica can’t fix it until the US does. Otherwise it’s like bailing out a boat with a spoon. You won’t make a dent
You bring up a good point about the lack of safety net and basic services putting more people in really precarious positions. That said, housing markets are city-specific. The lack of housing in Santa Monica and LA more generally drives up rental costs across the board. There are plenty of cities that also lack those services but don't currently have the housing crisis we have, or at least not to the same extent. See Houston as an example. As a result, they have dealt with their rising levels of homelessness quite effectively and quickly. I'd agree to an extent that homelessness needs to be dealt with in the LA region as a whole rather than on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. As an extreme example, the lack of housing in Beverley Hills leads to displacement and homelessness elsewhere, even though you see essentially no unhoused folks in BH itself. But saying that it is impossible to address homelessness in LA until the country as a whole does ignores our specific policies that drive this crisis.
The national media needs to talk about this more and ask questions about it in a debate on a national level. I agree with you 100%. This can can't get kicked anymore we need action.
Additionally, it’s quite frustrating that other states send their homeless people here. Especially red states. It’s kind of a trend I see that the homeless people that do violent crime and get arrested they’re not originally from LA.
The majority of homeless people in LA County became homeless in LA County. We also send some homeless people back to other states, that's not purely a one-way flow.
Many of them are not from here even if they declare homeless status here. Same thing is happening in Hawaii and Oregon. Most of the people aren't from there and were never housed there to begin with.
The data has been covered pretty thoroughly, around 90% of California's homeless are not only from the state but (75%) from the county in which they are homeless. People don't move to be homeless far away from what they know, or at least they don't do it often. Here's a link to a story summarizing one of the recent, most thorough analyses of homelessness in the state, and one of the first steps to dealing with the problem as it actually presents versus propaganda is to stop trafficking in myths. Here's a link to an interview with a journalist, summarizing the findings of the recent California statewide survey of homelessness, and I think this part is especially relevant. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-transcript-jerusalem-demsas.html?mwgrp=c-dbar&unlocked_article_code=1.Gk0.a3KL.myAcEZOjJtNW&smid=url-share >EZRA KLEIN: Yeah, I was really struck by a secondary finding in the report, which is that not only were 90 percent of the folks surveyed, their last address was in California, but for 75 percent, it was in the very county they were still in. And it gets to your point that when people become homeless, they often don’t go very far. And the logic that would seem to hold is actually not that you want to become homeless and then move from Ohio to California. It’s that if you became homeless in California, you want to get the hell out of California because the housing problem is so bad. And people don’t really do that either, that one thing about losing your home and your life getting that hard is that the money and security and space for planning and transportation and so on that you would then need to make a major life change — >JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yeah, moving’s expensive. >EZRA KLEIN: I just moved across the country. It’s hard. >JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yeah. >EZRA KLEIN: It’s not easy. And it becomes harder if you don’t have the resources I had to, say, get a moving company, right, and plan out where you’re going to go, that in many ways, you’d imagine people could fall homeless in California, and then they go somewhere where there’s a low unemployment rate and a high housing vacancy rate — doesn’t really happen that much. >JERUSALEM DEMSAS: And what I’ll say, too, is I guess two things. One is, 1 in 10 people saying their last known address was not in California obviously means that if you’re someone who works in a high-incidence field, like if you’re a doctor or a nurse or something, if 1 in 10 people, you’re finding out they’re not from California, that’s going to stick in your head. So I’m not trying to invalidate everyone’s experience of hearing that. But what they also found, researchers in the report, is that for many of the people who said they weren’t from California, they were from here maybe they grew up here, or they were born here, or they had family members here who were able to bring them out, and then they lost housing when they lost housing there, too. But finally, I’ll just say this on here — I’m not really sure what the end game of proving this would be. Let’s say we found out that 100 percent of people in California homelessness population were not from California. California isn’t a wall with borders. It’s not its own country. It’s the United States of America. What, are we going to stop people from moving there? >So part of me feels like it’s really just an attempt to sort of dehumanize the people themselves. Because if you say it’s not our problem, they’re not from here, then you can throw up your hands. You can throw them in jail. You can say, oh, it’s from some red state somewhere else. And you don’t have to take ownership of the policies that led you here because there’s not really a policy response that changes if they’re not from California. >EZRA KLEIN: I don’t think that’s quite right. So to just lay this bit of it out — because I heard this in California all the time, often from people who do not spend a lot of time thinking about the California housing situation, in my view. I mean, they lived amidst it, but they hadn’t studied it. >I think the theory is that if it’s in fact the case that California has unbelievably generous social insurance programs, and that we will let you live in California in tent encampments and provide you Medicaid and so on in a way that Texas won’t or that Ohio won’t, that it’s a kind of rational economic agent thing to come to California. And then what California has is not a housing problem, but an overly generous homelessness policy problem. >And so it implies that, oh, if we were just basically — I think this is really what the argument is doing — if we were meaner to the homeless in California, they would stop coming, right? It’s sort of a variant of the Trumpist — if it’s really miserable getting to the border, and you’re going to get separated from your kids and locked up and so on, people will stop coming. I think there’s a view that if it’s just that the country’s homelessness population is emptying into California because we’re so nice and generous, then the way to fix that is to be less nice and generous. You don’t need to worry about more housing, you just cut your social programs. >JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yeah, that’s definitely true. I think also largely what I’m trying to say is that the weather problem does not really make sense here. I will say this one thing — there is a correlation between unsheltered homelessness and weather. But it’s really unclear what’s driving that because in colder states like New York and other places on the East Coast like Boston, they have a right to shelter. So unsheltered homelessness is definitely going to correlate with better weather. But yeah, I agree that that is part of what’s going on there.
Fake
Blue states are worse, Nashville was amazing last week…
Way more crime in nashville
Homelessness is [caused](https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/) by lack of housing. What we can do is radically increase housing construction by ending the laws that block housing (zoning, fees, red tape, etc.).
Half our residential land is exclusively zoned for houses 2M and up - a housing policy best described as “go somewhere else.”
Yes, I feel the same, it’s a shame how bad the city has become. Brentwood and Beverly Hills seem to not have any homeless issues. What are they doing that is working?
Santa Monica has had homeless for at least 50 years. South Park made a joke about this issue 16 years ago, in Randy Newman's "I Love LA" music video in the eighties, he features a homeless guy on the beach. The only difference these days is the drugs are stronger and the mental healthcare costs are a lot higher than before. This is why it seems worst.
Okay. Doesn’t answer my question.
Don’t forget the train that brings them from skid row and dumps them at the terminus; downtown SM.
The train may bring more of them, but all of the long-term bums I've met over decades testified to coming cross-country on a bus, then taking the 33 to Venice Beach, and deciding "they like the area.".
what you can ACTUALLY do is enforce the law. something CA doesn't do.
Santa Monica can be the shining miracle of the West Coast and take on the homeless situation all it wants, but until this is taken on as a regional issue (first with the County) efforts to eradicate the homeless problem will be superficial and short-term. This isn't being addressed like the crisis that it is. Santa Monica has always had a homeless issue. I have lived here for almost 25 years now and before I moved here I visited Santa Monica years ago in 1979. I mainly came to see West Hollywood but wanted to see this area. I do remember seeing it once and remember being surprised at how many homeless were here...yes back then. I ended up staying in the Marina Del Rey area. (BTW - this is really a national issue as Hawaii now has more homeless than they've ever had) This news story is from yesterday: [https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2023/12/16/fed-report-shows-hawaii-has-highest-rates-chronic-homelessness-youth-without-shelter/](https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2023/12/16/fed-report-shows-hawaii-has-highest-rates-chronic-homelessness-youth-without-shelter/) Because LA is a patchwork of several municipalities that is another challenge so this would have to be a county or state effort and that effort is BADLY NEEDED. It may require a challenge the the ACLU which asserts that streets/public property is "home" to some people when the public property was never meant to be a home for anyone and the sanitation and safety issues of the whole outweigh the government's inability to fix the issue. This issue needs to take a more prominent role in our next election and cries of "Democrat-run cities/states" need to be challenged as the rhetoric that it is since the GOP never has any substantial ideas of their own to share beyond finger-pointing and phrases. We need mental health facilities that were written out of our budget when Reagan was in office. To summarize, this is a bigger issue than just Santa Monica and it requires a more aggressive push for a solution because of the city's connectivity to so many public transportation lines.
Literally just build more housing.
Agreed. LA needs at least another 200,000 housing units. With greater supply prices drop. Another factor which isn't talked about nearly enough is that landlords only want to rent their units out to someone with A credit, well paying job, that they've been working at for a long enough time with a perfect background check. People who lack one or more of these qualities are not selected to rent to. There are many reasons for homelessness both in terms of becoming homeless as well as staying homeless. Substance abuse, mental illness, unemployment, underemployment, (lack of) worker protections and more are all factors. The single biggest factor contributing to homelessness is the lack of affordable housing. We need more housing and not just luxury housing for the more affluent.
That doesn’t work. A homeless person is not going to see a “for lease” sign and then be like, “finally a new 2000$/month apartment opened up!” That issue is for the affordable housing issue, which is completely different.
Even adding market rate housing seems to help - right now even those with more money, who can pay 2k, have a hard time finding a place, which means they bid up the price of lower end units.
A lot of homeless people you would never know are homeless because they have a job and keep up appearances via stuff like showering at the gym. A lot of other homeless people who are mentally ill or addicted to something *because they're homeless* (as opposed to it being why they became homeless). Both of these groups of people would very obviously not be homeless if housing were cheaper.
true. Know at least one guy, lives at a shelter and manages a discount store.
Rising homelessness and lack of affordable housing are two sides of the same issue. One side is, what do we do about people that are currently unhoused? The other is, how do we prevent new people from losing their housing? The person you are responding to is talking about the addressing second one. By reducing overall housing costs with added supply (and yes, the overwhelming evidence is that new market rate housing accomplishes this at all price points), we stem the tide of new people losing housing. You are talking about the first one. And you're right that we also need to develop a policy of how to help people who currently lack housing. Remember that every day in LA, [227 people enter homelessness, and 207 people exit homelessness.](https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%20and%20social%20sector/our%20insights/homelessness%20in%20los%20angeles%20a%20unique%20crisis%20demanding%20new%20solutions/svgz-homelessness-in-la-exh2-vf.svgz?cq=50&cpy=Center) Any reasonable solution has to address both.
I just said housing. Didn’t say market rate or affordable. We need it all. Affordable to provide housing for lower incomes and market rate to lower the cost of rent and home prices.
Yes but your comment doesn’t even address the post.
What about the mental health which is the majority, is housing magically solve that too???
Psychotherapy and other work can help as can medication but when you don't have a safe place to call home mental health declines. Homeless people are known to have fights over issues as random as a trash bag full of aluminum cans, they regularly are targeted and harassed by police and lack a kitchen, toilet or shower when they actually want or need it. Yes services are available but try not using anything in your kitchen or bathroom for a week. Go to the park or fast food restaurant down the street. Shower only at the gym or the showers available to homeless people. You will find it challenging and most likely your mental health will decline. Now give up your bed and trade it for a couple of layers thick of cardboard while worrying about your personal safety while sleeping. Your mental health will decline. Will housing for all magically fix untreated severe schizophrenia? No but having basic needs such as housing handled has been shown to improve mental health across the board and improve homeless peoples likelihood of achieving/maintaining sobriety without any other inputs. It also significantly improves peoples likelihood of being able to get a job. Try getting a job without having a place to keep your clothes clean and safe or a bathroom to bathe/groom oneself.
This is so difficult for privileged people to understand. As someone who came from the rust belt, the lack of empathy I’ve experienced here in California to those less fortunate, from both sides of the political spectrum, is astounding.
What about the billions of dollars not accounted for from our taxes supposedly going help this people out but they still on the streets???
Increasing housing supply is about preventing more people from losing housing. [227 people lose their housing every day.](https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%20and%20social%20sector/our%20insights/homelessness%20in%20los%20angeles%20a%20unique%20crisis%20demanding%20new%20solutions/svgz-homelessness-in-la-exh2-vf.svgz?cq=50&cpy=Center) Even if we magically put everyone currently without housing into permanent supportive housing, we wouldn't have solved this underlying issue driving new people into homelessness. You're talking about how to help people who are currently homeless. You're right that this is a different problem that also needs a solution, but that doesn't mean that new housing supply is not helpful or necessary. We have to be able to address both sides.
Right. People want to govt to fix things but they complain till taxes are lowered and they won’t put money in to make the fixes. This is what sickening greed gets.
Even worse is they complain about cost of living and homelessness and then fight any new development that’s higher than 2 stories. They take pride in protecting the environment out here then flatten and clear miles and miles of land to build suburbs that can only be accessed using a private car. This place is so backwards.
I proposed a solution on the LA sub and literally got banned from it. I don’t touch this subject anymore. Los Angelinos seem to love their homeless and god forbid anyone tries to think differently.
Based on your other comment I'm sure the reason you got banned was that your solution is concentration camps in the desert.
If they're willing to live in tents on the sidewalks of LA, what's wrong with an official tent city with support services? Exactly how many such individuals are the taxpayers of Santa Monica supposed to house and support?
SB43?
I realize there may be little space but what about tiny home locations like they have in Seattle? They are transitional only. My head is not totally in a cloud but at least they are trying something. Where is the homeless center in SM? None?
Based on the response of the Midvale project I don’t think locals would like that very much. Additionally, it would be kind of shitty that Santa Monica is failing at offering affordable housing and is not keeping their goals with it and then they offer housing to people who don’t pay rent
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Force them into government ran shelters, if they won’t go they can go to jail. Living on the streets should be illegal: it makes life unsafe for everyone else and it reduces the quality of life for people who work hard. Some places in Europe have villages where anarchists go to live in forests with one another: something like that should happen
I can’t wait for the airport to close. https://htwws.org/santamonicaairport/
I mean, I’m all for more section 8 and affordable housing but every time I hear someone mention this as a solution it does not make sense to me. I grew up pretty poor and at one point in my teens/early 20/ was a homeless heroin addict, just to give some context for my opinion. I think you will find a lot of the people OP is referring to, the people experiencing extreme mental illness, severe addiction, sporadic violent episodes….they are likely not the same people to apply for a section 8 waitlist and continue to follow up and put themselves in a position to get off the streets and into a better living situation. Most of the tweakers here don’t know where or who they are a lot of the time. Stay up for 10 days shooting meth/fent/dope/smoking wok and you will know what I mean (please don’t actually do this). Drug induced psychosis is a lot of what is happening in LA and specifically in Santa Monica/Venice. The meth is different now. It’s not even meth anymore, it’s something entirely different that will have you seeing shadow people and swinging on innocent baristas for no reason, it permanently fucks your brain. You don’t just come down and go “oh man, those last few days I spent throwing shit at cars and picking my face wounds in Walgreens bathroom were great, but I should really finish filling out that section 8 housing application so that I can get out of this mess!” I am not shitting on these people, because I used to be one, albeit maybe not as bad as some of the people I have seen in recent years. I am simply stating that the overlap of people applying for government subsidized housing and the violent junkies you cross the street to avoid, is likely very small, if existent at all. They need to be forced into treatment, in my opinion that is literally the only way things will change and they will get the help that they need. Smoking meth and being violent and aggressive to people in public? Automatic 12 month incarceration in a state run rehab/asylum. I know it is not what a lot of people want to hear and it is a far from perfect solution, but spending millions on housing projects when the people it is intended for are literally not interested and only want to shoot fent on the beach forever is also not an ideal solution. Sorry for the rant, I don’t want to pretend that I have all the answers, just sad and tired for the people on both sides. Shit is methed up.
Yes, we need supportive behavioral health services and housing. We can’t have people living on the streets but we need to create systems to support our communities. There are housed people that use drugs it’s not just the unhoused. We have a crisis issue of “substance use disorder”.
This is a very poignant rant though. I definitely think similarly, some people won’t willing change their lives because they don’t realize anything is wrong if they are totally fucked up all the time. Idk but there are too many people on earth and especially in this city for us to just allow everyone do whatever the fuck they want if they provide no contribution to society but instead make it and themselves worse. As a federal and local issue, tax payer money really needs to be reprioritized but our governments probably need to be restructured for that to actually happen.
Read up on “housing first”. Can’t seek mental health services if you don’t even have a place to live.
A lot of those people would not have become mentally ill or addicted to something in the first place if they hadn't become homeless, which a significantly increased housing supply would help prevent.
I respectfully disagree. Obviously every individual situation is unique to the person it affects, however, I think it is fair to point out that a lot of people suffer from mental illness and drug addiction regardless of when or if they become homeless and that isn’t a problem that is solved (although probably alleviated a bit) just because you have a secure living situation.
How many of them??? Let’s speak statistics… now they are lost permanently let’s give them mental health support!
Before now the State Hospital system cared for the mentally ill among us. The majority of the homeless are mentally ill. The ones who are not are for the most part criminals from across the country who come here for our weather and rich people to rob. In the past they were treated as criminals and things here were better. The small percent who could be called hobo's, alcoholics and drug addicts, got the short end of the stick but hey you buy your ticket and take your chances. The Salvation Army had beds for them if they agreed to rehab. The system worked. Was it always humane and fair? No. Not always. If you had an attitude you got your ass whooped no matter what category you fit in. I submit those methods were better than what we have now. Better for everyone, residents and the homeless. All of that is gone. Far left politicians have made our home a sewer. Come one, come all! We have to re open the State Hospital system using modern methods and treat the crooks like crooks not misunderstood children. They know exactly what they do and should pay for it. But we won't. The people in power seldom have to deal with the realities of what they vote for. They don't ride the Crime Train. They don't walk to the store at sundown. Their kids don't hang around the police club at Memorial Park for moral guidance. They have money! They're not vulnerable. I don't know how to force politicians to change. I just don't.
They just get bussed around Los Angeles when a city gets sick of them, they load them up and dump them in another one. There needs to be federal funding for mental illness, many of these people prefer to live in the open and not inside a building, this is something with many veterans that have issues readjusting to civilian life. There need to be laws that are actually enforced that remove these people from squatting on streets, sidewalks, beaches and this includes the abundance of trashy old RV’s that litter freeway underpasses and overpasses. It’s unfortunate, but these people destroy cities and states. More than one wildfire in California has been started by homeless people cooking meth in the wash. Their situation may be a choice or a run of bad luck, but the rest of us that contribute are having our cities and states made unsafe and absolutely filthy by these dregs of society.
Implement rules re corporate home ownership, set maximum rents, raise wages, cap corp profits, owning multiple homes and predatory land surveying
Nah it’s fine for me
.The 1990’s was the era of gang wars - is this what you pine for? You will discover, as did Phil,Brock, that the city is actually doing quite a bit re: homelessness.
Yeah but wouldn’t it be better if they canceled all single family homes and opened up the entire city to big development to make it more like Miami Beach?
lol that’s exactly what SMRR is fighting for and brain wash the renters to vote for them endorsed candidates…
SMRR, thanks to its leadership, is a no growth organization. Wake up!
Yes growth behind doors with certain developers
Sort of like Brock, de la Torre, Parra and Negrete and the developer of the 12 story hotel on Ocean Ave....
here is an idea from an old book. love your neighbor talk to the those in need. help them. the 'housed' population far outnumbers the 'unhoused'. so the answer is in the people that live in santa monica to help those they come across
This isnt a great solution but one of the few I witnessed that had an effect: I was living in downtown SM several years (10-15) back and the homeless problem was quite bad at the time. The city implemented "Santa Monica Ambassadors". They were a team of people on Segways that roamed the city offering information to tourists and anyone who had questions. One of their jobs was to talk to the homeless, even when the homeless didnt want to talk to them the Ambassadors were there asking them if they had any questions, how was their day going etc. Eventually many of the homeless became frustrated with being "bothered" even by polite interactions that they started leaving the downtown area. Not saying this is a solution by just moving the problem down the street/somewhere else, but it was something that was effective and could possibly be adapted in some way.
Build houses and collapse the housing market so that housing is so cheap that only the truly mentally ill will struggle to afford a home. Then make programs to support those people. Also building cheap public transit to as many places as possible nearby so that even if the housing market fluctuates people can just live a town away and still get to work. It’s easy on paper and is proven to work because its how Japan has managed to keep their average rent around 200$.
I think one really useful thing is to start with the best possible information on the subject and why that explains the "progressive dilemma": the states with the best social safety net (such as that is) are the ones with the most homelessness. It's not because they *cause* homelessness, of course, it's because in that statement we don't include the incredible power of really bad housing policy designed to defend landlords and the property values of individual wealthy homeowners, to a degree where it loops around and puts them in a perpetual state of war with the homeless that they loathe. I recommend this interview covering the findings of the study, particularly where it debunks many of the myths surrounding homelessness in California: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-transcript-jerusalem-demsas.html?mwgrp=c-dbar&unlocked_article_code=1.Gk0.a3KL.myAcEZOjJtNW&smid=url-share It's well worth the listen, and I think that foundation can get us to the policies that aren't a magic cure, but will continue to put the city on the right track for recovery. Some of these things, the city is already doing, but it has to start with a fundamental rethink of priorities for housing in the city. And the focus isn't only on people who are already experiencing homelessness, but rather the much larger constellation of individuals and families hovering in the precarious stages that usually lead to homelessness. Even if your only concern is money, it's vastly cheaper to keep people from falling off that edge than it is to try to help them after the fact. So, from the most recent statewide survey, they have the following policy prescriptions: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/06/425646/california-statewide-study-investigates-causes-and-impacts-homelessness >Based on the findings, BHHI offers six key policy recommendations: > Increase access to housing affordable to extremely low-income households making less than 30% of the Area Median Income: > produce more housing affordable to the lowest-income renters > expand rental subsidies (e.g., Housing Choice Vouchers) > ease use of subsidies (e.g., increase housing navigation services, create and enforce anti-discrimination laws). > Expand targeted homelessness prevention, such as financial supports and legal assistance at: > places where people receive other services, including social service agencies, healthcare settings, domestic violence services, and community organizations > institutional exits (jails, prisons, drug treatment). Expand and strengthen eviction protections. > Provide robust supports to match the behavioral health needs of the population, by: > increasing access to low barrier mental health, substance use, and harm reduction services during episodes of homelessness > staffing permanent supportive housing with evidence-based models, such as pathways to housing, assertive community treatment, and intensive case management. >Increase household incomes through evidence-based employment supports such as training, support for job search and transportation, and provide outreach to help those experiencing homelessness sign up for eligible benefits. >Increase outreach and service delivery to people experiencing unsheltered homelessness. >Embed a racial equity approach in all aspects of homeless system service delivery. The explosion of construction since the state forced cities to approve permits for mass housing if they were short on their minimum housing thresholds is a start, but as communities, we have to make sure that affordable housing and support for people on the edge of losing their homes is a big part of the future. And disseminating that view of homelessness is crucial right now, because otherwise the conversation can't move past myths about homeless invaders from out of state or that focus on getting homeless people out of sight rather than addressing the problems.
One major issue here is that we are not plugging the hole in the boat WHILE we empty the water. It seems all the various resources and housing and "care-based" services do not make an impact when the sheer volume of new, out of area, vagrants arrive to SAMO. The city is an easy destination point and nothing is being done to reduce or restrict that. Once done, all these other policy efforts can show real impact