LA mayor celebrates moving 8,866 homeless into permanent free housing in 2024
(The Center Square) – Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass touted the success of her homelessness efforts, citing her moving of 8,866 homeless Angelenos into permanent free housing thus far in 2024. The city says it funds 29,554 vouchers for permanent supportive housing for homeless individuals and families, with $2,407 vouchers for one-bedroom apartments.
“The old ways of managing the crisis instead of solving it are over,” said Bass in a statement. “We are turning the page to make lasting change. You can see the results with more people inside, more clear sidewalks, and new, innovative housing.”
At the start of 2024, the City of Los Angeles estimated it was home to 45,252 homeless individuals, including 29,275 unsheltered homeless and 15,977 sheltered homeless (who are still homeless but have a place to sleep indoors). That was an annual decline of 2.2% overall, including a 10.4% decrease in unsheltered homeless, and 17.7% increase in sheltered homeless, meaning most of the decrease in unsheltered homelessness was from giving individuals a place to sleep at night.
Bass’s homelessness update noted the city had brought more than 23,000 homeless Angelenos indoors into temporary shelter as of November 30, and 7,400 from temporary shelter into permanent supportive housing, a population that’s part of the 8,886 permanent housing placements.
Should the city wish to use vouchers to house all of its homeless, in one-bedroom apartments, it would cost $109 million per year. The city budgeted $1.3 billion for homelessness last year, but did not spend $513 million of the allotted money, suggesting the city’s homelessness programs do not have a funding problem.
Across Los Angeles County, which had 75,312 homeless individuals at the start of 2024, 27,000 placements were made into permanent housing in 2023, resulting in a net 216 individual decrease in homelessness.
This suggests that at least 27,216 individuals became homeless in Los Angeles County that year, and that the county must consistently place nearly thirty thousand individuals into permanent housing each year just to keep up with growth in the homeless population.
Bass touted her “affordable” housing programs — which require housing to be price-controlled, including at rates that lose developers money on new construction — as a cornerstone of preventing homelessness.
However, housing experts say these restrictions only reduce housing costs for a select few, and increase the cost of housing for everyone else.
“Between 1990 and 2000 [California] cities imposing below-market housing mandates end up with 20 percent higher prices and 7 percent fewer homes overall,” wrote Tom Means and Edward Peter Stringham in a peer-reviewed analysis of California “affordable” housing policies, concluding such policies “may not be about increasing the supply of housing or making it more affordable overall.”
In Los Angeles, more stringent “affordable” housing requirements have led to the near-disappearance of market-rate housing, despite high demand.
In San Francisco, the San Francisco Standard reports a housing startup offering $700 per month sleeping pods with shared common areas does not meet the city’s inclusionary affordable housing program because its homes are too small. The city says the startup must pay a $306,058 fee to be allowed to rent out its 30 bed pods, or more than what the startup spent on making the housing.
“Ironically, this project cost about $60,000 to physically set up, so the affordable housing fee would be five times what we paid to even set up this affordable housing,” Brownstone Shared Housing CEO James Stallworth told The San Francisco Standard.
Stallworth’s homes, which would likely qualify as single-room occupancy housing in which individuals have private rooms but shared common areas, would qualify for housing vouchers in Los Angeles of $1,598, or nearly double the market rate paid by Brownstone tenants.
