Opaque operations plague INSIDE SAFE
According to unpublished CAO data from September, Inside Safe has only housed 38 out of 1,590 people, and many of those were legacy guests from Project Roomkey.
It’s hard to get information about Inside Safe.
The complaint expressed by unhoused targets of an Inside Safe operation on San Vicente in May was the same one made by L.A. politicians this Spring when the Mayor sought to quintuple Inside Safe’s budget. No one was getting the transparency they felt they deserved from the Mayor’s homeless intervention. The first 6-page Inside Safe report was 6 weeks late. Later reports didn’t contain information about permanent housing exits. And since then, massive planters have appeared at the site on San Vicente that Mayor Bass won’t comment on beyond acknowledging that they are, in fact, part of a “City project”.
Because the City is under a State of Emergency and Inside Safe is an Executive Order, it is exempt from certain procedures and disclosures and possibly out of scope of the City Controller, who is apparently still working on the LAMC § 41.18 audit requested by Councilmembers Katy Yarlslovsky and Curren Price in April.
For my last article about Inside Safe statuses, I obtained CAO data and documents via CPRA from the City of L.A.’s Next Request portal. For some reason, the CAO decided not to publish the results of my request, so I’ve made their September Inside Safe report available here. 👇
Click here to view the CAO’s September Inside Safe Report on my Google Drive.
It contains the information about permanent housing exits that City Council sought when debating whether to grant $250M more to the program. The stats aren’t good.
- <2% of participants (38) exited to permanent supportive housing (17) or permanently subsidized housing (21).
- Many of them were already in another program that was supposed to get them housed like Project Roomkey (8) or A Bridge Home (7) or entered through a popup winter shelter (1).
- Some of the people getting permanent housing may have already been in possession of a voucher they couldn’t redeem our their own (at least 1 that I know of from talking to participants).
That means the people coming into Inside Safe off the streets in these massive sanitation operations aren’t the ones leaving to permanent housing, and that’s a problem. Nine of the permanent housing exits come from Skid Row, which is a great thing! It also makes sense, considering that most of the PSH and permanently subsidized units are located in DTLA, like the Cecil. In the rest of the City, though, it’s hard to make placements for people unless they are willing and able to move to the Cecil. We must have more than one permanent housing destination to offer people.
Linking Arms with the County
L.A. County joined Mayor Bass and the City of Los Angeles in declaring a Homeless State of Emergency on 1/10. The City and County have both regularly renewed their declarations despite concerns. CD1 Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez has defended Mayor Bass’ program to the media while also happening to be the only City Councilmember that has not had a single Inside Safe operation in their district yet. CD1 motels have hosted Inside Safe participants from other districts, though.
Homeless Initiative
Even though Inside Safe is a City operation, the best public data about Inside Safe is from the County CEO, Fesia Davenport.
Click here to view L.A. County Inside Safe documents from the County CEO’s Homeless Initiative.
- According to the CEO, L.A. County’s Homeless Initiative (HI), which was started in 2015, has been heavily involved in Inside Safe (page 44 — 58)
- HI has been dispatching at least one County agency or department (DHS, DMH, DPW, etc.) to every city Inside Safe operation (page 31 — 36).
- The County also started their own interim motel shelter program designed to be like Inside Safe, called Pathway Home (pages 37 — 43).
Building Coalitions and joining Commissions
Mayor Karen Bass appears to truly be linking arms and building coalitions, as she was famous for claiming to do on the campaign trail. She joined the LAHSA Commission, appointing herself to the budgeting body on 10/10.
The ten Commissioners oversee LAHSA’s ballooning budget, which has inflated 13x since 2015. Homelessness in the same time period increased around 60%, according to a report by McKinsey consulting.
Historically, the Mayors of the City of L.A. appoint five Commissioners and each Supervisor appoints one, for a total of ten. Former Mayor Eric Garcetti’s most recent pick, USC-affiliated Jessica Lall, who ran a failed 2022 Mayoral campaign and was previously CEO of CCALA (Central City Association, a DTLA Business Improvement District group) and President of of the South Park BID, appears to have been released from her short-lived Commission seat.
Inside Safe operations
# • Date • SD#/CD# • Community • Location • # of people
- 12/20/22 • SD5/CD4 • Hollywood Hills • 101/Cahuenga • 29
- 1/3 • SD3/CD11 • Venice Sunset • 3rd/Rose/ABH • 107
- 1/27 • SD3/CD11 • Venice Ozone • Speedway/Ozone • 4
- 1/30 • SD2/CD11 • Del Rey • 87th/Western • 28
- 1/30 • SD2/CD8 • Gramercy Place • Culver Median • 51
- 2/7 • SD2/CD8 • Vermont Vista • 99th/Flower • 38
- 2/13 • SD5/CD2 • North Hollywood • Victory/Vineland • 48
- 2/16 • SD3/CD5 • Miracle Mile • 6th/Fairfax • 42
- 2/21 • SD2/CD8 • Vermont Vista • 81st/Figueroa • 20
- 2/28 • SD2/CD8 • Figueroa Park Square • 105/Figueroa/Hoover • 49
- 3/9 • SD3/CD3 • Reseda • L.A. Riverbed • 45
- 3/13 • SD1/CD14 • Wholesale District • Skid Row • 176
- 3/14 • SD1/CD13 • Echo Park • Echo Park • 63
- 4/19 • SD1/CD14 • Chinatown • Arcadia/Spring • 78
- 4/27 • SD2/CD9 • South Park • Grand/Vernon • 52
- 5/10 • SD3/CD5 • Carthay • San Vicente/La Cienega • 27
- 5/16 • SD2/CD9 • South Park • Grand/52nd • 52
- 5/31 • SD4/CD15 • Harbor Pines • Lomita/McCoy • 68
- 6/6 • SD3/CD13 • Hollywood • El Centro • 33
- 6/13 • SD3/CD12 • Chatsworth • Metrolink • 56
There have been at least half a dozen more including the Pacoima Wash, Rancho/Jim Gillian Park, Aetna Street, and more in the “Grand Corridor” in South Park.
“How do I say the state of the city is strong when 40,000 people are in tents?” —Mayor Bass
There are not 40k people in tents. Exaggerating the number of homeless people in L.A. does not help people who live in tents.
In 2022, out of 13,700 informal dwellings counted in the City of L.A., 3,346 of them were tents.
Overstating the scale of homelessness helps nonprofits, who do not help us, get a lot of money with no accountability.
A Homeless State of Emergency doesn’t stop evictions, tows or “sweeps”.
The Mayor’s declaration doesn’t offer unsheltered people immediate, voluntary relief from actual emergencies. The HACLA is still withholding thousands of federal subsidies for permanent housing, hundreds of which were targeted at unhoused people and they returned over $100M in federal grants from 2015–2020. There is no eviction moratorium or any protection that applies to unhoused people that protects against dispossession, criminalization and displacement.
Declaring an emergency doesn’t return the vehicles seized, put people back into the homes or tents they were evicted from, give us our tarps back or replace lost affordable units. It doesn’t forgive debts accrued from LAMC § 41.18 enforcement or get people out of jail. It doesn’t make nonprofits accountable to the people they serve, but it enriches those nonprofits with more no-bid, multimillion-dollar government contracts.
In most natural disasters and emergencies, the Red Cross hands out blankets and NGO’s distribute tents and tarps. But in L.A.’s Emergency, tents and tarps are confiscated and destroyed, and people freeze to death outside of vacant hotels, in the middle of busy retail corridors.
The weather emergencies that have occurred during the Homeless State of Emergency have demonstrated that we are more on our own than ever. In February, several of my unhoused neighbors, including one I knew, Elizabeth, froze after some rain. And in August, I was told to “Have a nice day!” by a 211 operator who did not have any shelter resources to offer in Hurricane Hilary. In both cases, statements were made that emergency shelter may have become available later, but that was too little, too late to matter to the people who needed them.
It was too little, too late for me, and I have a phone that I’m constantly checking and using to seek out resources. Most people on the street, like Elizabeth, don’t. It was my neighbors Valley of Change who were going around in the rain making sure unsheltered people stayed alive through flooding and downed power lines, not LAHSA or service providers.
Yet Urban Alchemy has scored two local contracts: one was to run an emergency shelter that I didn’t know of until it was almost over, and another starting today 11/1 to “patrol” the area where I live. Meanwhile I’ve been advocating for the streetlights to be repaired since 2019 to no avail.
Is there a quantifiable measure of success that Mayor Bass is seeking to end the emergency? There wasn’t a specific metric that was unusual enough to trigger it. There’s actually fewer homeless people in the City of L.A. “on any given night” than there were in 2005, but former Mayors Hahn and Villaraigosa did not declare an emergency back then.
Former Mayor Eric Garcetti declared a Homeless State of Emergency in 2015, and it didn’t do much of anything. Another emergency was declared in 1987 after several unhoused people around the city froze, but City Hall was quickly made into a weather shelter to help. That can’t happen now because disgraced CD14 Councilman Kevin De Leon, former Chair of the City’s Homelessness and Poverty Committee, made the area surrounding 200 N Spring Street into an LAMC § 41.18 Sensitive Zone, prohibiting sitting, sleeping and personal property.
The City has added thousands of shelter beds in the past decade, but two years ago, several thousand Winter Shelter Program beds were eliminated in favor of the new Augmented Winter Shelter Program, which has significantly fewer beds, and only activates during extreme weather events. Also, it is only accessible via 211.
The Homelesss State of Emergency doesn’t have a quantifiable threshold. If it did, would it be based on the results of the Point in Time Count? What would the number be to trigger an Emergency? Would we renew the declaration until the next years’ PIT? What kind of reduction would allow us to withdraw the declaration?
Without quantifiable limits, how will we know if the emergency is resolved? How will we know when/if it returns? Will we just randomly declare one every few years? Hurricane warnings require winds above a certain speed to be observed. Why don’t we use a number, like 50k people, to trigger an emergency so we can skip all of the debating about whether or not a declaration is warranted?
I oppose Inside Safe on the principle that the State of Emergency declaration is a performative cover to continue carrying out CARE+ “encampment resolutions” without looking cruel. CARE+ operations are married to Inside Safe. To compare, FEMA-funded Project Roomkey focused on shelter only and did not include involvement of Sanitation or LAPD.
I started this series to offer more critical insights beyond my personal objections, though. So here’s some facts:
17 people moved out of Inside Safe motels into permanent supportive housing.
21 people have moved into subsidized housing (like Section 8).
These are the true successes of Inside Safe, but the fact that are only 38 out of 1,600, or 2%, is also quite a failure for a $300M program that has been in operation for nearly a year now.
Despite the program’s difficulty moving people out of motels and into permanent sustainable homes, I’ve tried to keep an optimistic outlook, choosing to focus on its 66% retention of participants in motels.
Overall, 81% of Inside Safe participants are still indoors in temporary shelter, a fact which I feel reflects positively on Inside Safe’s effectiveness at providing interim solutions.
These numbers should be disclosed to people currently living in Inside Safe motels as well as to unhoused people who are being offered a chance to participate in the program. It was reassuring to me to hear that the majority of people who accepted these offers since December 2022 are still living indoors today.
Feedback from on the ground at most Inside Safe operations has been that the outreach workers weren’t very prepared to answer any questions from prospective participants, which is obviously a red flag that may result in people leaving or declining any offers that come their way. Participants and unhoused people who may consider accepting Inside Safe offers deserve to know the statuses and outcomes of the other people who accepted the same offer before them.
I made printable PDFs for people who happen to be on the ground at Inside Safe operations to pass out.
I believe that spreading this information will increase retention and acceptance of Inside Safe offers and put pressure on the Mayor to increase permanent housing outcomes.
Indefinite* invitations indoors
Mayor. Bass’ recently assured those residing in Inside Safe — or considering an offer — that they were invited to do so “indefinitely”, as reported on 10/17 by Spectrum News’ Kate Cagle.
In the segment, Aetna Street community resident and artist La Donna Harrell (and Lex Luther, her dog) and musician Anthony McLaurin discuss moving to a Van Nuys motel as participants in a September Inside Safe operation.
The Aetna Street Community, as they refer to themselves, and UCLA Luskin Institute on Democracy and Equality researcher Ananya Roy discussed disappointment that the Mayor couldn’t meet simple demands like getting the shelter offers with a timeline in writing first. They had put these reasonable demands in writing last April when threatened with a CARE+ “sweep”.
When eviction notices do eventually appear on their motel room doors, their fear is that news clips like this won’t legally protect them from further displacement. They’re correct. They won’t.
Inside Safe participants in motels and shelters are still “literally homeless” until they are permanently housed.
The U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department defines “literally homeless” as:
an individual or family who lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence, meaning:
has a primary nighttime residence that is a public or private place not meant for human habitation
OR
is living in a publicly or privately operated shelter designated to provide temporary living arrangements (including congregate shelters, transitional housing, and hotels and motels paid for by charitable organizations or by federal, state and local government programs)
OR
is exiting an institution where (s)he has resided for 90 days or less and who resided in an emergency shelter or place not meant for human habitation immediately before entering that institution.
“Encampments” are accessible, sustainable transitional shelters and permanent housing solutions for unhoused people in L.A. who can’t access public housing or redeem federal subsidies. They are often safer than interim housing sites and public housing buildings. At an Inside Safe motel in CD11, a participant was shot by a guest recently. The participant said they had never dealt with that level of violence while unsheltered.
For homeless people on the street, the choice to upgrade one’s living situation to real permanent housing is a no-brainer. HUD’s definition would count the participant as “literally homeless” both before and after their Inside Safe intervention. The program isn’t accomplishing much of anything unless permanent housing interventions are occurring from Inside Safe, too.
The annual Point-in-time Homeless Count (PIT HC) distinguishes between sheltered and unsheltered homeless people, so it is very likely that Mayor Bass will get to declare the “victory” of reducing unsheltered homelessness in the City of L.A. It seems like our City has focused all of its energy on reducing street homelessness and increasing HMIS enrollment while not ending anyone’s homelessness at all.
The problem with investing hundreds of millions of public dollars into interim programs like Inside Safe is they don’t actually end homelessness for pretty much anyone.
More accurately, they only end homelessness for 38 people, while perpetuating it for 1,552 of them.
Ruth is an unhoused person who has lived outdoors in the City of Los Angeles for over five years continuously. She was first evicted into homelessness by Sheriffs in 2003. She is known for holding space for homeless people in government meetings, being present on social media and existing in public 24/7/365. She loves her home, the Earth and her neighbors and opposes all displacements.
