L.A. leaders ask HUD secretary for more money to combat homelessness

Los Angeles city and county officials touted their recent efforts to reduce homelessness and asked for more federal help Tuesday during a meeting with U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro.

Castro traveled to L.A. in reaction to a flurry of recent city and county efforts, including a city declaration of emergency on the issue of homelessness.

The number of homeless people in Los Angeles city and county has risen 12% over the last two years, according to this year’s count by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, and more than 44,000 people are now unhoused throughout the county, including 26,000 in the city.

L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, who attended the meeting along with several City Council members and all five members of the county Board of Supervisors, said Castro had called him following last month’s emergency declaration and asked what he could do to help. That phone call was the impetus for the secretary’s visit.

Castro said he had come to “listen and understand how I can be helpful” in addressing the growing homeless crisis in the nation’s largest county and second-largest city.

“As goes L.A., so goes the nation,” he said.

City and county officials asked Castro for an increase in federal vouchers to help subsidize housing for veterans and other low-income residents, and for help in giving often reluctant landlords incentives to accept the payments.

County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl also asked the housing secretary to revisit a funding formula that rewards areas where homeless numbers go down and penalizes areas where they go up. The formula is unfair to places like Los Angeles, with rising housing costs that lead to rising rates of homelessness, she said.

Castro said his agency would be revisiting the formula, with a public comment period opening in the spring.

City and county officials praised what they described as a new spirit of collaboration between government entities on the issue of homelessness.

The county is responsible for social services and public health programs, and the city is responsible for land use and policing within the city limits.

City and county leaders have separately committed to putting $100 million toward the problem of homelessness this year, and are engaged in parallel planning processes that are expected to result in a joint plan on homelessness in February.

“We will solve this problem,” Garcetti said. “We will solve it because there is a political commitment that I have never felt before.”

Some community advocates who attended the meeting expressed skepticism. Pete White of the Los Angeles Community Action Network said that in practice the city’s and county’s goals and actions often don’t align.

“If [the city is] spending $87 million to arrest homeless people, where are they going to find themselves? They’re going to find themselves in the county jails,” he said. “If we’re talking about collaboration ... it has to be more than political rhetoric.”

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