For Immediate Release: September 8, 2022

LARGEST REDUCTION IN HOMELESSNESS IN CD11

Los Angeles - Today, Councilmember Mike Bonin and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) announced the 2022 Homelessness Count results.

While homelessness ticked up 2% citywide and 4% countywide from 2020 to 2022, LAHSA’s data shows it dropped 38.5% in District 11. That’s better than any other part of the City of Los Angeles and demonstrates that it is housing and services that end homelessness, not enforcement and criminalization.

The data states there are 69,144 unhoused people in Los Angeles County, 41,980 in the City of Los Angeles, and 2,012 in District 11. The homeless count is a snapshot census that tallies the number of unhoused people on a given night in February 2022, compared to a similar count in January 2020. The numbers on any given night can fluctuate and the data is not exact, but the big trends are useful and insightful.

Councilmember Bonin celebrated the report’s findings and issued the following statement:

How did we do this? We firmly embraced policies that focus on housing and services to help people transition off the streets permanently. And we firmly rejected failed, expensive policies that criminalize homelessness and move tents from block to block.

In the time between the 2020 and 2022 homeless counts, we focused on finding places where unhoused people could go, rather than passing laws telling them where they could not go:

  • We opened bridge housing in Venice and at the VA in Brentwood;

  • We converted motels in Westchester and Venice into housing;

  • We funded a program to provide 100 people with shared housing - a quick, nimble solution to homelessness;

  • We conducted the largest and most successful place-based homelessness intervention programs in Los Angeles, moving nearly 300 people indoors from tents on Venice Beach and in Westchester Park;

  • We partnered with and supported local nonprofits, and volunteer grassroots organizations and mutual aid groups that conducted phenomenal, patient outreach to build trust with our unhoused neighbors.

As long as thousands of our neighbors sleep on the streets, we can’t let up. We know what works, and we intend to keep doing more of it. Since the start of this year, subsequent to the 2022 homeless count, we have opened more homeless housing in West LA and Venice, approved more of it in Westchester and in Venice, and began or continued construction of even more of it in West LA and at the VA. We’re also purchasing a 133-room motel on the Westchester/Del Rey/Playa Vista border to provide even more homeless housing.

There is another key tool we have used to confront homelessness– and it is at risk of ending, if we don’t take firm action. COVID-era tenant protections and rent relief helped keep people housed, slowing and reducing the number of people falling into homelessness. There is a growing movement to repeal those protections, and it would create a tsunami of evictions, reversing any progress on homelessness in Los Angeles.

We can’t let that happen. Before the City Council repeals any COVID-era tenant protections, we need to approve new, tough permanent protections, including a fully-funded right to counsel, universal “just cause” eviction rules, increased relocation assistance, limits on rent increases, and removal of discriminatory barriers to rental housing. I’ll be fighting for those things until the end of my term, and hope my successor will pick up the baton.

Confronting homelessness is not easy, but we know how to do it. Provide housing and services, as quickly and cost-effectively as possible, to people who are currently homeless. And stop people from becoming homeless in the first place. I’ve got 3 months left in office, and my team and I are going to continue that work every single day.