Frequently Asked Questions

  Homelessness destroys lives, and it's ruining LA. The current approaches to it will not end street homelessness for years. It’s getting worse, not better. We believe it’s time for a bigger, bolder, faster solution: housing thousands of homeless people on unused city and county land in one or more “villages,” along with all the support services they need to transition to work and permanent housing. 

Thoughtfully designed homeless villages exist in cities across the US and the world.  

These people we call homeless are really refugees. They are refugees from an economy that has waged war on the poor and lower middle class. They are refugees from a health care system that has, in many cases, forced them to choose between recovery and poverty, between an ugly death and an impoverished life. They are refugees from a legal system that criminalizes addiction. They are refugees from a mental health system that is underfunded and overwhelmed.

Mostly, they are refugees from a society that refuses to treat their suffering as an emergency. The average international refugee has been homeless for five years. The average person on our streets is pushing two years, on and off.

So, yes, a refugee problem needs a refugee solution. Housing 100 or 200 people at a time won't solve it. 

You can't force people into shelters that don't exist.  But once there is adequate housing, a "Right to Shelter" law can make it easier to move even those who prefer living outdoors inside. "The public policy of this state must be that people live indoors,” said Steinberg, who noted that the number of deaths among the homeless is rising — more than 900 last year in Los Angeles County alone. If we can get more people inside, he said, it would be much easier to help people get well and find long-term solutions to their problems.

“Imagine what our communities would look and feel like if people had both a right to come inside and an obligation to come inside,” Sacramento Mayor Darrel Steinberg told LA Times columnist Steve Lopez. “It’s common sense. You’d enforce it by telling people they can’t camp, and removing the campsite, and escorting people indoors.”   

No. We want as many shelters as fast as possible wherever they can be built. Building one or more large villages ASAP doesn’t mean the City can’t or shouldn’t continue plans for shelters elsewhere. 

  The Northside LAX areas that would be part of this plan are not under the LAX flight path. About 22 acres are already being used and are zoned residential. (This is where Westchester Golf Course is). Another 70-80 acres are slated for future commercial and recreational development under the Northside LAX Plan Update.  

No. There are many large government-owned properties that could work.

 Evidently not. A Bridge Home is the name of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s initiative, launched in 2018, to provide emergency temporary housing spread over all 15 council districts. As of November 2019, four shelters have been built or repurposed. The Mayor expects 2000 beds to come online by 2020. That will leave LA, with a city street homeless population of 44,000 people, thousands of beds short. The program is neither fast enough nor big enough 

 And jobs. And mental health and addiction services. And, and… Yes, these are all the long-term solutions to homelessness. But safe, temporary shelter must come first. Forcing or allowing homeless to live on the streets ruins their lives, and ruins the city. It’s a moral outrage, a civic embarrassment, an economic drag and the worst possible “solution” to all these deeper social problems.   

  No. A 2018 Guardian newspaper study of crime in homeless villages in the Pacific Northwest and in the surrounding neighborhoods found a reduction in crime.  The Guardian’s data is “consistent with the position that homeless villages are not generators of crime”, said Kenneth Leon, a criminologist at George Washington University, and could be part of a “crime prevention ecosystem”.

  There are numerous tested temporary housing options that are far less expensive than you think.  Pallethouse.com makes self-contained tiny homes that can be set up with unskilled volunteer labor for $2500 each. In Seattle and Portland, tiny houses that shelter 1-4 homeless cost $2500 each. River Haven in Ventura, CA uses inexpensive shed shelters, an idea that can be scaled up. No one doubts providing temporary shelter is expensive, but the alternative is even more costly. “I believe the cost of getting them indoors would be a bargain considering what California spends on public safety and cleanup without actually getting people off the streets,” wrote Sacramento Mayor Darryl Steinberg..