Lock up your tents, California!

Toss out your old camping gear!

Hide your pillows and blankets where the cops will never find them!

Because the people who run California have finally seen clearly that the greatest scourge in today’s Golden State is not climate change and not crime, not COVID and not corruption, not the rising cost of living nor grinding poverty.

No, what most threatens our way of life is people who camp.

And so, in this the year 2024, the great state of California has gone to war against campers and their encampments.

This war effort is unlike anything seen here in generations. The wheels of 21st-century California government move painfully slowly. It takes state and local agencies days to respond to a police call, a minimum of six months to permit a coffee shop, five years to add a carpool lane on a highway, and three decades (and counting) to construct a promised high-speed rail line.

But the war on encampments is proceeding with a shocking speed, a real blitzkrieg. This summer Gov. Gavin Newsom, known more for issuing plans than following through on them, didn’t merely order state agencies to take down encampments on land they control. He donned gloves and work clothes to throw away the tents and trash of the unhoused himself.

Newsom also issued guidance on removing encampments to cities and counties. Local governments usually do their best to ignore state orders, but not this time. Cities from Arcata to Vista have ripped down encampments with alacrity and vigor. CalMatters counted at least 14 cities, from San Francisco to Long Beach, that have either passed new laws to prohibit camping or updated old ones; at least four cities revived camping bans they previously didn’t enforce.

San Diego, a leader in the anti-encampment war, has made “No Camping” signs as ubiquitous as fish tacos and shut down the massive “island” encampment—surrounded by water—under the I-5 freeway. Meanwhile, once-progressive paradise Santa Monica toughened its anti-camping ordinance, too. Possession of cannabis may be legal, but possession of pillows and blankets can get you locked up. (Don’t let the grown-ups see your blankie, kids!)

One great thing about the anti-encampment war is that it’s unifying, an example of the enduring power of bipartisan consensus. Sure, California’s exclusively Democratic leaders have fought bitterly against the U.S. Supreme Court when it strips away gun laws or the rights of women or immigrants. But in this war, the Golden State’s top progressive leaders are making common cause with the six conservative justices and their recent decision to allow cities to prohibit people from sleeping on the streets.

As Republicans and Democrats join forces in favor of this righteous war, a few apologists for the status quo remain. Some dead-end liberals are prone to quoting the 1894 novel Red Lily, by the Frenchman Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

But France is easily dismissed these days. He was a practitioner of irony—which has been outlawed across this formerly self-aware country—and of critical and independent journalism—which is being killed off by the bipartisan consensus that we shouldn’t have to listen to uncomfortable truths that offend our partisan biases.

Now, you might think California’s intellectuals would challenge the encampment bans. Instead, our state’s scholars are leading their own anti-encampment campaign.

The University of California and California State University systems have announced strict new bans against encampments anywhere on their campuses or properties. Their goal is to prevent a recurrence of the protests of the previous academic year that produced antisemitism, Islamophobia, and violence—including when some universities called in the police to bust up the encampments.

In announcing this oh-so-principled policy, the universities are not just saying that opposition to the scourge of encampments is more important than the First Amendment. They are also eliminating a potential on-campus housing solution—tents—when thousands of their students are unhoused.

But ignore the lonely critics out there. The logic of the universities, and the state and its cities, and the nation’s highest court, is inarguable:

Californians shouldn’t have to sleep outside.

The only way to make sure we don’t have to sleep outside is to arrest or relocate those of us who sleep outside.

And such enforcement will solve the problem because someone else, under intolerable pressure, will step in and provide shelter to those displaced by encampment crackdowns.

Who is that someone? The state points to local governments, which have money and authority to build housing. The local governments point back to the state, which could change laws that make it too easy for opponents to block housing for the unhoused.

Don’t worry. I’m sure they’ll sort it out soon. Please don’t lose any sleep over it.

The post California’s Greatest Scourge? Camping appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California is spending billions to house its increasing population of unhoused people. But it hasn’t come close to building enough to meet its ambitious goal of ending homelessness. And many Californians have lost hope that it ever will.

California is spending billions to construct a high-speed rail system. But it hasn’t come close to completing what would be the first such line in the nation. And many Californians have lost hope that it ever will.

In the face of these crises, what is to be done? One option would be to sit around and lament two massive failures of government, and conclude that mega-projects are just too challenging for our state.

Or we could steel ourselves and embrace the wisdom of Dwight Eisenhower—who famously said: “If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.”

In that spirit, I suggest we solve the big problems of homeless housing and high-speed rail by combining them into something even larger.

So, I hereby propose—very modestly—Homeless High-Speed Rail.

You read that right. Finding permanent lodging for unhoused people, already declared the state’s top priority by Gov. Gavin Newsom, would become the new, urgent mission of our flagging high-speed rail authority.

Under Homeless High-Speed Rail, the state’s unhoused people would no longer have to live in cars or temporary shelters or controversial encampments. Instead, everyone would have the option to take a sleeping-car berth on a brand-new bullet train.

Sure, this fusion of housing and high-speed rail might create some new challenges. But it would solve even more problems.

To pick just one example: advocates and media have long criticized our state government for its confusing mix of competing homelessness initiatives. The state splits up housing funding among different local governments, who complain that the flow of money is not consistent enough to solve the crisis. The state’s official auditor, along with other experts, has called for consolidating state and local programs on homelessness.

My proposal does just that—by consolidating every single state and local program to house homeless people under one single state agency: the California High-Speed Rail Authority.

Now, some cynics might look at that combination and call it crazy—a mere merger of two giant dysfunctional money pits. And they wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

The state has spent more than $20 billion on housing and homelessness since 2019—but the number of unhoused Californians has grown by one-third. Meanwhile, the high-speed rail project has secured $25 billion—but is still as much as $10 billion short of the $35 billion required to complete its first segment, in the Central Valley. Both projects will require tens of billions of dollars in additional funding to achieve their goals.

But what cynics are missing, amid all the red ink, is how these two failing programs, in combination, could save each other money.

Building homeless housing is incredibly expensive—Los Angeles is paying more than $800,000 for some one-bedroom units. But much of the cost is in expensive California land, high-cost California labor, and time-wasting California permitting processes. None of which are factors when people are housed on rail cars.

Instead, using housing money to buy rail cars—with private bathrooms—means that the high-speed rail authority could devote more of its funding to building rail and stations (which might also be used for housing).

Talk about a win-win!

Indeed, combining homeless housing and high-speed rail could answer objections that dog both programs.

For example, cities often can’t build homeless housing because of aggressive opposition from neighborhood NIMBYs. But NIMBYs would lose their developer targets, and their backyard objections, when housing is simply zooming past, at 200 miles per hour.

And on the high-speed rail side, hosting homeless Californians answers persistent questions about whether there would be enough riders to support the project. Surveys show little public interest in using high-speed trains, especially because the first segment will run between the smaller cities of Merced and Bakersfield.

But in a Homeless High-Speed Rail project, unhoused individuals would provide a large and steady ridership base.

Strange as my proposal may seem, almost nothing about it is new.

Keeping homeless people constantly on the move sounds cruel, but it is already an established and popular policy across California. After all, cities and police are always tearing down homeless encampments, and forcing unhoused people to keep moving.

In addition, the idea of converting spaces intended for other purposes into housing isn’t new. The state, cities, and counties have already converted dozens of hotels to serve as housing for the unhoused, under Projects Roomkey and Homekey. A Bay Area housing activist even offered a plan to house homeless people in old railcars.

If you board L.A. Metro or the San Diego trolley or other local transit systems in the state, you’ll see that individuals without homes are California’s most dedicated train riders. Thousands of unhoused Californians all but live on these local trains now, because of the low-cost shelter they provide. Indeed, homelessness is so much a part of transit that, earlier this year, BART adopted its first Homeless Action Plan, which includes promises to develop housing itself.

Of course, there will be some Californians, perhaps millions, who object to the whole concept, finding it perverse. These misguided moralists, a few of whom write columns, will say that California is a very rich place that surely can afford to house all its people and to build the same high-speed rail system that two dozen other countries have. And they will claim that California must learn to build and manage giant new housing and infrastructure projects if it’s going to survive the adaptation challenges of climate change.

In theory, these skeptical Californians will probably be right. But California doesn’t operate on theory. It operates on an unmanageable budget process, a volatile tax code, and a broken governing system that both parties refuse to fix. It has a state government that can’t adopt modern technology or manage a payroll, much less translate its people’s democratic preferences into major action. The way California operates now, the state will never have enough housing for the homeless, or a real high-speed spine for its transportation networks.

So, before you dismiss my modest proposal, just ask yourself: In the face of massive failures, when doing big and essential things is nearly impossible, is there any plan too awful to take off the table?

The post A Modest Proposal<span class="colon">:</span> Give High-Speed Rail to Unhoused Californians appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Homeless people.

Google all you want: You’ll find a lot of surveys about what housed people in L.A. think about unhoused people. You’ll find endless columns on what experts opine. But until recently, you’d be hard-pressed to find studies asking the people actually experiencing homelessness what they think should be done about the crisis.

Two recent surveys do just that—finally.

With a rise in homeless encampments, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, policy makers have implemented at-times scattershot efforts to combat the problem, with costs projected in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But such plans, said one researcher, were “formulated with no clear evidence on the housing needs and preferences of unsheltered people, information that’s critical to understanding the feasibility of these policies.”

The two new studies seek to bridge the gap between the well-intentioned plans and what unhoused people themselves say they actually need.

In both cases, homeless people overwhelmingly told researchers their first priority is—get ready for it—housing.

That seems like a no-brainer, but in fact is big news that should combat pervasive myths that suggest homeless people prefer to live in encampments, that it’s preferable to wait for more permanent housing, or that even if taxpayers funded shelters, homeless people wouldn’t agree to go there.

A recently released RAND Corporation survey, conducted from September 2021 to January 2022, interviewed 216 homeless men and women living in Venice, Hollywood, downtown, and at the Veterans Affairs complex near Brentwood. It reported that 90% expressed interest in finding housing, but that bureaucratic delays (41% of the unhoused never received follow-ups to housing applications) and inappropriate shelter offerings present serious obstacles.

The RAND finding that the overwhelming percentage of homeless people want to be sheltered tracks with another just-released study, conducted in February 2022, by the Santa Monica-based A-Mark Foundation, which I joined as CEO in June.

A-Mark teamed up with UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs to send graduate student researchers to L.A.’s Skid Row, where they asked 100 unhoused men and women living there what they would do about homelessness if they were mayor of Los Angeles.

Researchers asked unhoused people to list their top five priorities from a menu of options, which included healthcare, necessities, resources, sanitation/safety, and housing. Overwhelmingly, 92% of respondents chose securing temporary or permanent shelter as their first priority if they were, hypothetically, mayor of L.A., and as their answer to the follow-up question: “What kinds of things would you do in the short run?”

The fact that housing rated so highly in both the RAND and A-Mark studies punctures the myth that homeless people prefer homelessness. This directive should prod policy makers and activists toward immediate, if temporary, housing solutions. Because these studies make it clear: If you build it correctly, they will come.

I want to emphasize my use of the word “correctly” here, because that is where a lot of the misconceptions around the need to prioritize housing for people who are homeless takes root.

The RAND and A-Mark surveys offered helpful data to help policymakers understand what kinds of temporary shelter work, and how best to organize the bureaucracy around them.

In two focus groups that were part of the A-Mark Foundation survey, women said they avoided shelters that broke up families. Just 14% of the shelter units in Los Angeles serve families, according to a 2018 LAHSA count.

“The kids got to go with the mom,” one woman said, “and the dads got to go somewhere else, and then they can’t be together.”

Lack of security at shelters and concern over sexual violence were also named as top concerns. Men said curfews that made shelters feel like prison and prohibitions against dogs kept them away.

“If shelters or transitional housing require sharing rooms, have curfews and other rules, or reduce people’s sense of self-determination,” the RAND researchers echoed, “our research suggests these won’t be an effective approach to reducing street homelessness.”

On the bureaucratic side, the RAND study cited inherent problems with a multi-step system that requires caseworkers to enroll homeless people for housing, then go find them when housing becomes available. Encampment sweeps and the very nature of homelessness make that a challenge, and caseworker burnout itself is high. The result? The RAND survey reported that 75% of respondents had been continuously homeless for over a year, and 50% had been homeless for three years.

The RAND study also found that the majority of homeless people resided in Los Angeles County before ending up at their current location, and 75% reported residing in California—two data points that contradict the common notion that L.A.’s unhoused all come from somewhere else.

As the RAND and A-Mark studies revealed, despite concerns and circumstances that kept people away from shelters, they still wanted housing. “Walking around with pepper spray,” one unhoused man told the A-Mark team, “that’s my life.”

Said another unhoused man about what his approach would be if he were mayor: “Some people have given up hope, we have to give them hope.”

The RAND researchers acknowledged that Angelenos are tired of encampments and eager for solutions, but observed that “it will do no good to respond to this political imperative with policies that are ineffective.”

The voices of L.A.’s unhoused speak through this new research, and suggest productive paths forward. They point to the need for more shelters, especially those that take families, like Upward Bound in Santa Monica, and more private “tiny home” shelters with pet areas, like the Arroyo Seco Tiny Home Village in Highland Park.

We need to collect more research from people undergoing homelessness to learn what kinds of temporary shelter they would be most likely to successfully move into, and then transition out of into more permanent homes.

But we needn’t wait for more research to absorb the central lesson of these studies. The voices of our unhoused neighbors are clear: If a magic wand could be waved over the City of Angels, giving them mayoral power, the first thing they would do is provide shelter.

It’s a message our next actual mayor needs to hear.

The post What Do Unhoused People Want Most? Ask Them appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But homelessness is also incredibly useful for anyone who wants to complain about California. It allows us to say anything and everything we want about our state.

Especially right now. Politicians, journalists, authors, professors, and social media trolls will tell you that California’s homelessness shows the utter failure of, well, take your pick: Democrats, Republicans, new progressive policies, old conservative policies, police, prosecutors, judges, the health system, the housing market, the drug war, rent control, Prop 13, developers, NIMBYs, socialism, capitalism.

The critics may think they are making novel arguments, but making homelessness a hobbyhorse is one of California’s most durable traditions, at least as old as the state itself.

In 1855, the North Carolina author Hinton R. Helper, in the first best-selling anti-California screed, The Land of Gold: Reality vs. Fiction, declared that the Golden State was destined to fail—by pointing to the homeless people who filled San Francisco’s streets.

“Degradation, profligacy and vice confront us at every step,” Helper wrote. “Dozens of penniless vagabonds … are always wandering about the city in idleness and misery. [They] have no other place to rest, no bed except [bales of hay] into which they creep for shelter and slumber during the long hours of the night.”

Helper introduced a slur against California that persists today; our homelessness shows California not merely to be a place of poverty, but to be a place full of people of lower morals and greater corruption than other Americans. He wrote: “We know of no country in which there is so much corruption, villainy, outlawry, intemperance, licentiousness, and every variety of crime, folly and meanness.”

Californians themselves internalized the presence of street people as a moral failing—and they reacted with moral panic, and in ways that caused lasting damage.

There are too many examples to list them all here, but some stand out.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Los Angeles leaders exploited fears of vagrants—poor white men labeled “hoboes”—to build an excessively punitive jail system that plagues Southern California to this day.

In the 1930s, the California political establishment capitalized on fears of homeless and poor people in order to defeat the gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair, who promised to build a modern social welfare state to fight poverty. (Hollywood producers created ads casting actors as homeless people, saying they would move to California to secure the benefits of Sinclair’s programs.)

Since World War II, which saw a migration west that left people scrambling for housing here, public officials have routinely used homelessness to justify crime crackdowns, unconstitutional policing, mass incarceration, the drug war, longer prison sentences, and a variety of failed policies on mental health.

In today’s more polarized times, the hobbyhorse of homelessness is more frequently put to partisan purposes. A Wall Street Journal columnist writes that California homelessness shows that “doctrinaire progressivism” is a “suicide pact.” Right-of-center commentators routinely cite the billions California has devoted to housing and other services for the unhoused as evidence of the failures of socialism.

This generation’s version of Hilton Helper—an over-the-top critic—is the writer and activist Michael Shellenberger, a progressive turned right-wing darling. Shellenberger used homelessness and public drug use to argue—in his book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities and a campaign for governor—that Democrats had caused nothing less than “the breakdown of civilization” on the West Coast.

“It was Democrats, not Republicans, who played the primary role in creating the dominant neoliberal model of government contracting to fragmented and often unaccountable non-profit service providers that have proven financially, structurally and legally incapable of addressing the crisis,” Shellenberger wrote in San Fransicko.

Of course, demagoguing homelessness is not an exclusively conservative practice. Among activists and writers on the left, homelessness is often described as the product of home ownership and, to quote the Nation, “the ultimate symbol” of American capitalism. An official for the powerful Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative wrote that homelessness represented an attack on liberal democracy. A United Nations official used California homelessness to accuse the United States of multiple human rights violations.

Radical and counter-productive responses also have come at the grassroots level on California’s streets, with some activists discouraging unhoused people from accepting offers of housing. In Los Angeles, city council member Kevin de León, one of California’s most accomplished progressive politicians, has been engaged in a nasty conflict with activists.

“We’re investing tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to connect our unhoused neighbors to housing,” de León told the Los Angeles Times. “And to see people sabotage and undermine this work should be infuriating to all Angelenos.”

But the responses from all sides often tell you more about critics’ own politics than about the complex and peculiar nature of homelessness itself. And as we argue about homelessness, we are failing to keep up with new dimensions of the problem, including increases in the number of deaths on the streets during the pandemic.

Today, Californians rank homelessness as our state’s biggest problem. But it’s not too big to be solved. The homeless population is not overwhelming; 160,000 people is less than one-half of one percent of the total population of California. Local communities have more money than ever before, from local taxes to federal relief funds, that they could use to address homelessness.

Might we make progress if we stopped using the homeless to make our arguments, and instead listened more to unhoused people and sought to address their many different needs? Those who work with the homeless say that unhoused people themselves are largely untapped sources of ideas.

And if we California critics gave up homelessness as our old hobbyhorse, we commentators would have no trouble finding other issues to represent this state’s dysfunction.

I would suggest water policy.

The post Stop Using Homelessness to Hate on California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

More than half of America’s unsheltered population lives in just three states—California, Oregon, and Washington—and West Coast voters are demanding a response. Homelessness ranked as the top concern in a recent poll of likely voters in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. Last year, Seattle residents replaced a long-serving progressive city attorney with a Democrat-turned-Republican who vowed to clear encampments. And San Francisco’s progressive district attorney may be headed for defeat in an upcoming recall election, in part because of spiraling crime rates in neighborhoods with large homeless populations.

Much of the policy debate about homelessness has focused on high costs of living and a lack of public services, while politicians and activists largely have avoided trying to curtail one of the most consequential factors of all: the misuse of drugs. Policymakers don’t seem to want to say it, but going all out to help some homeless people stop using drugs has to rank alongside housing as a top priority.

Chronic drug and alcohol use are major contributors to homelessness. In a 2019 national survey of unhoused people, more than half of respondents reported that “use of drugs or alcohol had contributed to loss of housing.” In Seattle, which conducts a detailed annual census of its homeless population, the top self-reported reason for chronic homelessness—lacking shelter for more than one year—was “alcohol or drug use.” A 2019 analysis found that close to two-thirds of chronically homeless individuals in San Francisco reported misusing drugs or alcohol, and a quarter cited “substance use as the primary cause of their homelessness.” Drug or alcohol overdose was the leading cause of death among homeless people in Los Angeles County in 2020, similar to findings in other major American cities.

Federally-funded permanent supportive housing initiatives are prohibited from mandating sobriety as a condition for shelter. The federal policy known as Housing First, adopted during the George W. Bush administration, prioritizes securing stable housing for homeless people, regardless of their drug use, mental health status, or ability to support themselves, as a prerequisite to solving other problems. Housing First has been effective at keeping people housed for at least a year and reducing emergency medical services use. But there’s little evidence it helps people resolve substance use problems, gain employment, or retain housing over the long term.

Lacking a federal plan for addressing drug and alcohol use among the homeless, cities and states have had to come up with their own strategies—and many have embraced harm reduction, an approach that dovetails with Housing First’s priorities by ameliorating the problems associated with drug use without requiring people to quit. Harm reduction seeks to reduce overdoses and communicable disease by relying on needle exchanges and other initiatives that make drug use safer, rather than punishing users. Public health experts embrace the approach, as do criminal justice reform advocates and proponents of drug decriminalization.

The San Francisco Department of Public Health formally adopted harm reduction as city policy in 2000; it is also the stated policy of L.A. County’s homeless services agency. Proponents say harm reduction is more effective than sobriety-based treatment because it shows respect for drug users’ autonomy and does not rely on law enforcement. Practitioners describe their work as engaging drug users “where they are” and fostering trusting relationships with service providers. During a 2019 presentation about the method, Nathaniel VerGow, now the Los Angeles agency’s deputy chief, reminded participants that “many drug users can be happy, loving, trustworthy, productive people! Many sober people are NOT!”

Harm reduction methods can be effective at keeping drug users alive and stopping the spread of disease. But nowhere have they been shown to help large numbers of problem drug users regain control of their lives. And they’re highly resource intensive. In a recent University of Washington evaluation of JustCARE, a harm reduction homeless services program in Seattle, providers described round-the-clock efforts to placate methamphetamine-using clients “running around naked” and “pounding a door at 3:00, 4:00 a.m.,” or disassembling televisions in the converted hotel rooms where they were being housed.

Leaders grapple with how to afford such service-intensive programs. Fully funded, JustCARE would cost roughly $20 million per year to serve up to 288 people. Since its start in 2020, the program has served 225 participants and moved fewer than one-tenth into permanent housing. There are close to 12,000 homeless people in Seattle and surrounding King County.

Politicians often promise simple solutions with splashy policy initiatives—crackdowns, shelters or, lately, expensive permanent housing. In his most recent State of the City speech, departing L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti reaffirmed the value of a $1.2 billion homeless housing measure passed by voters in 2016. The measure, slated to fund construction of roughly 12,000 housing units by 2027, has been faulted in multiple audits for delays and cost overruns. Still, Garcetti insisted on permanent housing as a solution to homelessness: “[I]f we don’t double down on our housing momentum, the California Dream will be an old chapter in a history book.”

But drug treatment experts say cities need a multipronged approach. Psychiatrist Keith Humphreys, of Stanford University, said research shows that people with substance use problems are best helped with a combination of some harm reduction methods—especially medication-assisted treatment for opioid withdrawal—and an ultimate focus on getting and staying sober.  The odds of recovery from a substance use disorder “are at least 50 percent higher” in sobriety-based programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, he said. Scott Chin, president of the privately-funded Union Gospel Mission in Seattle and a former homeless heroin user himself, said that half of participants in his program, which requires sobriety, graduate and eventually find employment and stable housing.

Humphreys said cities relying solely on harm reduction should be aware of results in Vancouver, Canada, which pioneered the method in North America. The city reported a record number of overdoses last year and its homeless population grew by more than a fifth over the past decade.

There are signs of change. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently proposed what he called a “Care Court” that would compel people with serious mental health or substance use disorders into treatment, for up to two years. The plan was immediately endorsed by a bipartisan group of big-city mayors and opposed by civil libertarians and advocates for the homeless. “We may have to use force to get [people] into treatment,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said, in a recent podcast interview. Preliminary results from an annual nationwide homeless population count suggest that San Francisco’s efforts to battle homelessness have begun to pay off. The city recently reported a 15 percent decrease in its unsheltered population since 2019.

Josephine Ensign, a longtime homelessness researcher at the University of Washington who herself experienced homelessness as a young adult, said that amid all the debate, it is important to recognize two qualities essential to any effort to help homeless people: compassion and a healthy respect for complexity. Many forms of support for homeless drug users—Housing First, harm reduction, 12-step sobriety programs, faith-based services—can improve outcomes and save taxpayers money by keeping people off the streets and out of jail, Ensign said. The key is flexibility—finding the right service for each person and not getting stuck in ideological rigidity.

“Having choices for people is hugely important,” she said. “It’s getting the political will among voters to understand the complexities of homelessness, and address it.” In cities up and down the West Coast, contentious upcoming elections will show whether voters agree.

The post Why Won’t Policymakers Talk More About Drugs and Homelessness? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You’ve made herculean efforts to address the complexities of California’s long-running homelessness crisis. So have other state, federal, and local officials around the Golden State.

But while you’ve all made real progress—from instituting the use of hotels as temporary housing to securing billions in new funding—you’re not much closer to ending the crisis than when you first took office. The costs are mounting—impacting the wellbeing of the unhoused, threatening public health and sanitation, and eroding the trust and cohesion we need to solve big problems.

Homelessness has become a white-hot political issue from Los Angeles to Lassen County, dividing too many communities. In a new Berkeley IGS poll, two-in-three voters rate your handling of homelessness as “poor” or “very poor.” And it’s not just you. The people of Californians are telling focus groups that they don’t think any elected official can solve homelessness.

All of the above are reasons why you need—right now—to ask the people of California to solve the problem themselves.

How?

The answer lies in a tool of popular democracy that is little known in California and the U.S., but has become a common method for addressing the thorniest and most desperate problems in other parts of the world. It’s most often used when governments and other civic institutions find themselves unable to address a crisis that has divided society.

The tool is called the citizens’ assembly.

In essence, it’s a temporary government of regular citizens convened to study a problem, come up with a plan, and then take action to enact it.

Ireland used citizens’ assemblies to resolve divisive conflicts over abortion and same-sex marriage. Finland employed one to address its most divisive issue—regulation of snowmobiles—and North Macedonia held one to deal with the problem of vaccine hesitancy. And France convened a citizens’ assembly on energy and climate change after the so-called “yellow vest” protests revealed bitter disagreement over climate policies.

While citizens’ assemblies are little known here, they aren’t entirely novel. Petaluma has been contemplating a form of citizens’ assembly, a policy jury, to determine the future of the Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds property. Not long ago, your columnist proposed an international citizens’ assembly to help govern the complex series of crises at the U.S.-Mexico border.

How might such a process be applied to homelessness in California?

To be effective both legally and practically, the California Citizens’ Assembly on Homelessness would need official authorization from both you and the legislature. Such an assembly would consist of California residents chosen by lot from a pool of everyday people—but through a process designed to ensure the body’s membership is representative of the state in geography, race, ethnicity, political party, and gender.

It would be wise to have one population overrepresented in such an assembly: those whose lives will be most affected by its decision making. While getting elected to the legislature without a permanent address is nearly impossible, one democratic virtue of the citizens’ assembly is that it could specifically include a significant plurality of people who are currently unhoused, or have experienced homelessness in recent years.

The citizens’ assembly would also need power—including the right to subpoena witnesses. And it must have a budget large enough to bring in technical experts to help the citizens, both in understanding homelessness and in organizing the assembly itself. The Committee for Greater Los Angeles and the Weingart Foundation, which recently conducted extensive focus groups on homelessness with Angelenos, would be natural allies in organizing such an assembly.

Most of all, the assembly must have the authority to turn its ideas and recommendations into laws and constitutional amendments. You should make sure that any laws proposed by the assembly will be automatically introduced in the legislature, and that any constitutional measures proposed by the assembly will automatically be placed on the statewide ballot.

The mechanics of such an assembly might sound complicated to you, governor. The people who organize these things might make your head swim when they talk about details—geeking out, say, over the notion that functionally, a citizens’ assembly is really two assemblies: one group of citizens to study the issue and create an agenda for change, and a second group to draft the actual proposals, laws, and ballot measures.

Critics will dismiss the assembly not only as too complex, but also as too novel, and too multi-faceted. They’ll urge you to keep the homelessness portfolio in your own hands, to call special legislative sessions, or to draft new funding or ballot measures yourself.

Don’t let them rattle you.

And don’t let them tell you that everyday Californians don’t understand homelessness. At this point, homelessness is so prevalent that public knowledge of, and experience with, the problem is deep. Which makes this an ideal case for a citizens’ assembly.

If the legislature balks at funding such an assembly, I suspect you’ll find that California’s philanthropic community would be willing to step up. And many of our major public universities, having pledged to deal with homelessness under the rubric of social justice and community embeddedness, are likely to provide experts, technology, and students for such an enterprise.

Indeed, the best case for a citizens’ assembly is that it would galvanize Californians, drawing widespread attention and creating a common statewide forum for figuring out homelessness.

Right now, our homelessness responses are divided—by local jurisdictions, by a set of overlapping state programs, and by political campaigns that see homelessness as a wedge issue. A citizens’ assembly could bridge those divides and be a unifying force.

And since the assembly would gather in public—both online and in person (be sure to reserve a building big enough to contain the audience that might want to watch the proceedings)—it could provide a model of how, in polarized times, Californians of every stripe can hash out their differences, and find better ways forward.

Yes, it’s possible that the assembly would fail. But that would leave California no worse off than it is right now. And if the state convened a citizens’ assembly, and that body made a huge impact on the homelessness crisis, California would become a true national leader on housing the unhoused.

And on democracy itself.

The post Let the People of California Solve the State’s Homelessness Crisis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We’d been invited to ask ourselves this question as we walked the streets in the dead of night, canvassing for strangers. I thought I knew the city well, but it appears vastly different when you’re looking for a place to bed down for the night.

Behind the hedges in front of a quaint apartment building? Too dark and secluded, vulnerable to robbery or rape. Could I rest on the front porch of that bungalow? Too risky: I might be mistaken for a burglar. 

A grassy median on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea was looking pretty attractive as a night’s lodging. This wasn’t what I had expected, nor what I had anticipated. But, then, neither was the foot.

It was an uncommonly chilly January night in 2018 when I encountered a bare foot protruding from a sleeping bag, on the sidewalk outside one of my favorite watering holes. “Do they have to camp out in front of our neighborhood wine bar?” I muttered to myself, sidestepping the offending appendage. “Can’t they go back home where they came from?”

With the arrival of friends and convivial beverages, the troubling thoughts melted away. But later, sinking into a warm bath, I tried to imagine whom that foot belonged to. I couldn’t picture anyone specifically, just a vague notion of a generic homeless person.

Cue the late night Googling of topics related to the homeless in Los Angeles. “Why are there so many …” “who are the …” and “what can one person do about the …?” And soon, I learned that in order to allocate resources, provide services, and receive some of that precious Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) federal funding, Los Angeles County is required to perform regular counts to determine the number of people sleeping unsheltered. In a county that spans over 4,000 square miles, the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority (LAHSA), responsible for administrating the Greater Los Angeles Point-in-Time (P.I.T.) Homeless Count, as it’s called, relies on citizen-volunteers. Counting takes place at night, when folks are less mobile, lessening the chance of marking down an unhoused person twice. Notoriously self-absorbed Angelenos did this? That seemed hard to believe.

A week later I became one of 200 locals assembled at the Hollywood City Hall, a small fraction of the 8,000 county residents who took part in the annual count that year.  Our number included gym rats, hipsters beaming with ecstatic idealism, middle-aged women wearing Roe v. Wade 45-year commemorative pins, and elder activists sporting well-worn AmeriCorps T-shirts.

And me. With all the largess of a visiting dignitary, I turned to the person next to me and introduced myself. “Yeah, I know who you are,” she replied. Oh, a fan, I assumed, when she added, “I’m a development executive at Imagine, you pitched to me once.” Unsuccessfully, she might have added (but didn’t), instead, introducing me to a klatch of similarly accomplished entertainment executives, veteran counters, who’d seamlessly blended into the crowd.

We were treated to snacks, a training video, and a round of reassuring Q&As conducted by the LAHSA representatives. The P.I.T. was strictly a visual count, carried out on foot. We weren’t to engage with our unhoused neighbors and—not to worry, not to worry—we wouldn’t be sent into areas where we might feel less than secure, like encampments.  “Treat everyone you encounter as if you’re visiting friends in their living rooms after a long, hard day,” instructed then-city councilmember David Ryu.

We were issued flashlights, neon orange vests, and official-looking clipboards, and in an act of faith that defies social convention, we hopped into vehicles driven by our fellow volunteers. Soon, I was one of four local moms in a minivan, snaking our way through Hollywood. Our survey tract included Gardner Street, only a handful of blocks from where I had lived when I first arrived here to pursue an acting career, in 1989.

Back then, the area was a warm landing spot for both families and people like me, just starting out. I’d easily slid into restaurant work to afford the $750 monthly rent for a small but comfortable studio, where I remained until the acting work steadied. The neighborhood appeared a lot less accessible and welcoming with rents now topping $2,500.

If I were sleeping outside … where would I be?

Trudging in and out of alleyways, we peeked behind trash bins and piles of construction materials, peered into dense foliage, and surveyed the odd outdoor alcove, but the majority of our unhoused neighbors were out in the open. Now it seemed foolish not to have understood the advantage of a well-lit spot. It was midnight when we tallied our last soul, but wait, what about that late model sedan parked in front of a hacienda style duplex? The interior of the car was obscured by a set of sunshades, which might indicate that it was being used as a shelter, but it was otherwise a twin of my own car. No, actually, it seemed better maintained than my car. We didn’t count it.

Courtesy of INSAN Foundation/INSAN for Humanity.

Before we departed, I asked my counting buddy what she would do if things spiraled down for her. “I guess I’d go back home,” she answered, citing a strong support network in another state. “What about you?”

My first decade in Los Angeles was experienced through Joan Didion’s lens. Numbed by the sprawl, the freeway traffic drained my will to live. It was convenient to characterize residents as show business cyphers. Like many transplants, I’d stubbornly resisted the city’s charms and when asked, repeated a standard refrain, “I’m only here to work in the entertainment industry. Then, I’m outta here.”

Thirty-two years later, I reside in Jonathan Gold’s Los Angeles, calculating driving routes that take me past the mini-malls that house the city’s best purveyors of spicy phos and tacos dorados de camarón. Despite the inevitable vagaries of a career in the arts, I hadn’t left. Instead, I forged deep ties and raised a child in a warm and engaged community that’s become my primary support system. Who had committed some of the most egregious acts of careerism I’d witnessed in Tinseltown? Me.

Maybe it was the city-issued safety vest and authority conferred by carrying a clipboard, but I felt a swell of affection, and a weight of responsibility, as it dawned: There was no longer a “back home” for me.

Since that night four years ago, some things have changed and some have remained the same. There’s been a 12.7 percent increase in homelessness in Los Angeles County and a 14.2 percent increase in the city of Los Angeles. Everywhere, there’s palpable frustration with elected officials and government agencies, as the pandemic has sent more people into the streets and housing prices just keep skyrocketing.

But I no longer wonder who they are, and why they don’t go “back home.” I know now that 70 percent of those experiencing homelessness have lived in the county for at least a decade, and two-thirds of unsheltered Angelenos became homeless while living here.

With average rents in my once-affordable old stomping grounds now topping $2,500, putting together a deposit, first, and last months’ rent, has become an insurmountable hurtle for many of us as gig work has made dependable wages harder to come by.

I’m also pretty certain that I made a misjudgment about that car.

That January night at the P.I.T. led me to volunteer in a Host Home program sponsored locally by Safe Place for Youth and open my house to a young couple experiencing homelessness. Prior to their month-long stay under my roof, my houseguests had been living in their car, which was much cleaner than my own reliably dusty ride.

Like many Angelenos, I remain frustrated with my powerlessness to effect change and with the lack of progress in solving the region’s housing crisis. But I can no longer pretend a transactional and transient relationship with my adopted hometown and the people who live here, including the unhoused. The annual P.I.T. was furloughed in 2020, and postponed this January. But it will take place again on February 22–24. I’ll be there, walking the streets in the dead of night, but I no longer think of the people I’m looking for as strangers—just neighbors I haven’t met yet.

The post Where Would I Sleep on the Streets of Los Angeles? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

COVID only accelerated this work, moving our events to a livestream in spring 2020 and, this year, once public health restrictions allowed, pushing us to introduce a new hybrid event format. Now, audience members can once again join us in-person or tune in from anywhere in the world. It’s turned out to be an advantageous mix for a roving organization that’s both global and local.

In 2021, Zócalo made it to South Central L.A., Culver City, and to our new home at the ASU California Center at the Herald Examiner. Our move to this historic building in downtown Los Angeles means, among other things, that we can offer an even bigger stage (quite literally) to further foster community and connection among Angelenos and beyond.

In a year that saw both changes and a return to a new kind of normal, it was fitting that our very first Zócalo speaker returned as well. We welcomed back The Economist’s Adrian Wooldridge (whom we probably owe a Zócalo members-only jacket for all the times he’s shared our stage) for one of the events that Zócalo staffers voted among their favorites.

Selecting just five events to spotlight proved to be a nearly impossible task. We owe a warm debt of gratitude to our audience members, speakers, and partners for joining us in making the public square such a dynamic place. See you there next year!

 Can Boyle Heights Save America?

In short: “yes.” USC historian George J. Sánchez—whose new book, Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy, inspired the conversation—Josefina López, author of Real Women Have Curves and founding artistic director of CASA 0101 Theater, and Los Angeles Times city editor Hector Becerra, a Boyle Heights native, came together in May to make a strong case for why Americans should look to this “magical and multiracial neighborhood” to understand the true meaning of citizenship and belonging. Bonus—our chat room was packed with people from Boyle Heights who shared their memories, restaurant recommendations, and more.

Is South L.A. Forging a New American Identity?

Zócalo’s first-ever hybrid event explored how place-based identity can forge new bonds across racial and ethnic lines. Held at the Mercado La Paloma, in partnership with Esperanza Community Housing, the event was part of the South Central Innervisions: An AfroLatinx-Futurism multidisciplinary arts festival. Fittingly our panelists, Community Coalition’s Corey Matthews and USC sociologists and South Central Dreams co-authors Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Manuel Pastor used much of the conversation to look ahead at South L.A.’s future.

Is There Still Merit in a Merit-Based System?

New Yorker staff writer Nicholas Lemann, as moderator, asked Wooldridge, whose latest book is The Aristocracy of Talent, and the other panelists to define meritocracy and evaluate whether it has any currency left in today’s deeply unequal society. Among the event’s trenchant observations: “We need to look for better ways, the best ways possible, of finding promise, wherever it is in society,” said Wooldridge.

Can California Help Reduce Gun Violence?

Too often a dialogue around gun violence in the U.S. derails into a reductive “pro-gun” versus “anti-gun” stalemate. This was not that conversation.  Instead, this Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation event brought together a group of people who fundamentally agree that gun legislation can save lives, and asked them to discuss the difficulties and occasional victories of their work. Their solution-centric talk focused on the policies, research, and everyday action coming out of the Golden State that might have a ripple effect on the nation as a whole.

What Will It Take to End Homelessness in L.A.?

A graduate of Yale University who had worked on Wall Street, Shawn Pleasants shared his journey into and out of homelessness during this powerful panel put on in partnership with United Way and the Committee for Greater Los Angeles. Pleasants, who is now an advocate for the unhoused, and fellow speakers from a variety of local organizations and perspectives called for more innovation, collaboration, and simple human relationship-building to address what might be L.A.’s most pressing crisis.

The post Our Favorite Events of 2021 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In search of solutions to the problem and its root causes, Zócalo, United Way, and the Committee for Greater Los Angeles convened policy makers, advocates, and experts to ask “What Will It Take to End Homelessness in L.A.?”

The evening’s moderator, KCRW housing and homelessness reporter Anna Scott, began the conversation by asking panelist Shawn Pleasants to share his own journey experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles.

“It’s a complex narrative, but so is life,” said Pleasants. “It’s something I didn’t imagine could possibly happen to me.”

A graduate of Yale University who had worked on Wall Street, he ended up unhoused after his mother died and his business failed. Living on the street, he dealt with addiction and had to find food, water, and basic resources, such as the bathroom, each day, as well as a safe place to stay. “It’s a very exhausting existence to have,” he said, “one that keeps you from looking forward or have any hope.” Multiple attempts to get housed failed for various reasons—including a caseworker’s arrest for fraud. “The promise of me finding a way out, working with a particular caseworker or an agency, and suddenly be dropped into nothingness, it’s very disappointing and it’s very disruptive,” he said.

Ultimately, it was one of his Yale classmates, Kim Hershman, who was able to provide Pleasants with the support he needed. Today, he said, he has been housed for one year, is 584 days sober, and is working to help others conquer the issues he faced.

“What would have been more helpful to you from professionals that you did interact with up to that point?” Scott asked.

First, said Pleasants, Hershman asked him what he needed. And second, he emphasized, she came to see him regularly and they formed a relationship based on trust, which made him decide to ultimately accept her offer of help.

Turning to Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) Commission Ad Hoc Committee on Governance Reform chair Sarah Dusseault, Scott asked how LAHSA can make street outreach more effective.

Dusseault, whose brother is unhoused, said she is working “on making sure lived expertise is at the forefront of both design and execution. … It is real easy to design a program that on paper looks amazing,” she continued, “but if we don’t have that real-life experience at the forefront in the design process, it can easily not be as effective as it could be.”

Scott asked the rest of the panel what holes they see in the system for people who need mental health and addiction treatment services.

UCLA California Policy Lab executive director Janey Rountree said that her team looked at everyone enrolled in street outreach services for a year, and then linked that data to clinical mental health diagnoses and substance use disorder diagnoses. They found that 30 percent of street outreach participants have either a serious mental illness or a substance use disorder and about 10 percent have both.

“If you’re really meeting people where they are, you’re going to hear about a lot of different kinds of needs, and for that outreach to be credible, you’ve got to follow through,” said Rountree. The challenge to such follow-through is that street outreach workers “don’t have the full spectrum of resources that are needed,” the most pressing of which regards the housing gap.

Fifty years ago, Rountree said, California stopped building housing to keep pace with population growth; as a result, housing costs skyrocketed while the average income has stagnated. “When you get to spending more than 30 percent of a person’s income on housing, you can expect to see homelessness in your community, and in Los Angeles we’re over 50 percent,” said Rountree.

While securing permanent housing is the ultimate goal, the shortage of high-quality interim housing—particularly for people who are suffering from substance use disorders—is especially critical, said Rountree. But the financing isn’t there, particularly for such housing that includes care for people suffering from serious mental illness.

“We need to raise the bar,” Pleasants said. “[Caseworkers] shouldn’t be able to take on another person until they have solved the problems of the people that they have in under their care,” he added. “It’s not just passing them on to another worker with another agency. There’s a myriad of different fragmented systems that are very siloed.”

The goal, he said, should be to get people off the street as quickly as possible, and there needs to be clearer pathways to do that. “If a veteran has a problem, they go to the Veterans [Affairs]; they know what to do,” he said. “Well, if someone’s homeless, what do you do? And nobody seems to know.”

Scott asked Enterprise Community Partners vice president Jimar Wilson, who works in affordable housing, what he sees as the biggest barriers to creating new affordable housing in L.A.

Wilson said a multitude of solutions are needed to solve the gap between wages and housing prices. “There is no one solution, but high cost, and barriers to that gap of what people need to stay in housing is something that we need to address,” he said.

Innovative ideas to solve these problems are out there, Dusseault pointed out. But the issue is scale. Los Angeles County, she said, is currently short half a million affordable rental homes. “We just need to put up a whiteboard and figure out a plan to get there,” she said. One hopeful example she cited was the Vignes Street housing project, which was built in less than six months and will provide 232 units of permanent and interim housing at a cost of about $200,000 per bed.

Pleasants added that there is a lot of untapped potential in the city—citing, for example, the many units in receivership without tenants. “I’m sure those landlords who own those buildings would love to have the city put someone in at any cost to keep them afloat,” he said.

The issue is enacting policy. Frustrated at recommendations LAHSA has made but cannot execute, Pleasants continued, “We need to find a way to get all of this wonderful thought and all this wonderful potential here into actual action.”

Scott asked United Way of Greater Los Angeles Homelessness Initiatives director Carter Hewgley what can be done about L.A.’s lack of governance around homelessness.

“We’ve got to get focused and organized on a shared goal, and drive progress across all of our power structures, toward the same common agenda,” said Hewgley. “I don’t know that we’re ever going to live in a Los Angeles where one entity has the authority to end poverty and reverse the housing crisis, but I am eager to get to a point where … the best of those ideas to rise to the top and resolve them.”

What about change now, asked Scott: “Are there just basic concrete things that the city and the county could do to work better together?”

Hewgley said the region’s COVID-19 response made him optimistic. “A crisis like a pandemic reminds you that you can coordinate. You know you can bring it together and have a unified vision,” he said. “We need to treat homelessness the same way.” Our societal failures, he said, whether it’s healthcare, housing, or systemic racism, “all comes and manifests in homelessness, and so I think we’ve got to have that kind of unified effort that we had during the pandemic … on getting people safely inside and getting them housed.”

Tackling homelessness will require systemic change, the panelists agreed. “One of the things we’ve got to acknowledge at the federal level is that housing is a human right. Healthcare is a human right. And we’ve got to start putting our money where our rights are. And delivering those rights at scale is something that I think the whole country would benefit from,” said Hewgley. “Too many people have been waiting too long who deserve nothing less than that.”

Turing to audience questions flooding into the virtual chat room, Scott asked the panelists to discuss what they think is holding Los Angeles back from adopting a right to housing, and how helpful it would be to have such a right.

“I absolutely believe in a right to housing, and I think that concept of housing as infrastructure has been part of what has been holding us back,” said Dusseault. “There needs to be a real understanding of how we got here in order to get out of this, and the real understanding is that we’ve had tons of federal subsidies for all sorts of things—for mortgages for homeowners and other things that the federal government’s subsidized—but we have completely starved our public housing, and that has had a real impact. We’ve starved our access to mental health care and our access to basic health care.”

Following up on that question, Scott asked the panelists: Are there any other cities that have successfully made a big dent in this issue?

Hewgley argued that L.A., in fact, is where we should turn for answers. “We are probably doing some of the most innovative stuff in the country,” he said. “We’re just not doing it at scale.” Instead, he said, it’s a pilot project in a single district. For example, he noted, there are several pilot projects happening right now where social workers trained in de-escalation and connecting people to services are responding to crises instead of armed police. But the problem is providing the resources to scale up such programs. “We probably have the best examples of great practices here in this jurisdiction,” he said. “[But] our bold ideas are not always matched with bold money and bold scale.”

Another audience member had a question for Pleasants about street outreach: What should the approach be if an unhoused person refuses care or services?

A case worker, said Pleasants, is walking into someone’s life at a random moment. “They may have just gotten robbed, they may not have eaten for a while,” he said. “You really don’t know what issues they are going through, and unless someone takes a trauma-informed approach, you’re not going make headway.”

Sometimes, it’s a matter of coming back at a better time. “You’ve got to build trust, you have to build a relationship,” he said.

A final questioner wanted to know if homelessness is something that L.A. can manage, or even end.

“I think we’re in an extremely unique moment where we already have the federal government’s interest,” said Dusseault. “The federal government made some huge mistakes in the Great Depression. We made some huge mistakes in the Great Recession, where the drive for recovery was inequitable and created some of the mistakes that are ending up in homelessness now.” Governance reform and maximizing the impact of that federal help are key right now, she added.

“As we’ve talked about today, we’ve seen what we can do in our response to COVID-19. Within a matter of months, we housed thousands and thousands of people,” said Dusseault. That took collective action across sectors. “I really do think we can do this, but it’s going to take a completely different approach.”

The post A Complex Homelessness Crisis Requires a Complex Response appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The problem’s name is Los Angeles.

We Californians love to blame our woes on San Francisco, an easy target with its wealth, powerful politicians, and pretentious progressivism verging on parody. But in recent times, it’s been your columnist’s home base of L.A. County—home to one in four Californians—that undermines our state the most.

California as a whole can’t prosper if its biggest and most diverse metropolitan area keeps floundering. Since the early 1990s recession, L.A. has been a drag on California’s, and the nation’s, economic growth and employment. L.A. hasn’t matched the gains in wages, education, health, or voter turnout found elsewhere in the state. And it is Los Angeles that has been the biggest driver of high poverty rates and rising inequality across the state.

L.A. is also where California lost the pandemic. The county of 10 million has one-third of the state’s COVID-19 cases and 40 percent of the deaths. If Los Angeles had controlled COVID-19 better, California as a whole might not have been compared unfavorably to Florida.

L.A.’s outsized coronavirus failures also had a statewide impact. State officials never really managed to come up with a COVID-19 framework that fit both small counties with few cases and California’s largest county, a virus hotspot. So, they kept changing frameworks and guidance, creating public confusion over what was permitted under COVID-19.

Los Angeles’s failures at pandemic response also made it harder to justify reopening elsewhere. Maddeningly, the leadership and teachers’ union of the dysfunctional Los Angeles Unified School District—not content to prevent only L.A.’s own students from returning to the classroom—used their political muscle to block the governor’s plans to reopen schools not just in L.A. but statewide.

In this context, it made sense that Gov. Gavin Newsom broke with precedent and held this year’s state-of-the-state speech in Dodger Stadium, rather than in the Capitol in Sacramento. A full statewide recovery from the pandemic requires a big comeback by our largest county. If L.A. doesn’t control the virus and repair the economic and educational damage of the pandemic, the state of our state will be deep trouble—and Newsom could well be recalled from office later this year.

But the stakes of getting Los Angeles right extend beyond the fates of the governor or the state. L.A.’s struggles point to larger American failures to ensure that prosperity and health are broadly and equitably distributed, and support the poor, immigrants, and communities of color in building foundations of education, higher-wage employment, and family wealth.

As outlined in a terrific 2020 report, “No Going Back L.A.,” from the Committee for Greater L.A., Los Angeles is on the front lines of this struggle because it experienced major demographic change ahead of the rest of the country. The county’s share of people of color has risen from 47 percent in 1980 to 73 percent today. During the same time, L.A. lost its manufacturing base, middle-class jobs fled, and wages stagnated. Persistent and systemic racial disparities cost Los Angeles more than $300 billion in annual GDP, according to USC’s Equity Research Institute.

Ending these disparities in Los Angeles, and around the nation, is an epic task of integration—connecting people, opportunities, jobs, schools, businesses, healthcare, and public policies in a way that keeps people and places from falling behind. But L.A., despite its talent for creating culture that connect people around the world, is rotten at integrating itself. Its peoples, neighborhoods, and institutions are disconnected and poor at collaboration, making life feel isolated and cruel.

This is not a new problem. Back in 1946, the progressive journalist and former state official Carey McWilliams wrote that Los Angeles is “chronically unable to integrate its population” and provide social stability. “There is something disturbing about this corner of America, a sinister suggestion of transience,” he wrote. “There is a quality, hostile to men in the very earth and air here.”

That prose mirrors the 21st-century conclusions of the UCLA scholar Michael Storper, who studied the different economic trajectories of the Bay Area and L.A. In 1970, those two big California regional economies were at parity, with similar education levels and numbers of engineers. Now the Bay Area is 30 percent richer than L.A.

Why? Because the Bay Area’s leading institutions in education, business, and government became highly networked, and planned collaboratively to build Silicon Valley as the economy changed, Storper concluded. But L.A. didn’t do the same—it remained a bunch of separate, siloed communities. L.A. universities and civic groups competed instead of collaborated, and aerospace and corporate headquarters left. Signature institutions like the Los Angeles Times, and even the Dodgers, were sold to out-of-towners, and Hollywood became a welfare case, propped up by state tax breaks and streaming services.

The results: wages for the lowest-paid workers in L.A. have declined by 25 percent since 1979, even as housing costs soared, and L.A. poverty rates have risen since 1990, even when they declined elsewhere. The region does not produce enough skilled and college-educated workers for existing jobs. The county’s 88 different cities, and myriad other local governments, have struggled to serve a larger and poorer Los Angeles; several major agencies—notably the LAPD—performed so poorly and violated so many rights that they were put under court or federal oversight.

Before the pandemic, L.A.’s optimists could dismiss larger concerns about Southern California’s problems by pointing to local budget surpluses, declining crime, rising high school graduation rates, or ambitious plans to fight homelessness. But the coronavirus made the depths of L.A.’s problems undeniable.

COVID-19 followed the path of L.A.’s inequality; it killed at a much higher rate in our most overcrowded, poorest, and predominantly Black and Latino communities. And its economic damage to jobs and businesses followed a similar pattern. Federal relief programs also left out unauthorized immigrants and their families, while school closures and distance learning revealed the depths of L.A.’s digital divide.

The big question now is whether L.A. can change its ways, and connect its people and institutions to build new structures and supports for its people. To that end, the “No Going Back L.A.” report is itself a promising sign—it’s a product of a collaboration of civic leaders called the Committee for Greater L.A. and public policy scholars at both USC and UCLA.

The report is full of ideas for building real foundations that allow people to find stability and health in the short term, while reducing inequality to spread prosperity in the long term. This starts with legal status for undocumented Angelenos, about 70 percent of whom have been here for more than a decade, and includes ideas for a regional housing strategy, more collaboration between civic groups, and making high-speed internet a civil right. The goal is to turn L.A. from a segregated patchwork into an integrated whole.

For such strategies to work, the rest of the state will have to contribute its expertise and funding. The politics of helping out our biggest county won’t be easy in a state where “Beat L.A.” is a common chant in sports stadiums. But right now, California needs to save L.A., if it is going to save itself.

The post Los Angeles Is Failing California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.