The Brief

Countless Angelenos struggle every day with finding — and affording — the right mental health help.

Getting and maintaining that help can prove even more difficult if you live on the streets with a severe mental illness.

The latest homeless count from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) found that 25% of unhoused people in L.A. County self-reported experiencing severe mental illness. That’s up from 24% from last year's count.

And research shows that in 2020 there were, at minimum, some 4,500 unhoused people in L.A. County who have been diagnosed with a psychotic spectrum disorder like schizophrenia.

It’s a staggering number of people living unsheltered with some of the most debilitating conditions.

And the people who treat and care for unhoused people in L.A. say they need more help.

‘Being homeless is a form of insanity’ 

On a recent busy Monday at the USC street medicine team home base in Alhambra, Brett Feldman loaded up bags with medical supplies, medications and all the equipment he needs to see about eight patients a day.

Feldman, director and co-founder of the Division of Street Medicine at USC and his team will treat wounds, check blood pressure and draw blood.

But he said there’s still more that could be done to help people living with mental illness.

“Psych time on the street is really rare,” Feldman said. “There’s just a national shortage of psychiatrists.”

In a recent report Feldman co-authored, he recommended that more frontline medical workers — like physician assistants — receive training on how to help treat behavioral health conditions.

“One of the things we’ve been trying to do statewide is encourage those doing primary care street medicine to really educate themselves ... to feel comfortable to do treatment for behavioral health at the top of their scope,” Feldman said.

Feldman and his team’s first stop is near a freeway onramp at Hollywood and Van Ness. The patients Feldman was hoping to find here have disappeared. A left behind cardboard sign reads: “Pregnant traveler in need of supplies. Everything helps.”

Cardboard signs left behind.

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Robert Garrova / LAist

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But Feldman and his team pressed on. They decide to visit a patient they’ve been following for some time now.

Ami Tallman and her dog Lobo live in a trailer parked in a backyard. She’s been a painter for 40 years. People tell her she’s a history painter.

“I’m very interested in history so I tend to paint historical events that I’m, sort of, obsessed with that day,” Tallman said.

Tallman showed a picture on her phone of one of her pieces, a painting of an apartment building in Ukraine. A bomb has ripped off one of the walls and the interior of peoples’ personal spaces are on full display.

Feldman first started treating Tallman back when she was living under a bridge near the 110 Freeway.

“Being homeless is a form of insanity,” Tallman said. “I know a lot of people, when they’re on the street for a while, people stop looking at you, they stop talking to you. At that point your own conversation becomes pretty attractive.”

As she had her blood drawn, Tallman offered what she believes could help people living on the streets with a mental illness.

“I mean, it seems like you could offer them a place that they could get treatment, that they could stay that wasn’t carceral or contingent on them following a specific course of treatment that’s against their will,” Tallman said.

Back in the truck, Feldman explained that people living on the streets with serious mental illness are the hardest to help get housing and treatment for, even if they want it.

And he says a lot of resources just go towards mental health emergencies, which he likens to treating people for a heart attack but not their hypertension.

“So there needs to be street medicine that follows them for mental health, longitudinally and then they’ll be more housing ready, they’ll be more able to organize themselves and follow through on appointment and paperwork and interact with people and be successful in housing,” Feldman said.

‘The mentally unhealthy have been alienated’ 

Tifani Caesar says the mentally unhealthy have been alienated.

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Robert Garrova / LAist

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At the team’s next stop, a large park in the Los Feliz neighborhood, Tifani Caesar sits up against a large tree. A small sign that reads “Aloha” hangs from the trunk behind her.

Yelipsa Madera, a medical assistant, checks Caesar’s blood pressure and asked her some questions about her health.

Caesar said she struggled with postpartum depression after the birth of her son. When asked what she thinks would be most helpful for unhoused people living with mental illness, Caesar responded:

“A psychologist or somebody on staff for people to talk to. Somebody that’s always available. So if you have an issue, you can go and try and find some conflict resolution.”

Caesar said she believes there is a kind of tyranny coming from the neglect of people living with mental illness.

“The mentally unhealthy have been alienated. Instead of integrating them, you know, we just fringed them and short-bused them over there,” Caesar said.

Janey Rountree, executive director of the California Policy Lab at UCLA, worked on a study which found that roughly 4,500 people who were unsheltered and received street outreach services between 2019 and 2020 had been diagnosed with a psychotic spectrum disorder such as schizophrenia. That’s about 10% of the total 45,000 unsheltered people the study examined.

“It’s just an enormous number of individuals who are experiencing this and also who are unsheltered and living on the street ... That’s a larger population than most communities' entire homeless population,” Rountree said.

Rountree and her colleagues incorporated SMI diagnosis and treatment logged in county records in their research.

“To put that into context, there are clearly people who are on the street who are disconnected from services ... Those people are not going to be captured by our study,” Rountree told LAist.

But Rountree’s study also points out that “the vast majority (83%) of Street Outreach participants do not have a County service history with a diagnosis for any serious mental illness in the five years before enrolling in Street Outreach services.”

Rountree says while people living with SMI might be the most visible on our streets, the one thing all unhoused people have in common is severe poverty. And sometimes that gets lost when we try to blame homelessness on just mental illness and drug use disorders.

“And so in some ways I would urge our community — all of the people who work on this, elected and journalists and others — to shift the conversation away [from] who has the most accurate estimate towards: What are we going to do for the people that we know are experiencing this?” she said.

'It’s a moot point ...' 

La Tina Jackson, deputy director of countywide engagement division at the L.A. County Department of Mental Health, heads up the Homeless Outreach and Mobile Engagement (HOME) program. The first of its kind in L.A. County, Jackson said the program started working with unhoused people living with a mental illness around 2020. They have eight total psychiatrists doing street care and hope to expand soon.

Mark Fowler, of DMH’s HOME Team, helps Chris Herrin step down from the county van upon arrival at the hotel participating in Project Roomkey, the county’s temporary housing program.

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Courtesy LA County

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“Street psychiatry in L.A. County is a pretty burgeoning practice,” Jackson said. “To have psychiatrists that are specifically dedicated to serving people that are unsheltered with severe mental illness in L.A. County is new.

Jackson agreed with Feldman that physician assistants and other frontline medical workers can “absolutely be used in this work.”

But she says having more street teams trained up to address mental health conditions isn’t a fix-all.

“The most important piece to me is, we have to have the resources to place someone,” Jackson said.

Because of decades-old federal rules, disappearing supportive housing and insufficient government funding, those places to stay are hard to come by.

According to a report from the California Health Care Foundation, in California “the number of acute psychiatric beds per 100,000 people decreased about 30 percent from 1998 through 2017.”

For starters, Jackson said parity with other physical and developmental disabilities would be “wonderful.”

“The rate at which the state pays for someone with a developmental disability could be upwards of $10,000 for someone to stay in a board-and-care and get the support that they need. For someone who has a psychotic spectrum disorder, it is roughly $1100 a month for that person to access the same,” Jackson told LAist.

Jackson said she’s excited about bringing psychiatric care to unhoused people, but she gets nervous when politicians see street psychiatry as a panacea.

“If you don’t have the system around to place people, to get them care, it’s a moot point ... We’re providing medication on the street [and] that’s not appropriate either for a long term kind of strategy,” Jackson said.

The stalwart on the street

On the way back to home base, Feldman explained that many of his patients won’t lead with their mental health condition.

“For example, today, one of the new patients, they came to see me because they had a rash. They also had uncontrolled bipolar disorder,” Feldman said.

Feldman said he and his team have worked hard to gain people’s trust. They never promise something they can’t deliver and they come back when they say they will.

It’s relationships like these that make patients more comfortable opening up about their mental health struggles as well, Feldman explained.

Feldman said he wants his team to be a “stalwart on the street,” building relationships with the community so that they know enough to send in more specialized mental health care when needed.

“We don’t want to be yet another person that’s abandoned them.”

That ocean breeze is just not cutting it in schools in Torrance and Long Beach as Southern California reels from a heat wave.

Parents have taken to social media, created petitions and are proposing a bond measure in order to address the sweltering classrooms as temperatures hit triple digits in some areas.

Only 25% of Torrance Unified classrooms have air conditioning, according to a district spokesperson. And while 90% of Long Beach Unified schools have air conditioning, the schools without air conditioning have to bear this heat spell until the end of 2027 when new air conditioning will be in all classrooms.

What are schools doing to beat the heat?

In Long Beach, the district says there are portable fans in classrooms without AC and the district has installed heat-blocking window covers.

"The things that we do immediately and have been doing for several years, hydration stations,” Keith Butler, the deputy superintendent at TUSD, told the school board early this week. “So our nutrition services freezes blocks of ice, puts them into containers with water, and students are — and staff are able to rotate through and at least get ice water.”

There is also a classroom rotation system so everyone gets a turn in cooling zones, he said.

Can schools close on extreme heat days?

Eric Mitchell, a spokesperson for LBUSD, told LAist, “The District will not close schools because of extreme weather unless the City of Long Beach Public Health Department or a state-authorized emergency response agency directs it.”

Baillie echoed his words adding that a state-declared emergency allows schools to close temporarily without needing to make up teaching time. School funding is dependent on attendance and instructional time.

If a local emergency is declared, school districts, she said, must consult with labor unions to adjust the school schedule to either extend the school year or move to a student-free professional development day.

“Our district is actively discussing creating union-approved ‘weather days’ that would provide a mechanism to adjust the schedule,” Baillie said. “Thresholds would be part of that discussion and might focus on when national weather alerts elevate a heat advisory to an extreme heat event, as they did this week.”

So how can Torrance get ACs in the classroom?

School districts like Torrance pay for facility upgrades like new ACs through district issued bond measures. A school district takes a loan and the people in that city pay back that loan through an increase in their property taxes. That is because there is no specific state allocation of funding for major upgrades or construction. Most of the money schools get from the state is spent on instruction and other student services. There have been some occasional grant programs, like CalShape, but no ongoing source of funding.

This week, a petition to get TUSD to place a bond measure on the ballot to fund ACs has already garnered over 1500 signatures.

But, Baillie said, “Third-party polling completed earlier this year showed a willingness to vote for additional future bonds; however, when specifically asked about the costs of specific bonds to fund the $520 million needed to upgrade the electrical systems and install AC at all 34 campuses, polling showed there would not be enough support (bonds require 55% +1 of voters in an election) to pass a bond for AC.”

And so the bond measure was not placed on the upcoming ballot.

Butler, the deputy superintendent, explained during this week’s school board meeting that parents cannot simply donate an AC unit.

“ One [reason] is it's not super effective to have a typical window unit from a home that would be trying to cool a 960 sq. ft. classroom with 27 students and a teacher, maybe an instructional aide,” he said. “But the bigger issue is the ones that are large enough to really do that, the room has to have a large electrical load, and our electrical system within our buildings where most of them were built in the 1960s, it's just not meant to handle what it does.”

LAist reporter Mariana Dale contributed to this article. 

The Orange County District Attorney’s Office is hosting a buyback event Sunday where people can exchange their e-bikes and e-motorcycles for up to $1,000 in gift cards. The goal is to reduce the number of illegal bikes on the road, and give parents an incentive to get dangerous vehicles out of kids’ hands.

“These vehicles are not child’s play, and the consequences are incredibly dangerous and increasingly deadly,” DA Todd Spitzer said in a news release announcing the event.

Communities in Orange County have been grappling with a surge in e-bikes and e-motos on the road, including among young kids, and an accompanying increase in serious crashes.

“Our area has pretty much the highest concentration of e-bike injuries and e-bike accidents in the country,” said Dr. Tetsuya Takeuchi, the trauma medical director at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo.

Takeuchi said  just over 70% of the children treated at the hospital for e-bike injuries had some level of head injury, “from a simple concussion to devastating brain damage, brain bleed and skull fracture."

A lot of those injuries are among teenagers not wearing helmets, he said. Plus, many e-bikes on the market are too heavy and fast for children to control, Takeuchi said.

Besides safety concerns, tensions have flared with other drivers, pedestrians, and neighbors in areas with heavy concentrations of e-bikes.

Newport-Mesa Unified School District became one of the first districts in the country this year to restrict e-bikes to high school campuses only. District leaders say the policy is working to disincentivize young students from riding e-bikes to school. But at one middle school, students with e-bikes have opted to ride them anyway, parking in the surrounding neighborhood and raising the ire of homeowners.

The DA’s approach

The DA’s office has started to target parents who allow their children to ride e-bikes and e-motorcycles that have been illegally modified for high speeds, sometimes with deadly consequences. In April, the district attorney filed child endangerment charges against a mother from Aliso Viejo after her 14-year-old son struck and killed an 81-year-old man while doing wheelies in the street in Lake Forest. The boy was riding an e-motorcycle souped up to reach 60 mph.

Details of the buyback program

The e-bike and e-motorcycle buyback program is part of the DA’s plan to address safety concerns with e-bikes. Local police departments, hospitals and the California Office of Traffic Safety will also be onsite with information booths.

People can bring in functioning or non-functioning e-bikes, e-motorcycles, e-scooters and pocket bikes and exchange them for gift cards worth up to $1,000 — while supplies last.

The event takes place from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 13, at Angel Stadium in Anaheim.

An appeals court issued a ruling Friday that strikes down a federal government effort to block a lower court’s order requiring the construction of 2,550 new housing units on the Veterans Affairs campus in West Los Angeles.

The long-running case, brought forward by disabled veterans struggling with homelessness in the L.A. area, has centered on the use of the sprawling 400-acre VA campus.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter had previously scrutinized leases for the private Brentwood School’s athletic facilities, a parking lot company, an oil drilling enterprise and UCLA’s baseball stadium.

Ruling that the campus was meant to aid veterans, Carter ordered the VA to not renew the leases and quickly build 750 units of temporary housing and 1,800 units of permanent housing.

But Carter’s September 2024 order has been on hold ever since the defendants asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to review his decision.

Case returns to lower court

On Friday, more than two-thirds of the court’s 29 judges ruled against the VA’s petition for a rehearing.

“It's a historic day for veterans,” said Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney with Public Counsel representing the plaintiffs.

“The government has been fighting their veterans, who went to fight on behalf of the nation,” he added. “They've been fighting them like they are the enemy. They went to the district court to fight. They lost.”

Rosenbaum said he’s pleased to see the case return to Carter’s courtroom after a long appeals process. Carter, himself a Marine Corps veteran who served in the Vietnam War, took an active role in pushing the VA to address a homelessness crisis that has thousands of former service members experiencing homelessness on any given night in L.A. County.

Could the VA pursue further appeals? 

Carter has also ordered the VA to stop using veterans' disability payment benefits as a reason to make them ineligible for supportive housing programs due to income restrictions.

But Rob Reynolds, an Iraq War veteran who advocates for L.A.’s veteran community, said the federal government’s attempts to win an appeal could continue.

“The government can still appeal this to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Reynolds said.

When veterans involved in the case first heard today’s news on the 9th Circuit ruling, he said they immediately asked about the potential for further appeals.

“All of us are really hoping that the government stops this fight, and that we can get housing built for our veterans and end this madness once and for all,” Reynolds said.

A spokesperson for the VA declined to comment on the ruling, saying the department does not discuss pending litigation.

Jenny Yang, a comedian from L.A., has been traveling across the country turning immigrant grocery stores into comedy hubs. Now she’s back in L.A. getting ready to start a mini-residency in Highland Park, tape her first one-hour special and share moments from the tour.

Yang kicked off her Good Egg Immigrant Grocery Store Standup Comedy Tour in June in L.A., then took it to 15 cities across the country. She told LAist the decision came as a way to cope with the grief from her dad’s death, 10 failed in vitro fertilization treatments between 2020 and 2025 and seeing the news of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids spread across the country.

She said the idea to tour grocery stores was a way to reclaim those spaces, after immigration enforcement left many afraid to go out and do simple tasks like buying groceries.

“If we cannot laugh in front of a wall of instant ramen around our bok choy," Yang said, "then what is the American dream for?"

Her routine wove in stories about her fertility struggles and the challenges of having to be a “good egg” growing up as the child of immigrant parents from Taiwan. Her hope for the tour was to connect with people, to make jokes and help people feel lighter after.

The tour proceeds went to local nonprofits serving immigrant communities, and Yang said those organizations helped recruit the grocery stores. She said some stores said no at first — they felt overwhelmed by ICE activity in their city, had lost staff or worried about drawing attention.

“That's part of the story of the tour is it's one thing to want to imagine this beautiful world where you can tell jokes inside of immigrant grocery stores," Yang said. "It's another thing to know what those obstacles are, and I think that's still very telling for where we are as a country.”

One moment stood out to Yang: performing at Shuang Hur Supermarket in Minneapolis. It’s near the memorial for Alex Pretti, the nurse that a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot and killed in January as federal agents carried out immigration enforcement in the city.

“I was able to talk to Henry, the owner who’s a Chinese American uncle. [He] was so proud of being able to help his regular patrons, who for the most part even though it was an Asian centered grocery store, were majority Latino,” Yang said. “I was able to bear witness to their resilience as a community, what they did to take care of each other.”

Now she’s back in L.A. and is doing a mini-residency at the Outside In Theater at 5317 York Blvd. in Highland Park. Her first show is 6 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 12, followed by shows on Sept. 19 and 26 at the same time. Tickets are pay-what-you-can, and you can find them at Outside In's website.

In February 2027, Yang will be taping her first one-hour special at Rancho Meat Market #1 in Lincoln Heights. She describes it as a love letter to Los Angeles that’s endured so much, from the ICE raids to the January fires.

You can follow Jenny Yang’s work here.