$40M has been spent to house 1,400 people in LA motels. 6% have landed permanent housing

Out of nearly 1,400 people placed in Inside Safe motels by city officials, only about 77 people – or 6% – have moved into permanent housing, which is the ultimate goal of the program.

That’s according to a preliminary number released verbally by city officials Wednesday afternoon, at a committee meeting where councilmembers sharply criticized what they described as a lack of transparency around the L.A. mayor’s signature homelessness program.

So far, $40 million is estimated to have been spent on the program, and another $260 million in spending has been authorized by the city council.

Asked on AirTalk, LAist’s public affairs show, Thursday why so few people have been permanently housed, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass said federal rules are slowing things down and she too was concerned by the slow progress.

Those rules, she said, require lots of documentation before someone can be housed — something she says has left thousands of permanent supportive housing beds empty.

“Some of it is because of federal rules that we're trying to get the Biden administration to relax,” Bass said.

“You literally have to prove income eligibility. In other words, that you're poor enough, you've been in a tent. Why do I need to do that?” Bass said.

Councilmembers shocked by low number

During the committee meeting on Wednesday where the number was revealed by a city management analyst, councilmembers appeared to be learning of it for the first time.

“We have a real problem if the folks aren’t getting housed,” said Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, in reaction to the number. The figure, which LAist and council members had been asking for since April and May, respectively, has not been included in the written reports the council ordered the mayor’s office to provide them.

“We need to collectively work together to figure that out,” Blumenfield said, who is among councilmembers who have expressed concern about transparency problems as Bass seeks to address the city’s homeless crisis.

Blumenfield pointed out the low number comes after he and other council members held 13 housing fairs for Inside Safe residents that helped people get their documentation together. He appeared bewildered the fairs had yielded such little progress.

“This was a big production. We had service providers, we had document folks. We had all this great stuff,” he said.

The number was revealed after weeks of questions and pressing of the Bass administration by city councilmembers, LAist and other media outlets.

Councilmembers have said they want to help Bass fix barriers to housing people, but need information to do so.

“That’s part of what this committee is about too, is to get the information however ugly it may be, so that we can address it,” Blumenfield said Wednesday, just after learning of the low Inside Safe housing number.

Number of hotel rooms unknown

At Wednesday’s committee meeting, councilmembers questioned why they still didn’t have full information about how the dollars have been used so far, how many people have left the program and how many people are at which motels.

“Just to be clear, that is the expectation of this committee, is to have an accounting … of the dollars spent and what they were used for. And we don’t have that yet,” Blumenfield said.

Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson said he’s old enough to have seen social services for low-income people get defunded after advocates couldn’t answer questions about where the money was going.

He said he’s worried something similar could happen with the mayor’s homelessness efforts, if there’s not better transparency.

“This city, this society can turn on people in a heartbeat. Just all it takes is a couple bad stock markets and a recession, and suddenly, ‘Why are we wasting all this money keeping people indoors?,’ Right?” Harris-Dawson told the mayor’s staff at the committee meeting.

“You can’t even tell me where the rooms are and how many rooms there are and what hotels they’re at. And so, I think that’s what’s in the back of my head and I’m sure that it’s present for all of you.”

The mayor’s top homelessness advisor, Mercedes Marquez, said the mayor’s team is working to get the council more information, which she said would be available in an August report to the council.

A total of 1,373 people had moved into motels and hotels under Inside Safe, according to the latest report to the council, which shows data as of June 23.

The program has included $14 million in contracts with service providers, and a similar amount spent on motels and the L.A. Grand Hotel in downtown L.A. Another $1 million has been spent so far on city department costs like police overtime and transportation.

An LAist survey during Bass’ first 100 days found that homelessness was overwhelmingly the top issue Angelenos were concerned about. People said they wanted the mayor to take action and for there to be transparency around those efforts.

LAist followed up by creating a promise tracker to publish data on where Bass is at on her main campaign promises around homelessness.

6,000 unoccupied shelter beds countywide

L.A.’s latest homelessness count, released last week, showed 6,000 empty shelter and temporary housing beds when the count was conducted in January.

Officials told LAist many of these beds were unavailable, because they either were matched to someone who hadn’t yet slept there, or were reserved for someone who was away when the count took place, like at work.

Asked about this on AirTalk, Bass said the bigger issue is thousands of vacancies in a different type of housing — permanent supportive housing — that she said is caused by federal documentation requirements.

“The whole point is to get 'em out of the motels after a few months and into permanent supportive housing,” she said of the 1,400 people who have entered Inside Safe.

“We literally have lots of vacancies there, and the reason for that is because of federal bureaucracy,” Bass said, adding that she’s met with the Biden administration and is working on it.

“You're living in a tent, and in order for you to get into housing, you have to prove to me that you were income eligible,” she added. “Well, obviously if you had money, you wouldn't be in the tent. So there's lots of regulations like that that are just downright silly, considering the urgency and the level of the crisis that we're dealing with.”

As for the vacant shelter beds, Gary Blasi, a law professor at UCLA who works closely with unhoused people, told LAist “there are very understandable reasons why utilization is not 100%.”

“Unhoused people are people,” he said in an email. “In many, if not most cases, in order to get a few hours for one night in a shelter bed, an unhoused person has to give up any privacy they had in a tent, virtually everything they own, leave behind a pet, separate from an intimate partner, lose whatever spot they had in an encampment, be transported to a community they do not know, lose connection with the people with whom they have had a relationship of mutual support, etc.”