Less Than 1 Person Per Day Is Moving From LA Motels To Long-Term Housing Under Mayor’s Inside Safe Program

Internal reports obtained by LAist show L.A. Mayor Karen Bass’ administration continues to struggle to move people from temporary motel rooms into permanent housing — the primary goal of the mayor’s main program to address homelessness.

Across the city, about 32,000 people live without shelter. Bass has promised to house 17,000 people during her first year in office as she works to triage a problem consistently rated as a top and urgent priority among L.A. residents.

Records show fewer than one person per day has been finding permanent housing recently from the mayor’s Inside Safe motel program.

In a nearly one month period ending Thursday, the number of people permanently housed rose by just 17, according to weekly reports to the mayor’s office from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA).

The mayor’s response

“I am profoundly disappointed. I am extremely disappointed,” Bass told LAist in a phone interview Friday discussing the numbers.

“We know that the most important thing is to get people off the streets and into permanent supportive housing.”

Bass said the issue is both a shortage of permanent housing and also onerous federal rules that require unhoused people prove they’re poor before they can get housed.

“[We’re] trying to address the bureaucracy that ties our hands,” Bass said.

“We are looking forward to, in the near future, being able to have more flexibility,” she added. That includes getting the Biden administration to support allowing people to be housed first and then to submit paperwork later.

A new report by City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo also cites a lack of housing navigators – who handle the often complex process of getting people into housing – as a bottleneck in getting people from interim to permanent housing, along with a shortage of permanent housing.

At the current pace, it would take years to permanently house the roughly 1,100 people who remain in Inside Safe’s motels and hotels.

But Bass said she doesn’t expect it to take anywhere near that long, with things set to move faster as she presses agencies to clear barriers.

“It would be completely unacceptable to me to settle with this pace. That will not solve the problem, and our goal is to solve the problem,” she said.

Since it started in late December, the mayor’s Inside Safe program has brought about 1,400 people indoors into motels and hotels. Councilmembers and others have credited Bass with rallying a sense of urgency around the homelessness crisis and creating a unified strategy at city hall.

Early problems with Inside Safe

But the program has been struggling with its ultimate goal of getting people into permanent housing.

Altogether, just 108 people from Inside Safe have been permanently housed as of this week, out of the 1,463 people who entered the program, according to LAHSA’s data.

The numbers come with caveats: For the vast majority of the people counted as having “permanent” housing, there’s a time limit on how long the government will pay for their current housing.

But Bass said she’s not concerned. She believes the subsidies — which she said last two years — are long enough for people to secure further housing they can afford.

The role of landlords

To help speed up the housing effort, Bass is calling upon landlords to open up units to housing vouchers, and the public to support new housing in their neighborhoods.

Until recently, Bass’ office was reluctant to disclose exact numbers to councilmembers or the press, citing concerns about the accuracy of the data from LAHSA, which manages the information systems for homeless services.

LAHSA officials acknowledged to LAist on Friday that about 40 or 50 people in their mid-July report had been incorrectly marked as leaving the program or being on the streets, when in fact they were in motels or hotels.

The issue has been corrected in the latest report Thursday, with a new note at the bottom detailing data quality challenges, said Paul Rubenstein, LAHSA’s deputy chief external relations officer.

“I think we have to face the problems with the system in order to be able to fix it,” Councilmember Nithya Raman told LAist in an interview.

Raman chairs the city council’s housing and homelessness committee and has been pressing for more transparency about the Inside Safe numbers.

“I think there’s no shame in admitting that there are real challenges, as long as we’re working as hard as we possibly can to fix them.”

Bass has said it’s crucial for people to move from the motels into housing within months, given the high cost of motels. The motels are meant as a way to get people off the streets quickly, and the longer it takes for people to move into housing, the longer it takes for motel rooms to free up for more people to get off the streets.

Bass launched Inside Safe in December 2022 as her signature program on homelessness. Inside Safe, along with other government housing programs like vouchers or tiny homes, is a key part of Bass’ overall goal to house 17,000 Angelenos by the end of her first year in office.

Her latest update on that overall effort, in June, showed that around 10,000 people had been placed into temporary housing since she first came into office, while around 4,000 had been placed into permanent housing through various government programs.

LAist is tracking the mayor’s progress toward addressing homelessness in our Promise Tracker.

LAist engagement producer Brianna Lee contributed reporting to this article.