In order to comply with the terms of a major court settlement, the city of Los Angeles will need to cut annual spending on homelessness programs by $181 million. At least that’s the conclusion outlined in a city report released earlier this month.
The recommended cuts have alarmed some homeless service providers — and the clients they serve. Programs potentially on the chopping block include street medicine programs that serve unhoused people in poor health, hygiene programs that place showers and restrooms near encampments and safe parking lots for people living in their cars.
Matthew Tecle, executive director of Safe Parking LA, said when he saw the recommendation to potentially eliminate his organization’s funding, “It was a total gut punch.”
How we got here
According to the City Administrative Officer’s report, citywide homelessness spending reductions of up to 15% are needed in order to divert money toward creating 12,915 new shelter beds or housing units. This requirement is the linchpin of the city’s settlement in a 2020 lawsuit brought by the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, a group that alleged the city was systematically failing to address its homelessness crisis.
Tecle said the city now appears to be pitting the need for new shelter beds against services that don’t count toward the terms of the settlement.
“Safe parking is not a strategy that fits into traditional boxes of homelessness services,” Tecle said. “We're not a shelter in a traditional sense.”
But with more than 11,000 people in L.A. living in vehicles, the city should be trying to expand the number of designated parking lots that provide bathrooms, security and case management to people trying to find their way back into housing, Tecle said.
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Until the first safe parking site in L.A. launched in 2018, Tecle said, “there was no program that was serving people directly that were experiencing vehicular homelessness.” He said his organization now oversees 143 parking spots across the city.
“It was this understanding of a systemic gap that needed to be filled,” he said. “We feel like we've shown that value to this point, and we want to continue to do so into the future.”
Report lays out a zero-sum funding game
Advocates for unhoused people disagreed with the framing of the city spending report. They argued the court has never required the city to cut vital programs for people living on the streets.
“The city's CAO is recommending cutting essential services for unhoused folks to meet that [settlement] obligation,” said Shayla Myers, an attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles who represented the interests of unhoused people in the case. “But that's not the result of this litigation. That is the result of city planning.”
Myers said the city could instead divert funds from expensive encampment sweeps or look toward lower cost ways to help Angelenos get housed. The CAO report identified motel rooms through Mayor Karen Bass’ signature program Inside Safe as particularly expensive, costing $225 per night on average. Other interim housing units cost about $86 per night.
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City Council members sounded frustrated with the report’s recommendations in a Feb. 4 meeting of the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee.
“We are faced with an extraordinarily strange set of recommendations here,” said committee chair Nithya Raman. “Recommendations that, to me, seem to fly in the face of what this council has said we’ve wanted, which is to expand the number of people that we are serving.”
Raman sought to reassure homeless services providers that none of the proposed cuts were imminent.
“Nothing in this report is a certain action that this council is going to take,” she said.
In a statement to LAist, Raman, who is running for mayor against incumbent Karen Bass, a former ally, said there would be time for further debate before the city adopts its next annual budget in June.
“Between now and then, my focus is on protecting effective frontline services, meeting our legal obligations, and making sure any changes actually help us house more people — not fewer,” Raman said.
What’s on the potential chopping block
The report said the city could save about $15.7 million by cutting street hygiene programs, $3.6 million by defunding 11 safe parking sites, and nearly $5 million by cutting support for USC’s Street Medicine program.
Leaders of the USC program declined to comment for this story.
Participants at one Safe Parking LA site in West L.A. said shutting down the program would put them further from securing stable housing.
Daya Baran — a former investment banker who took to living in his Mercedes Benz following a divorce, job loss and eviction — said he rarely got enough sleep before coming to this site.
“There are always people who actually try to steal, try to rob you while you're in your car,” Baran said. “It's safer here. You know the people. There's security here. There's restrooms.”
Still, Baran said, there are moments when he craves a real mattress instead of his car’s back seat. At the gym, he’ll sometimes take a breather from working out and lie down on a yoga mat.
“I stretch out,” he said. “And that's when I realize, I wish I was in a bed.”
Providers say LAHSA’s evaluation is flawed
Gita O'Neill, interim CEO of the regional Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, said in a November memo that safe parking programs should be defunded because “they are ineffective compared to other strategies.”
When LAist asked what went into that determination, Christopher Yee, a LAHSA spokesperson, said only 44% of safe parking spots were occupied in the last fiscal year.
“In this time of constrained budgets, it is critical to invest in solutions that have demonstrated the most consistent success,” Yee said in an email.
But Safe Parking L.A. leaders said 86% of their spots are currently filled. In an email, Tecle said safe parking spots cost the city about $40 per night, much less than other shelter programs.
“Aggregating all providers together and labeling the model ‘ineffective’ ignores performance differences and avoids a serious evaluation of what is actually working,” Tecle wrote. “If the City wants efficiency, the answer is precision — not using an axe to eliminate one of the most cost-effective early interventions we have.”
George Robert Pratt III, another participant at the West L.A. site, said he’d been spending nights at the lot for about a year. At 72, he lives on Social Security payments of about $1,300 per month, not enough to afford an apartment of his own.
“This place needs more housing, especially affordable housing,” said Pratt, who grew up in L.A. “There's a lot of old people on the streets, out here living on the sidewalks, and I feel for them.”
For now, Pratt said he feels fortunate to have his 2002 Ford Explorer, which he has outfitted with a mattress. If this site were to be shut down, he said, he could always go back to parking on various city streets, out of the way and hidden from public view.
“This thing's pretty incognito, and I didn’t stay in one spot long enough to get anybody's attention,” Pratt said. "I know better than that."
