{"id":466714,"date":"2025-12-23T13:57:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T13:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/466714\/"},"modified":"2025-12-23T13:57:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T13:57:12","slug":"bass-got-some-of-las-homeless-people-indoors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/466714\/","title":{"rendered":"Bass got some of LA’s homeless people indoors"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jim Newton<\/a>, CalMatters<\/p>\n

This commentary was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass staked her political future on a promise: As a candidate
in 2022, she vowed to make homelessness her top priority and to make dramatic
reductions in the city\u2019s population of unhoused people.<\/p>\n

She won the campaign. To deliver on that promise, her first act as mayor was to sign Executive Directive 1, which was intended to streamline the construction of affordable housing and to signal the new administration\u2019s urgency on the issue. She also rolled out\u00a0Inside Safe<\/a>, a program that breaks up homeless encampments and offers a safe alternative to those living inside them.<\/p>\n

Three years later, as she enters the final year of her first term and embarks on her
campaign for re-election, Bass can point to real achievements in the homeless area, but she
battles a difficult perception problem: What if the number of homeless people in Los Angeles is down but not enough so that most Angelenos feel the problem is being solved?<\/p>\n

There is evidence of progress. According to the mayor\u2019s office, Inside Safe has
conducted 117 operations since Bass launched it, and it has brought 5,496 people in
from the streets. Of those, 1,321 have made their way to permanent housing. Others
have found temporary shelter or, sadly, have returned to the streets.<\/p>\n

How much progress?<\/p>\n

Against a citywide homeless population of more than 40,000 people, those
numbers may seem incremental, but they are helping to reverse years of neglect. The
number of unsheltered homeless people \u2014 the focus of Bass\u2019s work \u2014 has declined<\/a> by
17.5% since the mayor took office, according to the county\u2019s annual count.<\/p>\n

Austin Beutner, the former Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent who so
far is Bass\u2019s most serious challenger in the mayor\u2019s race, questions the numbers and
claims of progress. <\/p>\n

(Disclosure: I worked as a senior editor and columnist for the L.A. Times when Beutner was its publisher in 2014-15.)<\/p>\n

Beutner points to a recent study by the RAND Corp. that sounded skeptical about Los Angeles County\u2019s annual homeless count, suggesting it may significantly underestimate the extent of the area\u2019s unhoused population.<\/p>\n

The RAND study pointed to a rise in the number of so-called \u201crough sleepers,\u201d people
who sleep on the street without even a tent or car which, it said, has caused the county\u2019s
annual homeless count to become increasingly inaccurate. That\u2019s in part because rough sleepers are difficult to find and include in official tallies.<\/p>\n

RAND attempted to check the county\u2019s numbers by focusing on three areas \u2014 Venice,
Hollywood and Skid Row \u2014 and comparing its count to the one produced by the Los
Angeles Homeless Services Agency.<\/p>\n

The results, according to RAND, suggest that LAHSA is missing large numbers of unsheltered people. But even the RAND report noted that the number of people without shelter in its study areas was falling, sometimes dramatically.<\/p>\n

In 2024, RAND found, the number of people without housing in its study area dropped by 15%.
In Hollywood, the decline was 49%.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not enough to declare victory against the scourge of homelessness, but it\u2019s
hardly the basis for declaring failure.<\/p>\n

Complicating matters further are the relentless facts of politics and the strains they
put on any holder of the LA mayor\u2019s office. No matter how much a mayor sets out to
concentrate on a single issue, life intervenes, throwing up new challenges and
distractions.<\/p>\n

In Bass\u2019s case, the past year sent two big ones her way: the wildfires that destroyed
large swaths of the Pacific Palisades, within Bass\u2019s area of responsibility, and Altadena,
outside it. And then there was President Donald Trump\u2019s decision to turn Los Angeles
into the testing ground for his demonization of immigrants and militarization of American
life.<\/p>\n

A shifting focus<\/p>\n

Either of those could have upended Bass\u2019s focus on homelessness, and it\u2019s true that news
coverage of the mayor has largely moved off the issue that brought her to office.<\/p>\n

As she enters her re-election campaign, critics are more likely to focus on her halting reply to
the fires, while supporters point most eagerly to her dogged resistance to Trump.
In political terms, both issues may prove offsetting, as the fires highlighted what some
regard as the mayor\u2019s administrative weaknesses while the Trump assault reminded
voters she has served as a bulwark against a deeply reviled president and his
legion of not-very-bright minions.<\/p>\n

As 2026 opens, the Palisades are rebuilding, and the troops dispatched by Trump to put
down non-existent riots have returned to homes and bases.<\/p>\n

Homelessness persists.<\/p>\n

That then frames a central question of this mayor\u2019s race: Has Bass done enough to
address the shameful reality of a city that boasts extravagant wealth and yet tens of thousands of its people sleep without shelter?<\/p>\n

That, too, is politically complicated, in part because measuring the problem is only one
piece of its politics. It may not be enough for Bass to tell voters that they should be
happy with the city\u2019s progress, because the annual count shows the problem slowly
ebbing or because RAND found huge progress in Hollywood.<\/p>\n

What really matters is how most people come into contact with homelessness. In that sense, homelessness as a political issue resembles inflation. It does little good for a politician to tell voters that they should be happy with the economy if they\u2019re not.<\/p>\n

Joe Biden learned that the hard way, and Trump is busy learning it today. Every
time President Trump dismisses \u201caffordability\u201d as a \u201choax\u201d or a Democratic scheme, it backfires with voters who feel pressed by rising prices or stagnant wages.<\/p>\n

Hence Trump\u2019s march into the dark abyss of public disapproval.<\/p>\n

Similarly, it\u2019s not enough for Bass to insist that fewer people are homeless than<\/a> were
three years ago, if voters don\u2019t sense that for themselves. If there\u2019s an encampment on
the corner, it hardly matters that there are 49% fewer unhoused men and women in
Hollywood. Homelessness still feels present<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That may turn out to be this campaign\u2019s wildcard. If voters feel that their own
neighborhoods are better, it will land as proof that Bass is making headway and
deserves four more years to complete the work she began with Executive Directive 1.<\/p>\n

If not, Beutner or some other candidate may get the chance to finish what she started.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Jim Newton, CalMatters This commentary was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. Los Angeles…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":466715,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[14871,852,1582,276,11890,7265,2961,224,5337],"class_list":{"0":"post-466714","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-accountability","9":"tag-affordable-housing","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-california","12":"tag-commentary","13":"tag-homelessness","14":"tag-la","15":"tag-los-angeles","16":"tag-losangeles"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115769236554671153","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466714\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/466715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}