DELIVERING RESULTS IN 2024: Comprehensive Homelessness Strategy Nearly Doubles Permanent Housing Move-Ins Since Mayor Bass Took Office, Thousands More People Moved Inside Than[...]

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New Initiative Launched By Mayor in Partnership With Philanthropy Opens More Housing at Lower Cost To Taxpayers
Historic Policy Changes Secured To Slash Red Tape, Eliminate Building Obstacles

LOS ANGELES - Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass today announced permanent housing move-ins have doubled since before taking office and thousands more Angelenos have moved inside than in 2022. She also highlighted historic changes to policy, practice and law to house people urgently, as well as efforts to build housing faster and in a cheaper way. Work to confront the homelessness crisis resulted in the first decline in homelessness in years, including a 10 percent reduction in street homelessness.

This year, the Mayor's continued comprehensive approach to confronting the homelessness crisis demonstrated sustained change:

• More than 23,000 Angelenos moved into temporary housing - thousands morethan the year before Mayor Bass took office;

• Permanent housing move-ins have nearly doubledcompared to 2022;

• Mayor Bass launched a first-of-its-kind partnership that is saving taxpayers millions and opened housing faster;

• Project application wait times dropped by 75% following streamlining; more than 25,000 units of affordable housingare being accelerated;

• Regulatory fixes and the elimination of red tapehave directly contributed to more than 1,000 Angelenos coming inside this year

"The old ways of managing the crisis instead of solving it are over," said Mayor Bass. "We are turning the page to make lasting change. You can see the results with more people inside, more clear sidewalks, and new, innovative housing. We are breaking through past regulations that allowed people to languish on the streets and refusing to tolerate inaction. This progress is fuel for the future - we will not slow down."

The announcement today was made at LA4LA's first affordable housing project which houses nearly 60 formerly homeless people who came inside through Inside Safe. The housing project was on the brink of being sold as market-rate housing before LA4LA jumped in to work with developers and secure grant funding and a low-interest loan from philanthropic partners. Mayor Bass was joined by formerly homeless Angelenos who are now permanently housed through Inside Safe, business leaders and community members who spoke about the positive impacts that Mayor Bass' Inside Safe program has had on their lives and in their neighborhoods.

On Day 1, Mayor Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness, breaking with the status quo of a worsening crisis. During Mayor Bass' first year in office, the City turned a corner on the homelessness crisis. According to the 2024 Annual Point-In-Time Count Data:

• Homelessness in the City of Los Angeles is down for the first time in six years

• Unprecedented drop in street homelessness (10% decrease in the City of Los Angeles - the first double digit decrease in the last at least 9 years)

• A decrease in makeshift shelters (38% decrease in the City of Los Angeles).

• The number of people who moved into permanent housing is at an all time high.

Mayor Bass built on this success in 2024, driving unprecedented collaboration to make real, lasting and visible change in the lives of Angelenos.

URGENTLY BRINGING PEOPLE INTO HOUSING

Bringing More People Inside: According to data from intergovernmental agencies, 23,000 Angelenos have come inside as of November 30, 2024, which is more than 5,300 more people than in 2022, before the Mayor took office. These results show that Mayor Bass made sustained change over the last two years including:

• More than 23,000 Angelenos moved inside to temporary housing- an increase of more than 5,300people from 2022.

• More than 3,600people have come inside through Inside Safe since the beginning of the program.

• Nearly 7,400 Angelenos have moved into permanent housingplacements from interim housing - a more than 1,500 person increase from 2023 and nearly double the number of people placed in 2022. This year-over-year trend shows a sustained and improved increase in helping thousands more homeless people move from the streets to permanent housing.

  • 8,866 Angelenoshave come inside with housing vouchers in 2024. This includes but is not limited to low-income households assisted via a combination of Housing Choice, Project Based and VASH Vouchers.

• Prior to the Mayor and Council's focused efforts, thousands of vouchers went unused year after year leaving people to die on the street and even resulting in federal funding being sent back to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Mayor Bass fulfilled a campaign promise to fully utilize federal resources. This year, she announced that more than 4,000 people were able to fully utilize 3,365 Emergency Housing Vouchersfollowing the Mayor City Council's action to expand the capacity of HACLA by increasing staff and reorienting priorities.

Saving Lives, Preventing Encampments from Returning: Inside Safe is a citywide, voluntary program that partners with all 15 Council Districts, LA County, LAHSA and community partners to save lives and restore neighborhoods.

• Since the program began, more than 75 encampments have been addressed and more than 3,600 people have entered interim housing. In addition to the continued work to address encampments across the city and help people come inside to housing and services, this year the Mayor directed her staff to expand and improve upon strategies that were implemented in 2023.

• To bring more people inside urgently and prevent encampments from returning, in 2024 the Inside Safe Field Intervention Team launched a new series of Response Efforts. Response Efforts consist of the following: the Inside Safe Field Intervention Team monitors all Inside Safe encampment resolution locations in case new individuals have moved into the area. The team works with those individuals to help them come inside to Inside Safe interim housing and services. More than 100 response efforts were conducted over the last year, which have served hundreds of unhoused Angelenos.

SCALING AND IMPROVING SERVICES

Expanding and Improving Life-Saving Services: Inside Safe services and operations were improved upon and strengthened by Mayor Bass as more Angelenos were brought inside through the program. As a healthcare professional, Mayor Bass knows the importance of mental and physical health care for people who are working to get their lives back on track. She appointed the first ever Deputy Mayor of Homelessness and Community Health, a board-certified physician, to lead the evaluation and improvement of on-site services at Inside Safe interim housing sites.

• Since launching Inside Safe, Mayor Bass has required more robust and higher quality services to be administered to Angelenos in Inside Safe interim housing. Steps were taken to formalize service provision requirements including mail provision, case management and housing navigation.

• In partnership with L.A. County, Inside Safe co-hosted Service Connect Days to provide services that reduce the chance participants fall back into homelessness. These events are put on either at the site of Inside Safe housing or at locations where transportation is provided. Services include mental health assistance, legal documentation updates, immigration status assistance, government identification services and more. These services are crucial to assisting Angelenos to move into permanent housing and to remain off the streets.

• Through a partnership with health plans and LAHSA, the Mayor has coordinated efforts to enroll more people into Medi-Cal's CalAIM program that will provide enhanced case management and housing support to participants across all City interim housing.

• Mayor Bass expanded outreach to meet homeless Angelenos where they are and provide lifesaving medical care. This year's City funding resulted in USC Street Medicine hiring a designated Street Medicine team to be present at all Inside Safe operations, ensuring people are a good fit for independent living, placing them in a higher level of care as needed, and ensuring they have their medications. The USC Street Medicine team hired a full-time nurse in November and a full-time Physician Assistant will be starting in January 2025. Since last December, USC Street Medicine has completed more than 12,000 patient visits, served over 1,200 patients, and supported 23 Inside Safe operations/response efforts, with 110 of their patients brought inside through Inside Safe, while continuing to treat their patients as they move into housing and supporting them on their path to safety and stability.

Eliminating Barriers to Substance Use Treatment:The Mayor launched the Collaborative for Substance Use Care, a pilot that voluntarily screens people experiencing homelessness for substance use disorder on the street and at all City interim housing, assessing their readiness for treatment and offering voluntary enrollment into inpatient care such as detox treatment. In November, the Collaborative teamed up with the CIRCLE program to serve more people across the city. CIRCLE is a proven program that helps free-up LAPD officers by sending non-violent 911 mental health calls to mental health workers and individuals with lived experience to provide help and assistance for unhoused individuals experiencing crisis.

Bringing Pets Safely Inside: The Mayor's Inside Safe program partnered with Los Angeles Animal Services, CAMP LA and Best Friends Animal Society to provide vaccines and microchips for pets living with their owners in Inside Safe motels. Providing this service eliminates a key barrier that led to many Angelenos being unable to come off the street.

Connecting Formerly Homeless with Jobs To Help Them Remain Inside:More than 100 formerly homeless Angelenos in Inside Safe secured jobs and employment opportunities through the Mayor's Office Job Connectors program. With funding awarded by Comcast, the program is expanding to help more formerly unhoused Angelenos stay off the street by providing job training, support and other services. Jobs support began in August 2023 and has already helped:

• More than 100 formerly homeless Angelenos in Inside Safe secure jobs and employment opportunities

• 400 formerly unhoused Inside Safe participants receive 1:1 job counseling and assistance with resumes, interviews and applications to help them get "job ready."

• More than 500 job applications have been submitted thus far by Inside Safe residents.

Increasing Accountability, Delivering Sustained Results: In November, L.A. County voters passed Measure A, backed by Mayor Bass, to significantly reduce and prevent homelessness while creating accountability and transparency mechanisms that Mayor Bass has called for since the beginning of her term. Specifically, the ballot measure will provide funding to require accountability and results, create affordable housing, support home ownership, provide rental assistance, increase mental health and addiction treatment, reduce and prevent homelessness; and provide services for children, families, veterans, domestic violence survivors, seniors, and disabled people experiencing homelessness.

SHREDDING BUREAUCRATIC RED TAPE AND SECURING HISTORIC POLICY CHANGES

Historic changes to policy, practice and law: Since her first day in office, Mayor Bass has worked to break down the barriers that make it difficult to house people with urgency. The Mayor has made significant progress in changing antiquated policies, practices and laws and continues confronting the broken systems that allowed homelessness to explode in L.A..

• Securing waivers to bring people inside faster: Before these new waivers were secured, Angelenos were left on the streets to die because they didn't have a form of identification or they couldn't prove they didn't have a source of income. Mayor Bass secured a critical agreement to bring more Angelenos inside fasterby establishing waivers to bring Angelenos inside and then work on securing needed paperwork. More than 1,200 waivers have been secured to move people inside faster.

• Enshrining policy changes into law: Following the historic policy change, Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 1500, which was introduced by Senator María Elena Durazo and sponsored by Mayor Bass to give housing providers the certainty they need to take advantage of the federal presumptive eligibility waivers that Mayor Bass secured from HUD in August of 2023.

Accelerating Affordable Housing: More than 25,000 units of 100% affordable housing are being accelerated through the Mayor's Executive Directive 1. ED1 cuts through red tape to deliver more affordable housing faster and at lower costs. Permit approval wait times have been cut by 75%. More than 2,000 units of housing accelerated by ED1 are under construction.

Addressing RV Homelessness: Knowing the challenges that RV dwelling presents for communities and the homeless, Mayor Bass took unprecedented steps to break systemic barriers to getting RVs off the streets. Through Inside Safe, RVs are being taken off the street while people are brought safely inside.

• Existing laws require surrendered RVs to be stored for a certain period of time before being dismantled. Mayor Bass expanded Executive Directive 3 earlier this year to use publicly-owned land to build more housing faster and to address RV encampments by increasing the City's capacity to tow, store, and dismantle surrendered vehicles. Under ED3, the City secured a Metro-owned lot to serve as an RV storage lot to get more RVs off the street.

• In September 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 2525, which was authored by Assemblymember and Democratic Caucus Chair Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Hollywood) and sponsored by Mayor Bass to move RVs out of neighborhoods and bring more unhoused Angelenos inside. AB 2525 will reduce homelessness by allowing the City to lease property to store RVs while the unhoused Angelenos receive housing and services through the Mayor's Inside Safe program.

Delivering for Homeless Veterans: For too long, Veterans have had to choose between their disability benefits and housing, leaving thousands of Americans who served our country to languish on the streets. The Mayor has taken urgent action including:

• Changing federal policyso that disability benefits do not count toward income, making more Veterans eligible for housing and increasing their housing options. One of Mayor Bass' top federal priorities, this policy change was a direct result of advocacy from Mayor Bass and the U.S. Conference of Mayors' Task Force on Homelessness to the federal government. The VA estimates that nearly 5,000 Veterans were being disqualified nationally from voucher access because they made too much in disability benefits.

• Coordinating closely with HACLA to help interested landlords rent housing to Veterans by participating in the Veteran housing voucher program known as HUD-VASH. More than 50 landlords attended a resource and information event, leading to 65 scheduled apartment viewings for Veterans.

• In 2025, the Mayor will be launching a public campaign to partner with landlords to house more Veterans.

Establishing Competitive Rents to House More People: In the Los Angeles housing market, many landlords were unable to accept housing vouchers because the value was not high enough to be competitive. Through partnership with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and HACLA, an additional waiver was granted to public housing authorities to be able to enable more landlords to accept vouchers.

DRIVING DOWN COSTS

Initiating LA4LA: This year, Mayor Bass launched LA4LA, a new public-private partnership that brings together business, development and philanthropy to unlock, leverage and scale investments for innovative housing solutions. In less than nine months, LA4LA has preserved, funded and is delivering units of housing for formerly homeless and vulnerable Angelenos. Projects would have stalled or failed without LA4LA's partnership. Impacts include:

• LA4LA's first facilitated affordable housing project in Koreatown developed by Treehouse Community LA provides 58 new units of permanent supportive housing. The development was on the brink of being sold as a market-rate development, facing rising costs of material, and skyrocketing interest rates. In 4 short months, LA4LA jumped in to work with developers and secure grant funding and a low-interest loan from philanthropic partners.

• A new housing project in South L.A. that will add thousands of construction and permanent jobs, 800 new homes and a Costco with a healthy foods grocery store and pharmacy among other resources. This is a first-of-its-kind project under new legislation for the City that will accelerate the building of more much-needed housing. Costco will also provide hundreds of jobs in the new store.

• A milestone project in Northeast L.A. that preserves affordable housing for long-term working class residents. This project is part of an innovative community housing program that shows how mom-and-pop property owners can stop gentrification without sacrificing return on investment.

• A mixed-income, transit-oriented housing project with 10 deeply affordable units and ground floor retail space in Crenshaw with no public subsidy. The project developer is family-led, Black-owned, and women-owned with a focus on delivering much-needed housing while preserving the culture, history and identity of the Crenshaw district.

• An acquisition and conversion to affordable housing of 335 units of existing newly built housing that will provide larger units for vulnerable families in the San Fernando Valley.

In addition, LA4LA in partnership with the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the California Community Foundation, and other partners including the Ballmer Foundation, Broad Foundation and the Ford Foundation are engaging in the following initiatives to jump start housing:

• Housing Fellow: LA4LA is funding a Sr. Housing Advisor/Fellow for the Mayor's Office of Housing that will identify and implement new housing construction types, cost reduction opportunities, and access to capital.

• Small Lots/Big Impact Design Competition:In partnership with the City of Los Angeles, and cityLAB, a multi-disciplinary research center within UCLA's architecture and urban design department, the Small Lots Big Impact design competition will identify and pilot new housing prototype models that deliver gentle density and affordable homeownership.

• Development Research: In partnership with USC's Price School, LA4LA is mapping the universe of units that can benefit from development incentives. Using spatial data analysis and financial modeling, the research will address key questions including what a public development subsidy program could look like and how we can adjust our land use policies to incentivize upzoning without causing mass land value appreciation.

• Convening and Collaboration: LA4LA is hosting sessions with housing experts, banking institutions and culturally competent developers, among other key problem solvers, on the affordable housing crisis to help communities share ideas and lift up best practices and research. This will help us identify the next batch of innovative solutions.

Opening the Mayfair: Mayor Bass delivered the first ever permanent interim housing infrastructure through the on-time delivery of the Mayfair, 294 units of interim housing with onsite activity and community spaces, a medical clinic and supportive services. The Mayfair acquisition increases the delivery of housing and services for former residents of Skid Row and lowers daily operating costs.

Embracing Affordable Models: Mayor Bass held the City's first-ever Innovative Construction Expo to showcase creative housing construction models that drive down costs and timelines to build more housing across the Los Angeles region. The Expo brought together more than 150 affordable housing developers, companies who specialize in innovating housing, general contractors, architects, and city and county leaders from across the region to share cost-saving construction solutions and practices.

Responsibly Administering Funds: Mayor Bass has pushed for increased transparency and accountability over progress toward goals and spending since Day 1. She's taking action:

• Implementing Measure ULA: The Mayor helped shape the ULA Permanent Guidelines and Annual Expenditure Plan to ensure that money generated through the measure is funding programs that keep people housed and bring more people inside urgently.

• Managing State and Federal Grants: The City follows best practices to spend government grant funding as received. Funding is not spent before it is received from state agencies.

PREVENTING HOMELESSNESS, OTHER URGENT ACTIONS TO BREAK STATUS QUO

Keeping People Housed:The Mayor's Fund for Los Angeles, a separate non-profit organization working in partnership with the mayor, is helping prevent thousands of Angelenos from falling into homelessness. Through outreach, case management and legal services, over the past year, the Mayor's Fund and its partners have served people at immediate risk of eviction and homelessness and put a special emphasis on serving the city's most vulnerable residents, including youth aging out of foster care, veterans, and domestic violence survivors. This year, the fund has:

• Helped more than 1,680 families and individuals respond to eviction filings.

• Launched an initiative to proactively reach out to each youth aging out of foster care and help them establish stable housing.

• Partnered with a new legal service provider to provide each household at risk of eviction with legal advice and representation if their case goes to trial.

Responding to Housing Emergencies: Mayor Bass knows that ending the crisis means preventing people from falling into homelessness in the first place. Following a fire in the Chinatown community, the Mayor's Office worked closely with Councilmember Hernandez's team and community partners to find culturally appropriate housing options for 20 households including older Angelenos to remain in Chinatown, near their community and resources.

Moving Housing to Completion: The Mayor has worked closely with City departments to help steward stalled Project Homekey sites and move them toward completion. Following this cross-departmental leadership, more units of permanent supportive and affordable housing opened this year. Hundreds of units of permanent supportive housing are on track to open over the next six months.

Securing Historic Agreement with Federal Government: Mayor Bass secured a historic agreement with the White House and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness as Los Angeles was selected to be one of five cities to enter in an unprecedented partnership called ALL INside, a first-of-its kind initiative to address unsheltered homelessness across the country. The Mayor's Office, USICH, HUD and the White House Office of Management and Budget continue to meet with L.A. housing leaders to build on efforts to remove barriers to housing including but not limited to advocating for more housing vouchers, increasing the project based voucher cap for housing authorities, and increasing funding for programs to prevent and end homelessness.

Locking Arms with Housing Department, HACLA Leadership: The City Council approved Mayor Bass' appointment of the next Los Angeles Housing Department General Manager Tiena Johnson Hall. Ms. Johnson Hall will lead and implement strategies to cut through bureaucratic red tape, drive innovation for affordable housing development, prevent people from losing their housing, and work urgently to house more Angelenos. She will work closely with Lourdes Castro Ramirez, the new President and CEOof the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles. These leaders will encourage a deeper coordination and connection between HALCA, the City and the County.

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