Los Angeles Homeless Issue: Will Housing Really Change Anything?

I came across this NBC Los Angeles video and report. The video and article are mainly about Heidi Van Tassel, a woman who had a bucket of feces dumped on her head by a homeless person in Hollywood.

The article also shows that reports of crimes by the homeless has increased from 6,528 in 2017 to 9,846 in 2018. 2019 is expected to increase above this level. As of September 2019, reported crime is at 9,173. If you do a straight line calculation, 2019 could hit 12,230.

The article blames mental health and drug problems. It also states that many of those that are homeless are just released back onto the streets where they no doubt will commit similar crimes again.



What will be interesting to see is if such crimes start to decline as the 7,640 housing units (current estimates from the audit of Proposition HHH spending) start to open up.

In a post I wrote about protests around a Chatsworth homeless apartment complex and the arguments for why one should be built:

There are already homeless living on the streets of Chatsworth. As for this argument, the article mentions that those who want to move into this supportive housing unit would need to go through extensive background checks. How many people currently living on the streets would meet those background check requirements?

So would people with mental health and drug problems be allowed into this apartment complex? Could they even pass a background check? Even if they were able to pass a background check, it doesn't seem like this would reduce crime. It isn't like someone is going to hangout in their new apartment 24/7. In fact, if these apartment complexes are furnished with standard kitchen utensils (thinking cutting knives here), could crime actually become more violent?

I suppose an argument for why crime might get reduced is that perhaps it would be easier to treat the mentally ill who are housed in apartment complexes. Maybe drug addiction would drop. On the other hand, will there even be enough city workers employed to handle the workload of dealing with those with mental illness and drug addictions. If not, housing them might not do much to change the equation.

The LA Times has a suggestion, which would just mean another Proposition would be needed:

For some, the best form of help may be a back-to-the-future approach: state mental hospitals dedicated to serving this particular population. This would not solve the problem of people with mental illness who refuse shelter (that issue has to be addressed by involuntary commitment laws). But the fact is, there aren’t enough beds in existing facilities for the mentally ill who might need and want such services.

The opinion piece believes that these facilities believes these facilities could be run correctly by the government. Put me in the doubtful column on this one, but something does need to be done to remove the mentally ill from the streets of Los Angeles.