Los Angeles Approves Plans to Fight Homelessness

LOS ANGELES — Five months after declaring that homelessness here hadreached emergency proportions, city and county officials on Tuesday approved parallel plans that aim to combat the growing crisis of people living on the streets.

The city’s plan — which comes with a price of $100 million for homeless services this year and nearly $2 billion over the next decade for housing — includes appointing a city homeless coordinator, creating a network of public restrooms and showers, and, most critically, making a huge investment in affordable housing. Rising rents and home prices are considered prime culprits in the escalating number of homeless people here; according to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, Los Angeles County has the largest chronic homeless population in the country.

The plan approved by the county supervisors, meanwhile, committed an additional $150 million over the next two years to services for the homeless.

While stubborn questions remain about where the money will come from and how quickly improvements can be made, local officials declared that Tuesday’s votes marked the start of a new era for fighting homelessness in the region, after years in which the local governments did not work together and homeless people were chased from one area to another.

“This is a historic moment for the city,” said José Huizar, a city councilor and sponsor of the legislation. “For the first time in our recent memory, we have a comprehensive approach.”

Mayor Eric Garcetti said that the money would come from new revenue and shifting existing funds, and that voters would most likely be asked to approve more funding to address the issue in November or in March of next year.

“This is the highest priority that we have, to make sure that nobody is living on the streets and nobody is without a home,” the mayor said at a news conference after the City Council vote.

Mr. Garcetti said that significant progress had been made in the past year. He highlighted a collaboration with the county government to clean up Skid Row, one of the nation’s largest homeless encampments, with a goal of reducing the population there by a quarter before the end of the year.

The county’s homeless population shot up 12 percent from 2013 to 2015, and last year’s count put it at an estimated 44,000 people, with more than half of those within the city limits. Officials predict that this year’s numbers will be even higher.

Marqueece Harris-Dawson, a city councilor, said the expansion of encampments from downtown to freeway overpasses throughout the city had helped spur action. “All of us have encampments on one corner or another, under one freeway pass or another,” said Mr. Harris-Dawson, who co-sponsored the legislation.

Although the city is home to most of the county’s homeless population, it is the county, which runs the Public Health Department and the jail system, that provides most services for the homeless. The county already spends around $1 billion per year on health and welfare for the homeless, as well as on law enforcement to both help and police the population. The additional county funding will, in part, pay for short- and long-term housing.

Though some advocates for the homeless applauded the joint plans, others said the efforts would not do nearly enough to alleviate the suffering of those on the street. Neither plan, for example, addressed the ongoing complaint that the police harass people for sleeping on the streets — a policy that advocates for the homeless refer to as criminalization — and confiscate their property.

Pete White of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, an anti-poverty group, said the money the city had earmarked for emergency housing during potential El Niño flooding was nowhere near enough. “You must highlight criminalization,” Mr. White said. “Make sure it’s not part of the plan.”

But Peter Lynn, the executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, said the plans were important steps forward, because they identified just how much money would be required to end one of the region’s most intractable problems.

“Homelessness is at a crisis level in Los Angeles,” Mr. Lynn said. “It’s going to take time and serious resource investment to fix it, but the plans lay out a road map to get us there.”