Los Angeles Homeless: City Declares State Of Emergency On Homelessness, Will Spend $100 Million To Help

On Tuesday, officials in Los Angeles said they are declaring a state of emergency regarding the city’s excessive homeless population and have lodged a proposition to spend $100 million to help. This suggested proposal makes Los Angeles the first city in the nation to take such extreme measures to help people living on the streets.

According to the New York Times, the official estimate of homeless people living on the streets of Los Angeles is somewhere in the area of 26,000 people. In a joint effort with City Council President Herb Wesson and members of the council’s Homelessness and Poverty Committee, Mayor Eric Garcetti stood outside the Los Angeles city hall Tuesday to announce the city’s bid to combat homelessness, while homeless people slept on the lawn outside city hall.

“These are our fellow Angelinos. They are those who have no other place to go, and they are literally here where we work. Every single day we come to work, we see folks lying on this grass, a symbol of our city’s intense crisis. This city has pushed this problem from neighborhood to neighborhood for too long, from bureaucracy to bureaucracy.”

The funding proposal to help the homeless people of Los Angeles will need the backing of the full City Council, reports the Associated Press. And while Wesson hasn’t stated explicitly where, exactly, the $100 million will come from, he says it will be found “somehow, someway.”

The plan is still in its early stages, but it involves increasing the times that homeless shelters are open, as well as providing more rent subsidies to the homeless and those living in shelters. The state of emergency on Los Angeles’ homeless population came on the heels of another initiative announced by Mayor Garcetti that proposes to release almost $13 million in excess tax revenue for short-term housing — the majority of which would go to helping house homeless veterans.

Alice Callaghan, an advocate for the homeless on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, says that while the $100 million proposition is a nice idea, it’s not nearly enough to tackle the majority of the city’s homeless problem because, she says, the problem lies in there being not enough affordable housing for the homeless population of Los Angeles.

“A hundred million dollars won’t even buy all the homeless pillows. A hundred million certainly won’t build much housing — and what we really have here is a housing crisis.”

Should cities across the nation follow in the footsteps of Los Angeles in order to help the growing homeless populations across the country?

[Image Credit: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images]