Read: Medieval diseases are infecting California’s homeless

The mayor’s response has been to increase public spending on homelessness sharply, but he’s had frustratingly little to show for it. When the homelessness issue burst onto front pages a few years ago, Garcetti jumped into action with an ambitious plan to build emergency shelters in all 15 districts of the city. But as the mayor soon discovered, the issue with an “emergency” plan oriented around construction is that Los Angeles is a far cry from Bob Moses’s New York. Eighty percent of the shelters have been held up by red tape and community resistance. The short-term measures, then, must take the city’s built environment as a given.

A new sales tax boosted the city’s budget for dealing with homelessness to more than $600 million, or $20,000 per homeless person, while a bond issuance brought in $1.2 billion to go toward constructing an estimated 10,000 housing units over the next decade, all of which would be preserved for people transitioning off the street or in danger of ending up there. Los Angeles has taken about 16 percent of the funds from its recent sales-tax increase and packaged it as vouchers to offer to a share of its homeless population, allowing them to buy into the rental marketplace with the understanding that their subsidy will fade over the course of a year, shifting the burden onto the new renter.

While Los Angeles is right to want a program that moves people toward self-sufficiency—both for the sake of the homeless themselves and to protect the city’s coffers—the steep monthly increases as the vouchers fade out often outpace the low-wage, part-time work the recipients are able to find. Unsurprisingly, for an alarming share of recipients, the program is more of a one-year reprieve than the start of a new, stable life. Short of doing something serious about the underlying cost of housing in Los Angeles, a limited pool of voucher dollars will forever chase rising rents.

Before the city’s new homelessness count was released, the mayor had been touting the 20,000 people the city had moved off the street and into some form of housing. What we now know, however, is that while the Garcetti administration was helping to move 380 people off the street each week, some 480 others were joining the ranks of homeless Angelenos. Put another way, until someone does something about the city’s larger housing crisis, homelessness will be as much a part of the city’s landscape as Runyon Canyon.

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