[House Hearing, 116 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
EXAMINING THE HOMELESSNESS
CRISIS IN LOS ANGELES
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FIELD HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON FINANCIAL SERVICES
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
AUGUST 14, 2019
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Financial Services
Serial No. 116-44
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
40-162 PDF WASHINGTON : 2020
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HOUSE COMMITTEE ON FINANCIAL SERVICES
MAXINE WATERS, California, Chairwoman
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York PATRICK McHENRY, North Carolina,
NYDIA M. VELAZQUEZ, New York Ranking Member
BRAD SHERMAN, California PETER T. KING, New York
GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma
WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri BILL POSEY, Florida
DAVID SCOTT, Georgia BLAINE LUETKEMEYER, Missouri
AL GREEN, Texas BILL HUIZENGA, Michigan
EMANUEL CLEAVER, Missouri SEAN P. DUFFY, Wisconsin
ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado STEVE STIVERS, Ohio
JIM A. HIMES, Connecticut ANN WAGNER, Missouri
BILL FOSTER, Illinois ANDY BARR, Kentucky
JOYCE BEATTY, Ohio SCOTT TIPTON, Colorado
DENNY HECK, Washington ROGER WILLIAMS, Texas
JUAN VARGAS, California FRENCH HILL, Arkansas
JOSH GOTTHEIMER, New Jersey TOM EMMER, Minnesota
VICENTE GONZALEZ, Texas LEE M. ZELDIN, New York
AL LAWSON, Florida BARRY LOUDERMILK, Georgia
MICHAEL SAN NICOLAS, Guam ALEXANDER X. MOONEY, West Virginia
RASHIDA TLAIB, Michigan WARREN DAVIDSON, Ohio
KATIE PORTER, California TED BUDD, North Carolina
CINDY AXNE, Iowa DAVID KUSTOFF, Tennessee
SEAN CASTEN, Illinois TREY HOLLINGSWORTH, Indiana
AYANNA PRESSLEY, Massachusetts ANTHONY GONZALEZ, Ohio
BEN McADAMS, Utah JOHN ROSE, Tennessee
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ, New York BRYAN STEIL, Wisconsin
JENNIFER WEXTON, Virginia LANCE GOODEN, Texas
STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts DENVER RIGGLEMAN, Virginia
TULSI GABBARD, Hawaii
ALMA ADAMS, North Carolina
MADELEINE DEAN, Pennsylvania
JESUS ``CHUY'' GARCIA, Illinois
SYLVIA GARCIA, Texas
DEAN PHILLIPS, Minnesota
Charla Ouertatani, Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Hearing held on:
August 14, 2019.............................................. 1
Appendix:
August 14, 2019.............................................. 67
WITNESSES
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
Al-Mansour, Chancela, Executive Director, Housing Rights Center.. 37
Ansell, Phil, Director, Los Angeles County Homeless Initiative... 12
Dennison, Becky, Executive Director, Venice Community Housing.... 32
Gallo, Dora Leong, President and Chief Executive Officer, A
Community of Friends........................................... 41
Garcetti, Hon. Eric, Mayor, City of Los Angeles.................. 51
Hartman, Erika, Chief Program Officer, Downtown Women's Center... 35
Haynes, Anthony, Speak Up! Advocate, Corporation for Supportive
Housing........................................................ 34
Horiye, Joe, Western Region Program Vice President, Local
Initiatives Support Corporation................................ 30
King-Viehland, Monique, Executive Director, Los Angeles County
Development Authority.......................................... 9
Lares, Margarita, Chief Program Officer, Housing Authority of the
City of Los Angeles............................................ 7
Lynn, Peter, Executive Director, Los Angeles Homeless Services
Authority...................................................... 5
Miller, Christina, Deputy Mayor for City of LA Homeless
Initiatives, Office of Los Angeles Mayor....................... 3
Murray, Kevin, former State Senator, and President and CEO, the
Weingart Center................................................ 11
Vizcaino, Alma, Speaker, Downtown Women's Center, on behalf of
Domestic Violence Homeless Services Coalition.................. 39
Watkins, Tim, President and Chief Executive Officer, Watts Labor
Community Action Committee..................................... 29
APPENDIX
Prepared statements:
Dennison, Becky.............................................. 68
Gallo, Dora Leong............................................ 73
Garcetti, Hon. Eric.......................................... 78
Hartman, Erika............................................... 89
King-Viehland, Monique....................................... 96
Lares, Margarita............................................. 103
Lynn, Peter.................................................. 108
Murray, Kevin................................................ 117
Vizcaino, Alma............................................... 119
Additional Material Submitted for the Record
Waters, Hon. Maxine:
Wrtten statement of National Community Renaissance (National
CORE)...................................................... 122
Written statement of Jane Nguyen, a community organizer in
Los Angeles................................................ 132
EXAMINING THE HOMELESSNESS
CRISIS IN LOS ANGELES
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Wednesday, August 14, 2019
U.S. House of Representatives,
Committee on Financial Services,
Washington, D.C.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:10 a.m., at
the California African American Museum, 600 State Drive, Los
Angeles, California, Hon. Maxine Waters [chairwoman of the
committee] presiding.
Members present: Representatives Waters, Sherman, Green,
and Garcia of Texas.
Also present: Representatives Napolitano, Chu, Barragan,
and Gomez.
Chairwoman Waters. The Committee on Financial Services will
come to order.
Without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare a
recess of the committee at any time. Also, without objection,
Members of the House of Representatives who are not on the
Financial Services Committee are authorized to participate
fully in today's hearing, and members of the local media who
are invited to this hearing may engage in audio and visual
coverage of the committee's proceedings.
I would like to remind all here that any recording of
today's proceedings is solely to educate, enlighten, and inform
the general public on an accurate and impartial basis of the
committee's operations and consideration of legislative issues,
as well as developing an understanding and perspective on the
U.S. House of Representatives and its role in our government.
This coverage may not be used for any partisan political
campaign purpose or be made available for such purpose.
Finally, I want to welcome today's audience to this
hearing, which we will be conducting under the Rules of the
House of Representatives and the Rules of the Committee on
Financial Services.
Today's hearing is entitled, ``Examining the Homelessness
Crisis in Los Angeles.
I now recognize myself for 5 minutes to give an opening
statement.
Good morning to everyone. Welcome to the Committee on
Financial Services' field hearing entitled, ``Examining the
Homelessness Crisis in Los Angeles.'' This is our first Full
Committee field hearing of the 116th Congress.
I would like to thank the California African American
Museum and, of course, the executive director that you just
met, George O. Davis, for hosting today's hearing.
As chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, I
have made it a top priority to focus on homelessness. We are in
a national homelessness crisis. Earlier this year, I convened
the first-ever Full Committee hearing on homelessness, and
today, we will continue our discussion by examining the
homelessness crisis in Los Angeles and the Federal, State, and
local responses to address this great challenge that is in our
City and that is facing our nation.
According to the latest Point-in-Time Count, both the City
and County of Los Angeles experienced a 12- to 16-percent
increase from last year in the number of people who are
experiencing homelessness. On any given night, we have nearly
60,000 people in the County, while over 35,000 people
experience homelessness right here in the City.
I am describing some of our most vulnerable neighbors,
including families with children, seniors, and unaccompanied
youth. We cannot ignore that our homelessness crisis is
directly linked to the affordable housing crisis. Too many
people cannot afford to keep a roof over their heads as wages
have not kept pace with rising rents.
Los Angeles has one of the least affordable housing markets
in the United States. In LA County, a renter earning the
minimum wage of $13.25 an hour would need to work 79 hours a
week in order to afford a 2-bedroom apartment. As a result,
approximately 721,000 households in the County are severely
rent-burdened, meaning that they pay more than 50 percent of
their income on rent.
We need a bold and comprehensive response at the Federal,
State, and local level to address the homelessness crisis. That
is why I have introduced this bill, the Ending Homelessness
Act, legislation that would provide over $13 billion in funding
to ensure every person experiencing homelessness in America has
a place to call home.
The Financial Services Committee passed this legislation
earlier this year, and I am committed to doing everything I can
to get this bill passed into law. Both the County and City are
working hard to combat the homelessness and affordable housing
crisis.
Thanks to voters approving local ballot measures in 2016
and 2017, the City and County have robust new resources to fund
initiatives that improve the lives of people experiencing
homelessness. Proposition HHH has helped fund the development
of thousands of new permanent supportive housing units, and so
far, funding for Measure H has helped 14,000 people find
housing. However, much more needs to be done, including passing
legislation like the Ending Homelessness Act into law at the
Federal level.
Today, we will receive testimony from representatives of
the County and City, including Mayor Garcetti, who will testify
on our third panel. We will also hear from housing and service
providers who are on the ground every day delivering critical
services to people experiencing homelessness.
I would like to thank our committee members who are in
attendance here today. And I am so very pleased to have with us
Representative Al Green, all the way from Houston, Texas.
Representative Sylvia Garcia is here, also from Houston,
Texas. Please welcome her.
And of course, I would like to thank the members of the
California delegation, who are not members of the committee,
who are here today: Representative Nanette Barragan;
Representative Jimmy Gomez; and Representative Judy Chu. And we
are looking forward to being joined by Representative Brad
Sherman.
I look forward to hearing the witnesses' testimony.
Today, we have three panels, and I want to welcome the
first panel for today's hearing. Our first panel of
distinguished witnesses are: Christina Miller, the Deputy Mayor
for the City of Los Angeles Homeless Initiatives, that is in
the Office of the Mayor of the City of Los Angeles; Peter Lynn,
executive director, Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority;
Margarita Lares, chief program officer, Housing Authority of
the City of Los Angeles; Monique King-Viehland, executive
director, Los Angeles County Development Authority; Kevin
Murray, former State senator, and president and CEO, the
Weingart Center; and Phil Ansell, director, Los Angeles County
Homeless Initiative.
Without objection, your written statements will be made a
part of the record.
And each of you will have 5 minutes to summarize your
testimony. I will give you a signal by tapping the gavel
lightly when 1 minute remains. At that time, I would ask you to
wrap up your testimony so we can be respectful of both the
witnesses' and the committee members' time.
Before recognizing Ms. Miller, let me just say that there
are other elected officials who have joined us here today, and
I would like all of the other elected officials who are in the
audience to please stand. We welcome you.
And Ms. Miller, you are now recognized for 5 minutes to
present your oral testimony.
STATEMENT OF CHRISTINA MILLER, DEPUTY MAYOR FOR CITY OF LA
HOMELESS INITIATIVES, OFFICE OF LOS ANGELES MAYOR
Ms. Miller. Thank you very much, Chairwoman Waters and
esteemed members of the committee.
My name is Christina Miller, and I serve as Deputy Mayor of
Los Angeles under the leadership of Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Chairwoman, I want to begin by commending your leadership
in introducing the Ending Homelessness Act. While the crisis is
not as acute in most cities as it is here in Los Angeles, this
is, undoubtedly, a pervasive issue nationally. It is one that
has impacted big cities especially, but also rural areas and
has left many families and individuals without the basic need
of a safe place to live and thrive. That is unacceptable.
The only way we find our way out of this crisis is
together. With decades of disinvestment from the State and
Federal Government amounting to nearly $500 million per year,
on average, we need your help to make lasting progress.
Here in Los Angeles, we find ourselves in a bit of a
paradox. We are seen as national leaders with the best suite of
interventions to combat homelessness, yet our numbers increased
last year by 12 percent Countywide, and the scale of our crisis
is daunting.
It is fair to say that most average Angelenos--it is hard
to feel that progress is being made. It is also fair to say
that we can't get to everyone living on the streets fast
enough.
So the question becomes, how does a City and a County with
so many resources, with strong, committed leaders and a solid
strategic plan, have one of the largest homeless populations of
any city in America? The answer is twofold.
First, that while we have made tremendous progress in just
a few short years to outreach, provide services, and place our
homeless neighbors into housing, this effort only began in
earnest a few short years ago, and the homelessness crisis in
LA has been in the making for decades.
Second, it was especially put into focus for all of us this
year as our homeless count numbers increased despite record
housing placement numbers--almost 22,000 people Countywide--
that homelessness is a symptom of a much larger macro issue in
our region and across America. Our homelessness crisis is our
affordable housing crisis.
Homelessness has, among other things, become the most
extreme expression of poverty as the wealth divide grows deeper
and more acute. So investing in our homeless service system
alone won't solve this crisis. Concurrently, we must address
the feeder systems into homelessness and increase affordable
housing options for people to exit to.
Let me shift to telling you about the City's response to
homelessness. This year, the City of Los Angeles homelessness
budget amounts to $462 million. That is 25 times the
homelessness budget in 2015, with two-thirds of spending going
towards permanent housing, as you mentioned, our HHH housing
bond of $1.2 billion with the goal of housing 10,000 people
over the course of 10 years.
Through an action-oriented partnership with the County,
LAHSA, and philanthropy, the City is focused on a response that
can be broken down into three areas: preventing homelessness;
reducing street homelessness; and increasing and preserving
affordable and supportive housing. Additionally, for the first
time ever, the City has a place-based strategy in Skid Row, the
epicenter of the region's crisis.
I will touch on homelessness prevention first. This is a
key part of our regional strategy. The City's largest anti-
poverty program is the Family Source Centers, where a multitude
of services are co-located at 16 centers Citywide, and a range
of services including legal support, employment, and financial
counseling are delivered.
We also have the Rent Stabilization Ordinance, which puts a
limit on rent increases and requires just-cause evictions.
The best way to prevent homelessness is to keep people in
their current homes. So, in addition, the City is scaling up an
eviction defense program that provides tenancy rights,
education, landlord mediation services, and legal
representation, if needed.
Second, I will touch on our street strategy and interim
housing efforts. With three out of four people living
unsheltered in Los Angeles, more than any other city in
America, our work to address health and safety issues in
encampments has to be balanced and coordinated with our field-
based outreach and services' response to navigating people to
housing and shelter.
We coordinate these efforts through a Unified Homelessness
Response Center. It is a physical space where City leadership
from departments are co-located and make real-time decisions on
how to respond to the complex operational picture on the
ground.
While we work to mitigate issues of cleanliness and health
in encampments, the ultimate goal is to get people off the
streets for good. Here, we leverage the army of outreach
workers expanded to 800 Countywide to get households into
bridge and permanent housing. Simply put, people live on the
streets because we don't have enough indoor places for them to
be.
To address that, through the Mayor's A Bridge Home
initiative, the City is standing up 26 new interim housing
projects that will yield over 2,000 beds, total. We have 5
projects open so far, yielding 247 beds. This is the biggest
shelter capital program in the nation.
Third, to touch on our housing efforts, in order to meet
the needs of our most vulnerable homeless Angelenos, the $1.2
billion Prop HHH loan program has led to the City more than
tripling its existing supportive housing pipeline with 110
projects and over 7,400 units on their way to people living on
the streets and in other circumstances, putting us on track to
meet the goal to build 10,000 units of supportive housing by
2026.
We have also created the City's first inclusionary zoning
program, the Affordable Housing Linkage Fee, which mandates the
inclusion of affordable housing and market rate developments or
payment of a fee to capitalize our affordable housing programs.
We have also enhanced our land use incentives through the
Transit Oriented Communities program and Measure JJJ, which
will work in tandem with the linkage fee, resulting in more
mixed-income developments.
We are strongly advocating for tenant rights in Sacramento
and supporting tenant protection laws, like AB 1482 on the
State level--it is an anti-rent gouging and rent cap law--and
an anti-discrimination law for rental assistance programs. We
are also firmly committed to innovation.
Finally, the City has a place-based strategy for the first
time ever in Skid Row. Emergency State dollars in the amount of
$20 million have been put forth to address the immediate,
short-term, medium-term, and long-term needs.
Thank you so much. That is just a snapshot of what the City
is doing to address homelessness.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
Mr. Lynn, you are now recognized for 5 minutes to present
your oral testimony.
STATEMENT OF PETER LYNN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, LOS ANGELES
HOMELESS SERVICES AUTHORITY
Mr. Lynn. Good morning, Madam Chairwoman, members of the
committee, and members of the LA delegation. I greatly
appreciate the opportunity to testify this morning, and I will
have to say that it is much nicer to address you as ``Madam
Chairwoman'' than ``Madam Ranking Member.''
I would like to cover some of the recent data on
homelessness and also some of the trends that brought us here
and some of the paths out of homelessness.
Last year, as you indicated, there was a 12-percent
increase in homelessness in LA County, meaning nearly 59,000
Angelenos are homeless on any given night. Seventy-five percent
of them, as the Deputy Mayor indicated, are unsheltered. This
is reflecting the Statewide crisis in homelessness.
Of the other 43 continuums across the State, three-quarters
of them showed an increase in homelessness this year. And that
increase was greater than the count that we saw in Los Angeles
largely due to the interventions that you mentioned that the
voters put in service to house people out of homelessness in
LA.
But the count only tells a snapshot. It is a moment in
time. Our data indicate that in addition to the 59,000 people
we counted, 55,000 more people fell into homelessness over the
course of 2018. So, over 107,000 people experienced
homelessness over the course of the year. That is a flow into
homelessness of about 150 people a day.
With the interventions that we were able to deploy--and as
the Deputy Mayor indicated, they are among the most robust in
the country--we were able to house 133 people out of
homelessness on a daily basis. That gap led to the increase,
and that gap is primarily driven by housing affordability. At
root cause, this is a crisis of housing affordability.
Los Angeles is the most populous County in America. We
would be the tenth-largest State, were we a State, and we have
the least affordable housing market in the United States by
multiple measures.
More than a third of LA renters pay more than 50 percent of
their income for rent. That is an extraordinary number of
extremely low-income people hanging on by their fingertips.
They are one medical issue, or one car repair away from
homelessness on a daily basis. If we neglect to address the
root cause of housing affordability--and the California Housing
Partnership indicates that we have a gap of 517,000 units of
affordability in the County of Los Angeles--we will not get
ahead of this crisis, no matter how effective our
interventions.
I also want to indicate very clearly that we cannot address
homelessness without simultaneously addressing structural and
institutional racism in America. It is a core driver for the
homeless crisis that we have.
And there are radical disproportionalities in race, in the
distribution of people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles
and in the United States. Thirty-five percent of the people who
experience homelessness here are Black. That is against a
County population of 8 percent African American.
The drivers for that represent a multitude of things. I
would like to call out in particular the history of racial
segregation in Federal policy that drove to deep housing
segregation in this County through redlining and across the
nation.
Federal policy instituted redlining, instituted housing
segregation, and HUD policy enforced it for decades in the 20th
Century. As American households were building wealth through
home ownership, that was exclusively reserved for white
households. African Americans were blocked out of home
ownership through those programs, and the wealth-building of
the 20th Century that occurred left African-American households
with one-tenth of the wealth of white households in this
country. That is a major driver for homelessness. There is no
fallback for many, many African-American households.
In addition, our criminal justice system over-polices and
over-incarcerates African Americans, African-American
communities, and that racial disparity in incarceration has led
to severe overrepresentation in our criminal justice system. In
the County of Los Angeles, with 8 percent Black people in the
County of Los Angeles, 30 percent of our jail population are
Black.
Those drivers leave people with severe economic disparities
and capacities within our housing market and our job market and
every other aspect of our culture. Those have to be addressed
if we are going to get to the root cause of addressing
homelessness in the United States.
There are a number of resources that the Federal Government
has constrained over the last few years, CDBG and home funding
being particularly notable as significant reductions over the
last few years, but the fundamental formulas that distributed
the core Federal housing programs that address affordability
were not fair. California was shortchanged.
We, in Los Angeles County, have 11,000 units of public
housing compared to New York City with 170,000 units of public
housing. So not only are our rents high and our incomes low, we
do not have the affordability mechanisms like Section 8 in
public housing that New York has.
I want to thank you, Chairwoman, for the opportunity to
address this panel.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Lynn can be found on page
108 of the appendix.]
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
Ms. Lares, you are now recognized for 5 minutes to present
your oral testimony.
STATEMENT OF MARGARITA LARES, CHIEF PROGRAM OFFICER, HOUSING
AUTHORITY OF THE CITY OF LOS ANGELES
Ms. Lares. Thank you, members of the Committee on Financial
Services, for inviting the Housing Authority of the City of Los
Angeles (HACLA) to provide written testimony and to speak today
regarding the humanitarian crisis in Los Angeles.
And thank you for introducing H.R. 1856, the Ending
Homelessness Act of 2019. A special recognition to
Congresswoman and Chair of the Committee Maxine Waters for
being a strong, vocal, and persistent champion for our
community.
HACLA supports H.R. 1856 so that communities with the
highest need, like Los Angeles, receive the appropriate
resources. This is both the most effective and efficient use of
scarce Federal funding.
HACLA further supports the concept that priority for
Federal assistance should be given to communities in which
local governments, like Los Angeles, have adopted policies to
aid in ending and preventing homelessness.
The Los Angeles community has stepped up to the plate by
taking a collective approach in building and preserving
affordable housing, committing ongoing rental assistance, and
increasing supportive services. This commitment was further
solidified when the voters of Los Angeles approved Proposition
HHH in the City and Measure H in the County. While we believe
that local governments and organizations must play a part in
the solution, we need the Federal Government to be a partner in
this effort.
For 10 years, HACLA has taken on the battle to end
homelessness and to preserve affordable housing by using
Federal rental subsidies such as the Section 8 Housing Choice
Vouchers. HACLA has implemented policies giving priority to
veterans, homeless veterans, homeless families, youth, and
individuals, and committed vouchers for permanent supportive
housing, which has led to 19,500 rental subsidies being
utilized to house formerly homeless households. Without this
assistance, the count of homeless individuals would be greater
today.
Continuing in this effort, in 2017, following the passing
of HHH and H by Los Angeles voters, HACLA committed an
additional 5,000 project-based vouchers for permanent
supportive housing. Within 2 years, HACLA will be utilizing
nearly 40 percent of its resources to house people experiencing
homelessness.
Besides the 36,165 people experiencing homelessness in the
City, based on the 2019 Point-in-Time Count, there are 18,000
households on the voucher wait list. In October of 2017, when
HACLA opened a wait list for vouchers, 188,000 households
registered for assistance, but the number had to be reduced to
20,000 via a lottery process. There are also 51,000 households
registered on the wait list for public housing. At minimum,
250,000 households are looking to HACLA for hope.
Clearly, HACLA cannot keep up with the demand without
additional resources from the Federal Government. HACLA needs
more vouchers, but with the appropriate funding levels for the
Los Angeles area.
HACLA is expending 100 percent of its Federal budget
authority but only able to utilize 93 percent of the vouchers.
Average rental payments have increased by 20 percent over the
last 4 years because of continued increases in the rental
market, while the incomes of voucher holders have dropped or
remained the same.
The average annual income for voucher program participants
is $16,953, or $1,412 per month, yet the 2019 HUD-published
fair market rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles is
$1,384 per month. The reality is that rental costs are high and
incomes are low.
With less than 3-percent availability in rental units, the
success rate in finding a place to live has dropped to 53
percent for households with a voucher. This is especially
heartbreaking for individuals who have been unsheltered or who
waited years on the wait list for a voucher, only to return the
voucher or have it expire.
HACLA's inability to utilize 100 percent of its vouchers is
having a negative financial impact on the agency. The Housing
Authority funds its program operations with federally provided
administrative fees for each voucher. With the drop in voucher
utilization from 100 to 93 percent, HACLA is now receiving less
administrative dollars. The loss of revenue is further
compounded when only 79 percent of the determined fees required
to properly administer the program are received due to a
proration factor.
While the focus of H.R. 1856 is on ending homelessness, it
is also important to support affordable housing for all who
need it. Homelessness prevention is a vital piece, as the
homelessness problem will continue to grow if the number of
people becoming homeless grows faster than we can house them.
As you are aware, permanent supportive housing is the most
appropriate solution for people experiencing homelessness and
to prevent recidivism. New permanent supportive housing needs
the operating support from a Section 8 voucher to work. HACLA
is rapidly reaching its limits of vital Section 8 assistance.
An additional allocation of vouchers from the Federal
Government would make it feasible for HACLA.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Lares can be found on page
103 of the appendix. ]
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
Ms. King-Viehland, please, go right ahead.
STATEMENT OF MONIQUE KING-VIEHLAND, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, LOS
ANGELES COUNTY DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY
Ms. King-Viehland. Good morning, Chairwoman Waters and
Honorable Representatives.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify on this
homelessness crisis, I dare say the most critical humanitarian
crisis facing the County of Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles County Development Authority (LACDA) is
resolute in our mission to build better lives and better
neighborhoods, as well as our commitment to end generational
poverty and homelessness. Using a combination of local, State,
and Federal resources, we administer several programs that
provide housing opportunities for lower-income families, the
elderly, the disabled, youth transitioning out of foster care,
and individuals and families experiencing homelessness.
Moreover, as the second-largest public housing agency in
Southern California, we administer several federally funded
programs that help in our efforts to combat homelessness--
including Section 8, Continuum of Care, and VASH-- by providing
rental assistance for approximately 25,000 families.
And in light of the magnitude of the homelessness crisis,
we recognize the need to take a bold step and use all of the
resources at our disposal to meet the crisis head on and,
therefore, created a homeless preference that dedicates 100
percent of our Section 8 turnover vouchers to house homeless
Angelenos.
We created partnerships with the 18 other housing
authorities operating in the County to align our policies and
streamline access, and we leveraged local resources to develop
creative, flexible solutions that restricted Federal dollars
did not allow.
For example, we created the Homeless Incentive Program, or
HIP, to remove barriers to access for our voucher holders who
were finding it next to impossible to use their voucher to
secure a unit. HIP allows us to engage property owners to
secure their rental units in exchange for a monetary incentive
while qualified renters with a voucher are referred to the
owner.
We also assist clients with funding to pay for security
deposits, utility fees, and move-in expenses. Further, each
client receives access to County-funded intensive case
management services to help with the transition and ongoing
supportive services, as necessary.
The LACDA administered approximately $18 million in the
first 2 years of Measure H, and these resources helped over
1,900 individuals and families come home. Additionally, we
leveraged our partnerships to expand this program, which now
supports 8 other PHAs in the County who have replicated HIP,
leading to an additional 825 individuals and families housed
over the same period.
We also provide capital funding and rental assistance for
the creation of new affordable housing. Over the past 5 years,
the County has provided $294 million in capital subsidy for the
development of affordable housing, leveraging $2.3 billion in
public and private funds that created more than 4,200
affordable units in the pipeline, two-thirds of which will
serve special needs populations. This year alone, we will fund
5 times the number of units we funded just 5 years ago.
However, recognizing that we cannot build our way out of
the crisis, several actions have been taken by the County to
keep residents housed. For example, the Board of Supervisors
passed a temporary Rent Stabilization Ordinance in effect until
December 2019. The board also passed a Source of Income
Discrimination Ordinance in April of this year barring owners
from disqualifying a prospective tenant solely based on their
source of income like a rental subsidy.
Despite these creative solutions, and while an
unprecedented number of affordable and supportive units are in
construction and being funded, the inflow, due to a myriad of
institutional and systemic issues, racial and social class
disparities, lack of economic growth and mobility, continues to
conflate our efforts.
We look to our elected officials for actions to help
address the crisis. We request support in sustaining or
increasing funding for vital Federal programs, providing
administrative flexibilities, allowing for regional waivers,
and redistributing of unused Housing Choice Voucher funding.
In closing, the activities outlined in this testimony, as
well as the more detailed written testimony, are indicative of
the forward-thinking, collaborative approach that has fueled
our fight, and it is a fight, to end homelessness.
The solutions to these problems are varied and complex, but
one thing is clear: We cannot do it without significant
investment from all levels of government. And the funding
proposed in the Ending Homelessness Act of 2019 introduced by
Chairwoman Waters is an excellent example of the type of
Federal investment needed to combat this crisis.
Again, the LACDA stands resolute in our mission to build
better lives and better neighborhoods.
Thank you for the invitation to address this urgent matter.
[The prepared statement of Ms. King-Viehland can be found
on page 96 of the appendix.]
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much, Ms. King-Viehland.
Senator Murray, you are now recognized for 5 minutes to
present your oral testimony.
STATEMENT OF KEVIN MURRAY, FORMER STATE SENATOR, AND PRESIDENT
AND CEO, THE WEINGART CENTER
Mr. Murray. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, and members of the
committe, for holding this hearing on what I also believe is
one of the most crucial issues we face today. It is maybe the
civil rights issue of our time. For reasons stated previously
on this panel, one of our main sources of providing a safety
net to our citizens is to solve this problem.
One of the things about homelessness policy is that it is
essentially the Rorschach test of policy issues. If you are an
affordable housing advocate, that is the driving force. If you
are a mental health advocate, that is the driving force. If you
are a civil rights advocate, that is the driving force. If you
are a criminal justice reform person, that is the driving force
of our problem of homelessness. The fact is, it is all of those
things.
And one of the things I want to urge the committee to do is
resist the temptation to find and fund a single silver bullet.
Our current Housing First model, I think, goes in that
direction. The rise of Housing First has also taken away
funding for transitional housing.
The Weingart Center now houses about 600 people a night,
right on the corner of 6th and San Pedro in Skid Row. We have
had to transition from a transitional housing operation to a
shelter and bridge housing operation.
What that has taken away is, it has taken away the funding
for life skills and other skills that, even if you put a
homeless individual into permanent housing, you have not
necessarily given them the life skills to become a good
neighbor.
So, again, I would argue to the committee and respectfully
request the committee to look at this solution, that we find as
many solutions as there are for types of people who have gone
into homelessness and where they come from and that one size
does not fit all.
Some of the things we also don't fund are family
reunification and shared housing and roommates. As some of you
who have been foster care advocates know, now we actually fund
family foster care. We do not fund for someone to rent a room
at a family member's house.
Our model is strictly build a unit, roughly a 250-square-
foot unit with a bathroom and a kitchen, and try and put a
person in that unit. Sometimes, those people don't want to
leave their community, the location where they are. Sometimes
they just don't like the rules that come from those things. And
then if they don't take that, we put them temporarily in a
shelter where most of the clients, frankly, do not want to go
into shelters.
So one of the things that we have to do is we have to find
a multitude of solutions and fund all of those. They do exist,
but our model kind of stifles that innovation.
Again, for instance, the County has a flexible housing
pool. There are flexible programs. But the overwhelming
majority of the projects that happen in this area are 250-
square-foot studio apartments.
There are people who need different types of support. And I
think that, again, I want to emphasize this should be a
multimodal approach.
The other thing is, as someone who operates right on Skid
Row on the ground, we do need to aggressively enforce laws
against those who prey on the homeless.
Right now, on Skid Row, there are criminal gangs who are
literally charging people for a place on the sidewalk.
So one of the things that we have to do--and I understand
that our views on criminal justice are not to necessarily be
aggressive on Skid Row, but we have to find a way to make this
differentiation because we are leaving people out on the street
to be preyed upon.
The next thing we need to do is we need to find humane, but
more aggressive ways to deal with the service-resistant. The
fact is there are people who are service-resistant for a
variety of reasons. It is not all mental health. It is not all
substance abuse. Sometimes, frankly, it is very rational
decisions that they make on their part. But we need to be
aggressive about that.
And finally, I would like to say that Los Angeles taxpayers
should be rewarded for taxing themselves to help solve the
homeless crisis.
[Disturbance in the hearing room.]
Mr. Murray. My last--
Chairwoman Waters. One moment, Mr. Murray. We appreciate
the enthusiasm, but would you please refrain from interrupting
the presenters.
Thank you. Go right ahead. Wind up, Mr. Murray.
Mr. Murray. The taxpayers have voted to invest billions,
literally billions of dollars, and the Federal Government
should recognize that and leverage that money to help us meet
this problem.
And finally, Proposition HHH and Proposition H expect to
build roughly 10,000 units of permanent supportive housing,
which I support, as one of the solutions. The fact is before we
get to 10,000, we will run out of Section 8 vouchers to fund
the revenue for those projects.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Murray can be found on page
117 of the appendix.]
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you, Senator Murray. Thank you
very much.
Mr. Ansell, you are now recognized for 5 minutes to present
your testimony.
STATEMENT OF PHIL ANSELL, DIRECTOR, LOS ANGELES COUNTY HOMELESS
INITIATIVE
Mr. Ansell. Thank you very much, Madam Chairwoman, and
members of the committee.
My name is Phil Ansell. I am the director of the Los
Angeles County Homeless Initiative. And I am delighted to
testify before you today regarding the Countywide movement to
prevent and combat homelessness, which was catalyzed by the
Board of Supervisors in August of 2015 when they stepped
forward and accepted a mantle of Countywide leadership to
combat this crisis.
In the first 6 months of the County Homeless Initiative, we
brought together 400 invited government and community experts
in 18 policy summits to generate on a consensus basis a
Countywide comprehensive plan to prevent and combat
homelessness.
In February of 2016, 47 comprehensive strategies were
unanimously approved by the Board of Supervisors. And on that
same day, the Los Angeles City Council adopted the first-ever
Los Angeles City Comprehensive Homeless Strategy, a testament
to the deep and new collaboration between the City and County
of Los Angeles in combating homelessness.
At that time, the Board of Supervisors approved $100
million in one-time County funding to jumpstart implementation
of the strategies and at the same time identify the need for an
ongoing source of funding, because an ongoing problem cannot be
effectively addressed with one-time funding.
In March of 2017, Los Angeles County voters somewhat
miraculously, in an off-year, low-turnout election, by a margin
of 70 percent, approved Measure H, a 0.25 percent special sales
tax generating an estimated $355 million annually for 10 years
legally dedicated to preventing and combating homelessness.
We told the voters that in the first 5 years of Measure H,
we would help 45,000 family members and individuals move from
homelessness into permanent housing. And in fact, in the first
21 months of Measure H-supported services and rental subsidies,
from July 2017 through March of 2019, we helped 14,241
individuals and family members move from homelessness into
permanent housing. We are on track to meet our goal of 45,000.
And in that same 21-month period, Measure H helped over 28,000
family members and individuals move into interim housing.
However, as you have heard, despite this extraordinary
effort by an extraordinary movement, a movement that has
doubled the number of family members and individuals moving
from homelessness into permanent housing since 2015, the number
of people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County rose
between January 2018 and January 2019 by 12 percent.
Now, as has been noted, our neighboring counties in
Southern California and the urban counties in the California
Bay Area all experienced much larger increases, typically 20-
to 40-percent increases over the same period of time. Without
Measure H, we would have experienced similarly large increases.
The fundamental problem is inflow. As noted earlier, in
2018, 133 family members and individuals every day moved from
homelessness into permanent housing. But every day, 150 people
became homeless. That difference, 17 more people per day
becoming homeless than exiting homelessness, accounts for that
increase in our homeless population.
The fundamental reason for that increase is economic.
People are unable to pay the rent in a housing market governed
by the law of supply and demand where we have such a severe
shortage of affordable housing that rents are increasing in
such a way that is both forcing people who are currently
renting out of their homes and making it impossible for low-
income households to secure new rental housing which they can
afford.
As was previously mentioned, we are in a paradoxical
situation in Los Angeles County. Just 2 days ago, the Los
Angeles Times ran a headline that said that communities across
the United States look to Los Angeles County as a beacon of
effective practice in combating homelessness. And yet, after
the City of New York, we have the largest homeless population
in the United States.
This paradox is attributable to inflow. We are bailing more
water out of the homeless boat than ever before, but the hole
in the bottom of our boat is so large that there is more water
seeping into our boat.
Chairwoman Waters' H.R. 1856 exemplifies the sort of bold,
major action we need from the Federal Government to partner
with us in the 88 cities, the County of Los Angeles, and our
hundreds of community- and faith-based partners as part of this
Countywide movement to bring our homeless neighbors home.
Thank you very much.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
Let me introduce to you two of our Members from the Los
Angeles County delegation who have joined us. Mrs. Grace
Napolitano is here. And we have just been joined by Congressman
Brad Sherman.
I will now recognize myself for 5 minutes for questions.
And I am going to go first to you, Mr. Ansell. You described
very well what was happening in the County of Los Angeles. I
want to know more information about Measure H that was passed
in 2017.
I think it is important for everyone to understand that we
do have funding from the Federal Government for all of the
United States of America, and that is through the McKinney-
Vento funds. So you get an allocation, just as the City does.
I was just looking up how much money you receive from the
McKinney-Vento grants that we send out to all of our States. So
in addition to that, you have the Measure H, is that correct?
Mr. Ansell. Yes, that is correct.
Chairwoman Waters. And you said Measure H is, what, $100
million?
Mr. Ansell. No. Chairwoman, Measure H is generating an
estimated $355 million annually.
Chairwoman Waters. $355 million. Will you describe to us
exactly how the $355 million is being spent?
I thank you for the general overview of what the needs are,
but now you have started to apply that funding to various
efforts of the County. Exactly what are they?
Mr. Ansell. Certainly, Chairwoman, and thank you for the
question.
The Measure H ordinance adopted by the Board of Supervisors
in November of 2016 specified 21 specific strategies for which
Measure H funding can be utilized. And in the spring of 2017, a
group of 50 government and community stakeholders developed
consensus recommendations to the Board of Supervisors regarding
the utilization of that Measure H funding across those 21
strategies for the first 3 years.
The strategies for which most Measure H funding is being
utilized include homelessness prevention for single adults and
family members, disability benefits advocacy to assist homeless
disabled adults to secure Supplemental Security Income and
veteran disability benefits, interim--
Chairwoman Waters. Excuse me. If I may, I do understand the
overall strategy and what you say was adopted. Can you be more
specific about any monies that have been spent on a project or
an effort of some kind?
Mr. Ansell. Yes, ma'am, certainly.
The two largest categories of Measure H expenditures are
for permanent housing and interim housing.
Chairwoman Waters. So have you constructed, built,
developed permanent housing?
Mr. Ansell. We only utilize Measure H for capital
construction to a very limited degree.
Chairwoman Waters. Okay. So most of your money is spent on
supportive services?
Mr. Ansell. Actually, rental subsidies and the associated--
Chairwoman Waters. How much money have you spent on rental
subsidies?
Mr. Ansell. In the prior year, we spent over $100 million.
Chairwoman Waters. Does that come from Federal funding or
from Measure H?
Mr. Ansell. From Measure H.
Chairwoman Waters. How much money again?
Mr. Ansell. Over $100 million for rapid rehousing and
permanent supportive housing. Both rental subsidies and the--
Chairwoman Waters. How do you spend the permanent
supportive housing money? Do you cooperate with the City of Los
Angeles, for example, who may be building low-income housing,
permanent housing? Do you coordinate with them in order to
provide the money for the supportive services?
Mr. Ansell. Yes, absolutely. In fact, the--
Chairwoman Waters. Give me an example of that.
Mr. Ansell. The County has a memorandum of understanding
with the City of Los Angeles, where we have committed to
provide intensive case management services for the tenants in
10,000 units of permanent supportive housing, which the City of
Los Angeles is committed to creating over this decade,
including the units funded through Proposition HHH.
So the basic model, Chairwoman, is that we use Measure H to
pay for the services and, where necessary, the rental subsidy.
The City funds capital. And we also use other County funding
other than Measure H for the capital cost of developing new
permanent supportive housing. And then we couple Measure H for
services--
Chairwoman Waters. Lastly, let me just--
Mr. Ansell. --with Federal rental subsidies--
Chairwoman Waters. If I may interrupt you, I think you said
you do direct some of the Measure H money toward capital?
Mr. Ansell. Only a very small portion.
Chairwoman Waters. A small portion. Again, most of it is
supportive services?
Mr. Ansell. And rental subsidies.
Chairwoman Waters. And rental subsidies.
And you have spent exactly--again, if you would reiterate
how much you have spent on rental subsidies, who did it go to,
and what is the criteria for that?
Mr. Ansell. In the past fiscal year, we spent over $100
million of Measure H for rental subsidies and services in two
categories. For permanent supportive housing, we provide
ongoing services and, where necessary, use Measure H to pay the
rental subsidy.
Chairwoman Waters. Quickly, can you explain to me who
qualifies for rental subsidies? Who gets that money?
Mr. Ansell. We have a coordinated entry system, as required
by the Federal Government, which we use to match homeless
families, youth, and individuals to permanent housing
resources. So for permanent supportive housing, it is those
persons who are the most vulnerable and have the highest acuity
under our assessment tool.
For rapid rehousing, which is a time-limited rental subsidy
with time-limited services, we serve a range of families and
adults experiencing homelessness.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
The Chair now recognizes Representative Al Green from
Texas, who is also the Chair of our Subcommittee on Oversight
and Investigations, for 5 minutes for questions.
Mr. Green. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. I thank the
witnesses for appearing as well.
Madam Chairwoman, I am proud to say that I am a person who
supports your bill, the Ending Homelessness Act, and here is
why. The senator is eminently correct. This is bigger than any
one single crisis. It is an affordable housing crisis, it is a
living wage crisis, a mental health crisis, a substance abuse
crisis, an incarceration crisis, and it is also an invidious
discrimination crisis.
It really is comparable to a disaster. It is a disaster
that is unnatural. For our natural disasters, we spend untold
amounts of money--Katrina, over $100 billion; Harvey, over $100
billion. This bill is $13.3 billion, and it takes a holistic
approach to dealing with this unnatural disaster.
So, Madam Chairwoman, I am grateful that you have this
bill. And if I may, I would just like to ask the panel, are you
familiar with this bill? If you are, would you kindly extend a
hand into the air, those who are familiar?
[Show of hands.]
Mr. Green. You are. Do you believe that this bill is a part
of the solution to the crisis? If so, would you raise your
hand, please?
[Show of hands.]
Mr. Green. I would like to know now--I always like to build
a record--what about the LGBTQ community? There was not a
mention of the crisis with young people who happen to be LGBTQ.
I have information indicating that approximately 40 percent
of the young people who are on the street homeless are a member
of the LGBTQ community. Anyone have any additional information
that you can share on this topic?
Mr. Lynn?
Mr. Lynn. Representative Green, the data that we have
locally would indicate that the number is less than that, but
substantially greater than the general population. The
prevalence of both youth who do not identify as male or female,
but as a nonbinary youth, transgender youth, and LGB youth,
represent about a quarter of the youth in our population who
are homeless.
But it is a tremendous overrepresentation against the
general population prevalence, and I think these youth are at
particular vulnerability. There are a number of reasons why.
They may not fit in at home and may not feel welcome or may not
be safe. And fleeing violence is one of the main reasons for
this population in particular to end up homeless.
We do have programs that specifically target that. I would
like to call the attention of the committee to the Equal Access
Rule rollback that HUD has proposed. It is expected to come out
in September, but this is a very damaging proposal.
HUD had moved the nation forward in addressing the rights
and access of the transgender community in our shelter
inventory and required all communities to provide equal access.
That rule is being rolled back, and that will have devastating
and life-threatening consequences for our trans youth and trans
adults nationally.
Mr. Green. Here is what I would like to do. I have a
staffer with me today, and I will make sure that that staffer
visits with you after this hearing.
Let me move quickly to criminal records. I was a small
claims court judge for a while, a JusticeCorps judge, and I
understand how people acquire criminal records for penalties
that require a fine only. And they go to jail not because of
the fine initially, but because they don't show up in court to
pay the fine because they don't have the funds to pay it.
And I am just curious as to the number of people on the
street who are homeless because of the inability to pay a fine
or because they were at some point charged with failure to
appear in court?
Mr. Lynn. Sir, we don't have data specifically on that
statistic. I will say that of the single adults who are
unsheltered in our population, which is the vast majority of
people experiencing homelessness in the County of Los Angeles,
63 percent have a history of incarceration in jail or prison.
So, there is a very large overrepresentation of people who are
homeless and people who have some degree of involvement with
our criminal justice system.
There are devastating consequences to any amount of
incarceration, any amount. People lose time in their jobs, they
get fired, people lose their apartments for not meeting those
requirements. But I don't have specific data on the number of
people who are homeless simply for failure to appear.
Mr. Green. I am abusing the time now. I will yield back,
Madam Chairwoman.
And I will make sure that we get with you, Mr. Lynn. Would
you provide something more for me in writing?
Mr. Lynn. Yes, sir. Thank you.
Mr. Green. Okay. I yield back, Madam Chairwoman. Thank you
for the time.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
The Chair now recognizes Representative Sylvia Garcia from
Texas, who is a member of the Financial Services Committee, for
5 minutes for questions.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, and thank
you so much for your leadership and also welcoming us to your
district.
Your efforts in making homelessness a top priority for our
committee are significant not only for this City, but for
cities across America. Your leadership in holding one of our
first hearings about this subject and making sure the committee
passed the Ending Homelessness Act as our first markup was
monumental.
I am really here to listen today, and I appreciate from
everyone their time here today and appreciate the moving
personal stories, along with the policy recommendations that
people are making.
Two weeks ago, I went to Detroit and learned about how the
ripples from the financial and foreclosure crisis are still
pushing people out of their homes, often illegally, 11 years
after the Great Recession. Today, I am learning about the
unique challenges that Los Angeles is facing with homelessness
over the last year and over 58,000 residents in LA County. By
comparison, in my area that number is less than 4,000. Two big
urban cities, big difference.
This is a homelessness problem that is much worse than what
we face in Houston, obviously, but I want to understand what is
driving this crisis and what are the best policy solutions.
As a former social worker, and also now as Vice Chair of
the Majority Leader's Task Force on Urban Poverty, I know we
need to focus on supporting wraparound services at the local
level to fully address the immediate needs of people in the
homeless cycle while also looking at what structural reforms,
as Mr. Lynn mentioned, we could make in our nation's economy so
that we can make sure people aren't driven to homelessness in
the first place.
This committee and this Congress as a whole need to look
not only at the short term, but, more importantly, the long-
term challenges ahead so that we can offer a basket of national
policy options to make sure that every American city that faces
this crisis can deal with it.
So, first, I want to start by saying that in my mind, the
homelessness issue and the housing crisis in this country is a
civil rights issue that we must tackle firsthand.
I would like to start this morning with asking Mr. Murray a
question. Mr. Murray, I, too, am a former State Senator and I,
too, like you, worked on many of the issues that we are talking
about here today.
While I have not had a chance to fully visit your City, I
did have the staff drive me by this Skid Row everybody keeps
talking about. It is unlike anything like I have seen before,
and I just wanted to ask you a question about this whole notion
of wraparound services.
What is the greatest need in our system today that we need
to make sure that we put in place not only in your City, but in
cities across America who face the same challenges that Los
Angeles does?
Mr. Murray. I think it is a variety of things, and I think
it adjusts depending on the client, at least in my view.
Down on the ground, we have shelter people who literally
don't want any services and just want sustenance for that
night, and you are not going to convince them or it is very
hard to convince them to take more. Then, you have people who
want to turn their lives around, and some of those people have
severe mental health issues. Some of those people have
substance abuse issues.
The other factor is that if they are on the street for more
than a year, more than likely they have developed some sort of
trauma, which leads to PTSD or some other kind of mental health
services. So I would say if you were looking for a singular
thing to make sure that we include in the wraparound services,
it would be mental health services, but a variety of them.
Some of them are going to be substance abuse. Some are
going to be PTSD. Some are just going to be life skills. After
you have been out on the street for years, sometimes you need
some help just becoming a good neighbor so that you are more
likely to thrive in your new housing placement.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Thank you.
Ms. Lares, are you familiar with H.R. 2763, a bill I filed
to challenge the proposed rulemaking from the current
Administration on, frankly, kicking about 60,000 children
across America out of public housing? It is my mixed-status
family bill. If you are familiar with it, what impact would it
have on this City and this County?
Ms. Lares. I am familiar with both the proposed rules for
mixed families, as well as the proposed immigration rules. I
can share with you what the impact would be here in the City of
Los Angeles on public housing.
On the proposed bill for the mixed families, that would
impact 11,000 individuals in both our public housing and
Section 8 program. The proposed immigration rule, that would
impact 18,000. So, these are two separate numbers potentially
impacting more than 30,000 individuals and their households.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. So if the regulation were put in
place, how many of those would be children?
Ms. Lares. For the mixed family, a couple thousand. For the
proposed immigration rule, we are talking about 3,000.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Are you talking about the public
charge rule?
Ms. Lares. Public charge, yes.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. So both would have a severe impact on
those families?
Ms. Lares. Absolutely.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Thank you.
I yield back, Madam Chairwoman. Thank you.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
The Chair now recognizes Representative Brad Sherman, from
the 30th District of California, who serves on the Financial
Services Committee, for 5 minutes for questions.
Mr. Sherman. Thank you.
The homelessness issue is a combination of issues. Some are
homeless because of substance abuse and psychological problems
and trauma. Some are mostly homeless because the rent is too
damn high. They can't afford it. And I am going to focus this
panel on that second group, people who would be in an apartment
if we had Wichita rents, but we have Los Angeles rents.
And I would say that this group of homeless people is just
the tip of the iceberg. For every person sleeping in their car
or sleeping in the park, there are 10 people who can barely
afford their rent. There are 10 people who have an unlawful
detainer that they are worried about, and they are at a payday
lender trying to--there are 10 people who are cutting back on
their medication so that they can pay their rent. There are 10
people sleeping on their friend's couch.
We only see the folks who are absolutely homeless. But for
so many people, the rent is too damn high. And it is a problem
that we face in a number of big cities, but particularly here
in Los Angeles, and some of it relates to relatively unique
factors here.
One is we are the biggest city in the world without a
grade-separated rail system. So anytime you try to build
something, the first reaction is not, that person is going to
be with me on the train. No. It's, that person is going to be
in a car in front of me on the freeway.
We have NIMBYs (Not in my Backyard) who won't let you build
or people who think that their property values will go down
unless the people who live near them are richer than they are.
You have the fiscalization of land-use planning, where
every city is told, if you can attract an auto dealer, you get
more money, and it costs you almost nothing. If you accommodate
housing on that same property, you get no extra money for your
City budget because the property tax goes elsewhere, and it is
going to cost you some money for police and fire.
But what I want to focus on here is impact fees. You want
to build an apartment, and we need money to run the government.
We should tax people based on their ability to pay. We have
something that does that. It is called the State income tax.
Instead, in part, we are taxing people on their ability to
build, and those costs are then passed through to tenants.
Ms. Miller, the LA Times had a headline stating that tne
reason housing is so expensive in California, is that counties
and cities charge developer fees. Local impact fees impact
whether a project gets built. And if the law of supply and
demand, one of the few laws Congress cannot repeal, is
operative, if we can get more supply, that will influence not
only the people who live in that new unit, but it will bring
the supply and demand cost down.
So what has LA done to mitigate impact fees as a barrier to
development, particularly the development of affordable
housing?
Ms. Miller. Yes. Thank you for your question.
I will start by saying the City of LA is committed to
removing regulatory barriers to building housing at a cheaper
rate and keeping costs low, particularly so they don't get
passed on to tenants. I can talk about three areas in which we
are working to streamline the development of new housing here
in the City of LA.
The first thing I will start with is the Mayor's Executive
Directive 13. This is a streamline measure that puts the
building for any affordable housing project essentially at the
top of the line. And its aim is to--
Mr. Sherman. Let me interrupt. I know you are talking about
streamlining things. If somebody wants to build an apartment
unit in the San Fernando Valley, how much of a fee is imposed
per unit for them to be allowed to build that unit? What is the
impact fee?
Ms. Miller. Sir, I can get that information to you in more
detail in terms of the exact breakdown of what the fees are.
What I can tell you is that through the streamlining measures--
Mr. Sherman. And I do want to comment--I rarely do this to
somebody--it is not that these fees will be passed on to the
consumer. It is that the building won't be built, and then
everybody will pay a higher rent because the supply of units
will be down while the demand is still up. So, will you try to
tell us what this fee is?
[Disturbance in hearing room.]
Ms. Miller. Certainly. We can have our chief housing
officer provide some more detailed information.
Chairwoman Waters. Please, please, please refrain from
interrupting the questions and the responses.
Ms. Miller. What I can say is that there is a fee which we
are championing in that because it promotes equitable building,
and that is our Affordable Housing Linkage Fee.
So there is an Affordable Housing Linkage Fee, which
ensures the private market builds equitably. It gives
multifamily developers a choice. They can either include low-
income units in their projects, or they can pay a fee into the
Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which is used to capitalize
further and create more housing.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
The Chair now recognizes Representative Judy Chu of the
27th District of California for 5 minutes for questions.
Ms. Chu. Thank you, Chairwoman Waters, for holding this
very, very important hearing and also for your incredible
leadership with your very important bill to combat
homelessness.
I would like to address a question to Ms. Lares. In Los
Angeles County, we have housed an unprecedented number of the
homeless, but we have also still seen an increase in the number
of people experiencing homelessness in LA County, which rose 12
percent last year.
In my area of the San Gabriel Valley, homelessness rates
rose even faster. But I do have some positive news about one
City in my district, which is the City of Pasadena, which saw a
20-percent decrease in its homeless count this year.
And they attribute much of this progress to the success of
permanent supportive housing, and they say that it provides
stable housing to formerly homeless individuals and families
and offers services like employment training and healthcare
onsite. And the model can really work, as they have a near 100-
percent retention rate amongst its residents.
And of course, we have such incredible nonprofits, like
Union Station Services for the homeless, which provide so many
supportive services for the homeless.
So, Ms. Lares, you talked about permanent supportive
housing. Why is this important, and how does it play a major
role in combatting homelessness, and what could the Federal
Government do to increase it?
Ms. Lares. You are exactly correct. The City of Pasadena
has used its Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher programs to
project-based housing developments that provide permanent
supportive housing just as you described it.
They have used every possible voucher available. My
understanding is that they are reaching the caps. All of the
housing authorities are allowed to project-base 20 percent of
their vouchers and, very recently, an additional 10 percent
under HOTMA for housing homeless individuals.
So one big benefit or one big ask that the housing
authorities would have is to increase the number of vouchers
and also increase the caps that go along with it as well. That
would certainly help all of our communities across the country.
Ms. Chu. Thank you for that.
Senator Murray, I would like to talk to you about foster
youth who are at heightened risk of homelessness and how the
Federal Government can better serve them. In fact, I sit on the
Ways and Means Committee. I am working on Family Support, which
has jurisdiction over foster youth, and I am a member of the
Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth.
And in a recent survey from the organization, Voices of
Youth Count, 29 percent of 13- to 25-year-olds have experienced
homelessness, and they reported spending time in the child
welfare system.
In your experience providing services to individuals and
families at the Weingart Center, how can the Federal Government
improve support for foster youth so that they don't experience
homelessness?
Mr. Murray. Again, once they have gotten to us, they are
already experiencing homelessness. But I think one of the
things we can do is fund more specific things directed toward
that age group. Both the County and LAHSA have specific
transitional age youth programs.
In a previous life, as you may know, foster children and
foster care was one of my big projects. But I think it even
gets worse if you talk about transitional age youths who are
also LGBTQ because they are particularly vulnerable out on the
street.
So just specific funding and specific mental health funding
for their specific issues might, I think, help the problem. But
we do have to bolster up--as we are talking about public policy
matters, which are not necessarily dealing with the homeless,
but dealing with the path to homelessness, you really need to
invest some money on, where do aged-out youth in foster care
go?
The overwhelming majority of them--and I don't have the
specifics at my fingertips--go either into the homeless system
or the criminal justice system. And I think to the extent that
when we have put a child in foster care--and again, I spent
some time in dependency court in my early career--we become
their parent, and we are just doing a horrible job of it based
upon the numbers at foster care.
So I think we ought to put some money into when they are
getting ready to age out, some transitional money for them so
that they don't experience homelessness.
Ms. Chu. Thank you. I yield back.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
The Chair now recognizes Representative Nanette Barragan of
the 44th District of California for 5 minutes for questions.
Ms. Barragan. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. Thank you for
your leadership in holding this hearing, and for your bill, the
Ending Homelessness Act of 2019.
I often hear when I am in my congressional district and at
town halls, what is going on, what is happening, how come this
is getting worse, and why is it that the bills, the
propositions that we have passed and taxing ourselves, why does
it feel like it is not getting any better?
It is a challenging question. And we have heard a little
bit today about the progress that is being made.
Maybe one of you can talk a little bit about what the
chairwoman's bill will do. What kind of an impact will having
her bill pass, in helping address the homeless crisis that the
City and the County of Los Angeles is facing?
Ms. Miller, do you want to take this?
Ms. Miller. Sure, thank you.
What I will start by saying is that we have spent the last
few years building a system to respond to the crisis that is on
the streets, and we are scaling that system up as we speak.
What that system has told us is that there are 31,000
people in the system right now who have been engaged by an
outreach worker. So more than likely when your constituent sees
someone on the streets in an encampment, more than likely they
have been touched by the system. There is some outreach worker
somewhere providing services to them.
They have had their needs assessed with our standardized
assessment tool. They have gathered their documents needed to
get into housing, whether it is income verification, a driver's
license, an ID. They are ready to go.
The problem is this bottleneck of not having enough housing
for them to exit the system to. What we find is similar in our
shelter system. There are people ready to go. They have part-
time jobs. They are engaged in services. They have the mental
health support that they need. But there is no permanent
destination for them to land. There is no affordable housing
resource for them.
Ms. Chu. Ms. Miller, if you could just address what the
chairwoman's bill would do, that influx of $13 billion, how
would that help what you are trying to do?
Ms. Miller. Thank you so much.
I would say the biggest gap that we have right now is a
rental subsidy, is the ability to connect someone to an
operating subsidy that they can then apply to a unit in the
community and get them into housing. And I think the
chairwoman's bill with the set-aside of resources for
affordable housing would be critical to getting a throughput in
our system that we are lacking right now.
Ms. Chu. Thank you.
One of the things that we haven't mentioned is how
Chairwoman Waters has been leading not just on this issue, but
on the fight--on the cuts that have been proposed.
This President's Fiscal Year 2020 budget requested to
actually dramatically cut housing benefits that help families
who are low-income seniors, who have people with disabilities,
families with children, and veterans. Overall, the
Administration's proposed cut to HUD programs has been by an
astonishing $9.6 billion. That would be devastating.
And so that is why it is so critically important we have
hearings like this and that we have everybody make sure that
they are participating and that they are engaged so that we can
help fight back against these proposed cuts.
We hear proposal after proposal that will be cut back, that
would only negatively impact all of the work that people on
this panel are doing and will do.
Ms. King-Viehland, would you maybe like to comment on what
would happen, how the problem would get worse if we had this
actual cut of the $9.6 billion to HUD programs?
Ms. King-Viehland. We have talked about the fact that we
have more than 10,000 units of permanent supportive housing in
the pipeline. And we have talked about how critically important
those units are.
But without vouchers and rental subsidies, those units
don't come on. So it goes beyond sort of discussions of impact
fees and other costs related to rising housing costs. If we
don't have the vouchers and the rental subsidies to be able to
put those people into the units, those projects don't get
built.
Ms. Chu. Thank you.
Ms. Lares, you have done fabulous work. I represent the
community of Jordan Downs. Can you give us an update on where
we are on that, and when are we going to see people moving into
that facility?
Ms. Lares. Sure, absolutely. And we would welcome you to
join us on move-in day.
We have made a lot of progress with Jordan Downs, with the
new Jordan Downs and the new housing there. We will be ready to
move our first families into new units this fall, September-
October, right around the corner. So, I am a little bit ahead
of the game because we intended to provide an invitation to
help move in our families.
Completing phase one and phase two of Jordan Downs and
moving into other phases, as you are well-aware, we are
replacing one-for-one unit and exceeding that amount.
Currently, there are some 104 units at Jordan Downs. The new
Jordan Downs will have 1,400 units.
Ms. Chu. Great, thank you.
I will yield back my time. I will leave it for the next
round.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
The Chair now recognizes Representative Jimmy Gomez of the
34th District of California for 5 minutes for questions.
Mr. Gomez. Madam Chairwoman, thank you so much for hosting
this important hearing.
I got elected to Congress in July of 2017. That is when I
was sworn in. It was one of the first elections after the
Presidential. And I represent downtown, everything from Hancock
Park--very wealthy neighborhoods--to Skid Row, to Boyle
Heights, an incorporated City, Torrance, to Eagle Rock, and we
see a variety of issues.
One of these things that I tried to work on since I was a
student at UCLA was this issue of housing. And I recognized
early on that we had no housing policy in the State of
California, that the housing policy was sprawl: Build out as
far as the eye can see so that you can reduce the rents and the
pressure in the big cities.
How do I know that? Because my family, when we were living
in Orange County, got forced out. The house that we lived in
was bulldozed and turned into a Taco Bell. Imagine that, a Taco
Bell.
So my parents went out to Riverside, found a house there,
and bought it. It was relatively affordable. But that release
valve no longer really exists.
Out in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, they are
having higher rent increases percentagewise than here in the
City and LA County. S,o it doesn't exist.
And this is a problem, as everybody knows, that was years
in the making. Skid Row didn't come out of nowhere. It was a
strategic strategy by the City of LA and the County to push and
force people who were homeless into a specific area and provide
the resources, right?
So we act like this thing came out of nowhere, you know?
But it is something that decision-makers, over the years, have
created. Like it or not, everybody is responsible.
So what are we going to do now, is the question. There is
no other State that has this kind of issue. I asked a friend of
mine who is the Director of Housing and Community Development
for the Governor--previously Governor Brown and now Gavin
Newsom--he was at HUD. He said there is no other place, no
other State that has this type of problem.
So, I agree. We have a lot of problems, and we have to look
at a multimodal approach. I agree with that.
But we have to start thinking outside the box. And maybe it
is time to break the wheel when it comes to this merry-go-round
of homelessness and housing that keeps going over and over and
over because it seems that we are losing ground.
One of the issues that I want--we heard some things. Mr.
Ansell, you mentioned that the County provides the services and
some rental assistance and that the City--I take it that you
meant the City of LA--is responsible for capital development.
One of the things I want to know is, what are the other cities
in LA County doing when it comes to providing more units?
Because I know that not everybody is carrying their fair share.
Mr. Ansell. Thank you, Congressman. If I could just clarify
my prior comment?
Both the City of Los Angeles and the County of Los Angeles
are investing very heavily both locally-generated and State
funding for the development of permanent supportive housing. My
specific comment previously was with respect to Proposition HHH
and other Los Angeles City funding for permanent supportive
housing, how is the County collaborating? And in that regard,
yes, we are providing the supportive services that go along
with those new units.
With respect to the other 87 Cities in the County, we have
seen that Cities have a central role to play in this Countywide
effort and have reached out in an unprecedented way to Cities
across the County to engage their participation. The County has
funded 40 Cities in the County to develop City-specific
homelessness plans and has allocated a portion of Measure H
funding to those Cities to support implementation of those
homelessness plans.
The single biggest focus of those City homelessness plans
and of the County funding provided by the Cities is to support
Cities' utilization of their land use authority in a way that
will result in the production of additional permanent
supportive housing, affordable housing, and other interim
housing.
That can include, for example, feasibility studies of
individual parcels, government-owned parcels, for example, that
could be used for housing, or consultant assistants to help
small cities modify land use ordinances, for example, relative
to motel conversion or permanent supportive housing or
accessory dwelling units.
So what I would say is that, on the one hand, we are
engaged with smaller Cities throughout the County in an
unprecedented way and that there is an unprecedented level of
interest among many cities in responding to this challenge and
constructively addressing the homeless crisis, including
through the increasing housing. And on the other hand, we have
a very long way to go in ensuring that Cities throughout the
County exercise their land use authority in a way that
maximizes the availability of housing.
Mr. Gomez. My time is up, but that is a good point, because
I know for a fact that the State of California has given back
to a lot of cities, former State property, Caltrans property,
that was supposed to be used for housing, and they are not
using it. And that is a big problem.
With that, I yield back.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
The Chair now recognizes Representative Grace Napolitano
from the 32nd District of California for 5 minutes for
questions.
Mrs. Napolitano. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, and thank you
for all of your hard work, and I thank the rest of the
committee as well.
Ms. King-Viehland, we know that there is a great amount of
homelessness in Los Angeles County and that you have recently
changed strategy to prevent it, addressing it more
holistically, and ending generational poverty.
But do you work with the Cities and do you work with
agencies, all of them? Everybody is doing their bit, but does
anybody get together and talk as a group and say, okay, let's
start a program?
Because I am Chair of the Mental Health Caucus in
Washington, and mental health is the third-largest reason for
homelessness. We must include it in our program so that it can
take care of the problem before it gets worse.
The Cities sometimes start a preventive program. NOAH is
beginning to look at uniting to find out how can they keep
people in homes if they have a health emergency, an accident,
all the things that Kevin talked about. They can pay for 1 or 2
months' rent so that the family can stay in the home and not
become homeless. But that is an innovative program that needs
help and should be able to make a difference in keeping people
in homes.
Also, attractive places for the homeless to go are the
riverbeds, near hospitals. But we must also talk to the
railroad and Caltrans and others to find out what properties
they have in excess that can be used to build homeless--all
right, near railroads, noisy; near freeways, pollution maybe--
but at least they would have transitional housing. What can we
do? What are you doing to accomplish that?
Ms. King-Viehland. Thank you for the question.
I think to your original question, yes, there are a great
deal of efforts that are happening from a regional perspective.
And Measures H and HHH have really served at helping to build
an infrastructure.
So we are working in partnership with our partners at the
Homeless Initiative. At the County, we work with LAHSA, we work
with HACLA and others, and we are implementing programs in a
much more systemic and seamless way. And that, I think, has
been helpful.
As I mentioned earlier, with something like our Homeless
Incentive Program, for example--
Mrs. Napolitano. But is that in LA City alone, or is it
throughout the County?
Ms. King-Viehland. No. It is Countywide. So, that is sort
of the benefit. There are 18 other housing authorities, for
example, that are operating within the Southern California
region.
Mrs. Napolitano. Oh, I am sure there are more than 18.
Ms. King-Viehland. And one of the things that is great is
that we are working with them. So our Homeless Incentive
Program, it looks the same for a client, whether they come in
HACLA's door or whether they come in our door because the idea
is the program is seamless. It runs the same at HACLA as it
runs for us. So the idea is to create a regional approach to
attacking issues.
Much of the housing development we are doing, we have a lot
of those projects in partnership with the City of LA for the
work that we are doing, as well as the City of Pasadena, the
City of Glendale, and other Cities as well. So, we are taking a
Countywide approach to addressing the issues and breaking down
those silos.
Mrs. Napolitano. But do you include communications to the
Cities of what you are doing? Because I know my Cities, some of
them know, and others don't. And I need to know what kind of
information is going to the Cities to make them aware because
they also have the homeless transitioning to them.
Mr. Ansell. Yes. Congresswoman, through the Homeless
Initiative, we have very actively engaged Cities throughout the
region. We have convened two homeless summits, the first ever
in the history of all of the Cities.
Mrs. Napolitano. All right. But how about--
Mr. Ansell. And we have a designated liaison for each of
the Cities. And we invited all of the Cities in the County to
develop their own homelessness plans with funding from the
County.
Mrs. Napolitano. Do you work with the COGs, the Council of
Governments?
Mr. Ansell. Yes, we do. We work with the Council of
Government. In fact, we provide ongoing funding.
Mrs. Napolitano. Does the money flow to the Cities?
Mr. Ansell. We provide funding to the COGs to coordinate
the efforts in their Cities. And then as I mentioned, we have
approved funding to those Cities that developed homelessness
plans to support implementation of those plans.
Mrs. Napolitano. I would like to know more about those
because I have not heard yet. There is some information coming
back to me, but not necessarily with the COGs or with some of
the Cities.
So it is important that we get the ability to understand
that they are part of it, that they are--maybe their
representative doesn't attend meetings. I don't know. But we
need to make sure because the homeless situation is getting
critical, and it is worse in the San Gabriel Valley.
Madam Chairwoman, I yield back.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
First, I would like to thank our first panel of witnesses
for their testimony today.
We will now pause to set up our second panel for today's
hearing. Thank you so very much for coming, and for your
testimony.
While we are awaiting our second panel, I would like you to
know that I did ask our elected officials to stand.
Mayor Robert Pullen-Miles represents Lawndale, California.
Mayor Patrick Furey represents Torrance, California.
Mr. Jimmy Gow is here, who is a Commissioner in Torrance,
California, working with homelessness issues also.
I am told that we have a number of ministers in the
audience and that many of the ministers are involved with
homeless ministries in the church, where they are taking
clothing and food and toiletries down to Skid Row every day.
Would all of the ministers please stand, and Shane Scott
who is representing Macedonia Church?
We also have a number of veterans in the audience. Will all
of those who are veterans or representing veterans
organizations--I see in the back of the room we do have
representatives from New Directions. Please stand, Larry, in
the back of the room. Raise your hand.
Thank you all, very much.
Would the second panel please come forward?
[brief recess]
Chairwoman Waters. The committee will return to order.
Please take your seats. We are going to get started with our
second panel. Thank you very much.
Our second panel includes: Tim Watkins, president and chief
executive officer, Watts Labor Community Action Committee; Joe
Horiye, Western Region Program vice president, Local
Initiatives Support Corporation; Becky Dennison, executive
director, Venice Community Housing; Anthony Haynes, Speak Up!
advocate, Corporation for Supportive Housing; Erika Hartman,
chief program officer, Downtown Women's Center; Chancela Al-
Mansour, executive director of the Housing Rights Center; Alma
Vizcaino, speaker, Downtown Women's Center, on behalf of
Domestic Violence Homeless Services Coalition; and Dora Leong
Gallo, president and chief executive officer, a Community of
Friends.
Without objection, your written statements will be made a
part of the record.
And each of you will have 5 minutes to summarize your
testimony. I will give you a signal by tapping the gavel
lightly when 1 minute remains. At that time, I would ask you to
wrap up your testimony so that we can be respectful of both the
witnesses' and the committee members' time.
Mr. Watkins, you are now recognized for 5 minutes to
present your oral testimony.
STATEMENT OF TIM WATKINS, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE
OFFICER, WATTS LABOR COMMUNITY ACTION COMMITTEE
Mr. Watkins. Thank you. And I won't spend too much time
saying what an honor it is to be here, but I really appreciate
your work and always have on all fronts.
Having been here for 66 years, always being a boy of Watts,
born and raised in Watts, I have been blessed to be around the
Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC) its entire
lifetime, as my father was the founder 54 years ago, and you
get to see a lot in 54 years.
But as an organization that has consistently, constantly,
and without interruption provided service and helped support
the underdog in society, I would say that today, maybe I am
here representing the ``brothers on the ground floor.''
I don't know if you have ever heard that term, but in
Watts, there is a network of people who live under people's
houses that have raised foundations. They live there with the
cooperation of the homeowner or the renter.
They bump around at night. No one gets alarmed. But
basically, they are allowed to subsist in the foundation space
of those homes.
Over 54 years, we have seen Mayor Yorty, Mayor Bradley,
Mayor Riordan, Mayor Hahn, Mayor Villaraigosa, and now, Mayor
Garcetti. I won't bother to talk about the broken promises of
the past because maybe this time we are going to see a promise
kept. But so far, so far what we have seen over 54 years is a
trail of broken promises.
WLCAC was around when across the country, mental health
institutions were being shut down, and we saw the earliest
vestiges of homelessness in Watts when people started showing
up with nowhere to go. We started serving homeless populations
well before there was a LAHSA, before there was a City or a
County response to homelessness in South Central Los Angeles,
and we have been serving ever since.
I think it is important to recognize that although we made
those powerful steps early on, LAHSA has been at the forefront
of providing, I guess you would say, the mainstream of service
or the funding, the support and the services that homeless
people need. But it is just not enough.
We are all here, maybe even some of you--I remember some
recent Congress Members who were just a check or two away from
homelessness themselves. And I think it is important for you to
realize that in this audience, lots of us are just a couple of
checks away from being homeless, and that perhaps, along with
what we do about homelessness, we think about the problem of
poor public policy versus poverty and what that really means.
Because we keep talking about poverty as though that is the
problem, when poverty is but a symptom of poor public policy
and what drives us into these conditions that are not easy to
sustain.
Yet, we find ourselves with less in self-sufficiency,
certainly less in self-determining. And we watch the
descendants of people who, up until 1865, were able to get what
they wanted and still do, and here we are hundreds of years
later still just trying to find what they call that so-called
level playing field.
There is no level playing field. The playing field is full
of empty goldmines, diamond mines, waterholes, oil wells, you
name it. We look for scraps on the surface and every night get
disparaged.
The people in my community get disparaged and treated as if
they are subhuman because they have the nobility to go through
our trash. They dig through our trash to find recyclables and
then line up as if they should be incarcerated by getting
pennies on the dollar for what their work is worth all night.
And I think that we have to start looking for, how do we
prevent the problem in as many ways as we can that are not the
traditional ways? We will talk, we will talk, and we will talk
about hundreds of millions and billions of dollars. But it
takes too long to get the help that people need.
When you think about public policy versus poverty and how
this all happened, how much of it is by design? Why does
someone have to be homeless for a year before they can qualify
for service? Maybe their condition doesn't allow them to
survive a year of waiting. How many of our people can stand the
product of geopolitical gerrymandering in our community?
Watts is a place that, unfortunately, is 15 miles away from
its base. It is very difficult to get the kind of
representation that we need that is Watts-specific.
What are the impediments? Certainly, we have persecution,
human blight, the problem of transitional housing that was long
ago constructed to help homeless people that has been torn down
only to be replaced by transitional housing.
I know I have to go. We have a lot of resources, and I
would like to talk about that in the follow-up, if possible.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
Mr. Horiye, you are now recognized for 5 minutes to present
your oral testimony.
STATEMENT OF JOE HORIYE, WESTERN REGION PROGRAM VICE PRESIDENT,
LOCAL INITIATIVES SUPPORT CORPORATION
Mr. Horiye. Thank you.
Chairwoman Waters and members of the committee, my name is
Joe Horiye. I am the program vice president for the Local
Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), established in 1979.
LISC is a national nonprofit dedicated to helping community
residents transform disinvested neighborhoods into healthy and
sustainable communities of choice and opportunity.
We provide local community development organizations with
loans, grants, and equity investments, as well as technical and
management assistance. We have a national footprint with local
offices in 35 cities and a rural program. We invest
approximately $1.4 billion each year in these communities.
Our doors opened in LA in 1987. We have developed more than
11,000 units of affordable housing in the region with community
partners. Nearly $34 million of investments for affordable
housing and community development projects have been made in
California's 43rd District alone.
I oversee the work of our LA office, but I wish to
acknowledge Tunua Thrash-Ntuk, who is the Executive Director of
LISC and a native Angeleno. Our LA team is deeply embedded in
community-based efforts to provide assistance to those
experiencing homelessness and/or in need of affordable housing.
I have seen firsthand the challenges of opportunities that
exist providing affordable housing to people experiencing
homelessness and how nonprofit organizations and others can
improve their lives. I would like to focus my time on what is
needed to address this issue.
First, this country has to be committed. If we want to end
homelessness, these efforts must be supported through
sufficient funding resources.
For example, our nation's commitment to reducing chronic
and veteran homelessness has resulted in substantial declines.
This progress is mainly due to the Federal Government targeting
resources for the work, HUD's Continuum of Care. Homelessness
assistance programs provide the main Federal resources and
incentivize local CoCs to prioritize housing-first approaches.
LISC supports full funding for HUD's CoC's Federal
assistance programs and was pleased to support Chairwoman
Waters' Ending Homelessness Act of 2019. This bill would
increase McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Grant resources for
new permanent supportive housing, authorize additional
resources for special purpose Housing Choice Vouchers, increase
National Housing Trust Fund funding, authorize funding for
outreach to homeless people, and better integrate affordable
housing and healthcare activity. This bill recognizes the
resources the Federal Government has to provide if our country
is going to continue to make advances in reducing homelessness.
LISC LA has worked since its inception to provide
assistance to homeless service and affordable housing
providers. We provide grants to build organizational capacity,
and one of the most important Federal capacity-building tools
we utilize for this work is HUD's Section 4 Capacity Building
Program. Section 4 awards help nonprofit and housing community
development organizations further their affordable housing
goals.
One example, People Assisting The Homeless, PATH Ventures,
used HUD Section 4 support to develop West Carson Villas. This
development consists of 110 units, 55 which are reserved for
formerly homeless residents. LISC also provides financing for
affordable housing development, and we typically use the Low-
Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) equity.
The housing credit is the nation's most important
development finance subsidy source for affordable rental
housing and works by providing equity for such housing in
exchange for Federal tax credits. Our subsidiary, the National
Equity Fund, NEF, is one of the largest nonprofit syndicators
of LIHTC and a national expert in using housing credits to
finance supportive housing for people experiencing
homelessness.
LISC also uses other Federal resources to support this
work, including the Capital Magnet Fund (CMF). CMF is a
competitive affordable housing award administered by the
Treasury Department, which can be used flexibly by mission-
driven lenders such as LISC, and nonprofit developers for
affordable rental housing for very poor households.
An example of the impact of CMF and the housing credit is
our recent support for LA Family Housing's Irmas Family Campus.
Once a homeless shelter operating as a former motel, it
completed its transformation into a campus that offers health,
housing, and other services in San Fernando Valley.
The campus includes the Fiesta Apartments, 49 units of
permanent supportive housing targeting chronically homeless
single adults. LISC NEF invested nearly $13.6 million of
housing tax credit equity in a $20.7 million project, and LISC
used its CMF award to provide a reduced interest permanent loan
to close the financing gap on the apartments.
LISC LA's history of supporting affordable housing projects
for those experiencing homelessness has shown us that progress
can be made when resources are made available to address need.
We urge Congress to adequately fund and support Federal housing
assistance and tax credit programs which provide stable housing
for homeless people and to support programs that build the
capacity of nonprofit organizations serving these communities.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify. And I look
forward to working with you and your staff on ways to end the
homelessness crisis here in LA.
Thank you.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
And now, we will hear from Ms. Dennison. You are now
recognized for 5 minutes to present your oral testimony.
STATEMENT OF BECKY DENNISON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, VENICE
COMMUNITY HOUSING
Ms. Dennison. Thank you.
Good morning to everyone. I am Becky Dennison with Venice
Community Housing. We own and operate affordable and supportive
housing focused on ensuring inclusive communities on LA's west
side.
For over 30 years, we have been providing housing and other
support to those most in need, and we are currently building
new supportive housing in Venice, which is home to about 1,000
unhoused residents. We are also active in community organizing
and advocacy efforts that preserve existing affordable housing
and promote the rights of tenants and unhoused residents.
We simply, as everyone said, need vastly more resources to
produce extremely low-income and supportive housing. So,
affordability matters in production. We can't just produce and
expect the results to trickle down.
The Federal budget for affordable housing was cut almost 80
percent in the early 1980s and has never been restored. And as
was mentioned, we continue to see cuts chipping away at it.
And locally, production is nowhere near the documented
need. In the last Housing Element, the City projected to
produce 75 percent of its overall housing need, but only 17
percent of the extremely low-income housing need. So with the
largest production gaps at the lowest income levels and
overproducing luxury housing, homelessness continues at crisis
levels in LA.
LA has also underproduced supportive housing, creating just
a few hundred units per year for 20 years. And the ballot
initiatives that people have discussed are incredibly important
and will do good work, but are a drop in the bucket in the
overall need.
We need the City and the County and the State to create
permanent and sustained resources, and we need the Federal
Government to supplement those resources. Most specifically, we
need to increase the rental subsidy, as people have said.
Right now, we are making decisions in a scarcity
environment. We have to balance the need for new supportive
housing, affordable housing, public housing, and tenant-based
Housing Choice Vouchers within this limited pool of subsidy,
and there is just nowhere near enough to cover even a portion
of all of those needs.
The Federal Government must also help us address the issue
of underproduction of extremely low-income housing, because
while the Tax Credit Program is incredibly important, it is
just not designed to produce extremely low-income housing, and
therefore, that is where we see our biggest gap.
Beyond housing production, we must put more effort into the
prevention of homelessness, and the preservation of all
affordable rent stabilized and other subsidized rental housing
must be prioritized. And while these are largely issues at the
local and State level and our local government and State
government must make preservation more of a priority, we also
do need targeted Federal investment to make this a
comprehensive effort.
Prevention of homelessness also requires increased tenant
protections and proactive enforcement of those protections.
Tenants far too regularly face unjust and illegal eviction and
other forced displacement.
And again, some of these challenges and solutions are
focused on State and local issues. And our State Government has
some important policies pending, but the Federal Government can
help ensure more proactive enforcement of public and subsidized
housing tenant protections, rent-to-prevent-eviction programs
and funding, and then the prevention of any policy that would
produce displacement, such as the proposed mixed-status policy
that was also discussed.
Government entities must also eliminate the unacceptable
overrepresentation of Black people experiencing homelessness
that has been persistent in LA for far too long. Los Angeles
has studied this recently and has a report and recommendations
that Mr. Lynn discussed that really look at the long history of
institutional racism, and further exploration of that from this
committee is recommended.
And lastly, LA must end the criminalization of
homelessness. This is an area where LA has been uniquely
horrible in its efforts.
We have the largest unsheltered homeless population in the
country, and yet, without creating any significant housing
alternatives, LA has invested incredible financial and
political resources and policies explicitly intended to
criminalize homelessness and other initiatives that result in
harassment and forced displacement among housed residents.
These practices exacerbate homelessness, lengthen the time
people remain homeless, and discriminate against people for
their current unhoused status. This simply must end and be
replaced with health-based, street-based interventions until LA
provides housing for all in need.
So, in closing, we know that LA, and California as a whole,
must enact substantial new policies and funding streams that
focus on production at the lowest income levels and homeless
prevention, as well as eliminate harmful policies.
But LA and all regional efforts cannot succeed without more
investment at the Federal level. H.R. 1856 reflects a
significant step forward, and additional efforts will be needed
to solve this crisis.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Dennison can be found on
page 68 of the appendix.]
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you, Ms. Dennison.
Mr. Haynes, you are now recognized for 5 minutes to present
your oral testimony.
STATEMENT OF ANTHONY HAYNES, SPEAK UP! ADVOCATE, CORPORATION
FOR SUPPORTIVE HOUSING
Mr. Haynes. Good afternoon. My name is Anthony Haynes, and
I am a Speak Up! Advocate for the Corporation for Supportive
Housing (CSH).
I grew up in an average middle-class community with six
siblings and a mother and a father and a home. And my mother
and father used to shelter me from what was around the corner
until one day I found out what was around the corner, and I
became an alcoholic. I became a functioning alcoholic.
Over the years, my disease got worse, but I was still able
to find a job, and keep an apartment until I could no longer
work due to suffering from mental health issues.
After 10 years of homelessness, I ended up on Skid Row, and
I went to jail for 1 year, exactly 1 year, for possession of
marijuana. And when I got out of jail, I knew I needed
something different. I knew I wanted to do something different
with my life.
So with that year clean from alcohol and drugs, I got on a
wait list. And it took a long time for me to get permanent
supportive housing. But when I finally got in, it made a big
difference in my life.
Supportive housing is very important, not only just housing
a person, but with the wraparound services, with the case
manager onsite, the therapist, the psychiatrist right at my
disposal.
It took me a long time to find my worth, you know? They had
so many groups to offer, art group, journal group. So I ended
up doing a knitting group. And coming from the streets, I said,
``I am not going to sit in a circle and share my feelings.''
So, I took a knitting group for exactly 1 year, and in the
group, they sat and watched Oprah and knitted.
So after 1 year, I never learned to knit, but I sat with a
group of women who helped me regain who I am. They gave me so
much perspective on life. They showed me a different way that I
can go and to grow.
So it was so important for me to have those groups. And
then saying that the housing is important, but more important
is the wraparound services that come with it, the people who
are going to be there for when you need them.
Giving them housing is important, but now that you are
housed, you have to learn to live with yourself. And how do I
do that sober? It was a big challenge. Depression sets in.
But long story short, I continued to work on myself. I
continued to take advantage of what was offered to me, the help
provided within the supportive system.
And with that, they watched me grow. And I am now a peer
advocate manager for the Skid Row Housing Trust. I moved into
one of their buildings, and now I get to be an advocate for the
future residents and help them understand what it is going to
feel like once you move into your own apartment by yourself.
You are going to feel lonely.
And a lot of us resort back to what we used to know, our
old friends and the drugs and alcohol. So now, I show them a
way that you don't have to go back. We are going to build a new
bridge, we are going to build new friends, and we are going to
go a new way.
So now, I help the potential residents navigate all of the
resources that are at their disposal within the community. And
it is so important that they know that it is out there for
them.
A lot of stuff is offered to them, but half the time, it is
stuff they don't need or can't use. Everything offered is not
for every individual.
So, I just want to thank you for coming out and listening
to what we have to say.
Chairwoman Waters. And I want to thank you. Thank you very
much, Mr. Haynes.
Ms. Hartman, you are now recognized for 5 minutes to
present your testimony.
STATEMENT OF ERIKA HARTMAN, CHIEF PROGRAM OFFICER, DOWNTOWN
WOMEN'S CENTER
Ms. Hartman. Good afternoon, Madam Chairwoman, members of
the committee, and members of the California delegation. My
name is Erika Hartman, and I am the chief program officer of
the Downtown Women's Center.
For over 40 years, the Downtown Women's Center has been
providing housing and vital services to women in the Skid Row
area of Los Angeles, and today serves over 4,000 women per
year.
In recent years, we have seen homelessness in Los Angeles
rise to unprecedented levels, and in the last year, the number
of women grew to 18,337 individual women. Homelessness among
women is increasing nationally as well, and on any given night,
216,211 women are experiencing homelessness in this country.
Women comprise 39 percent of the individuals experiencing
homelessness, and 49 percent of those are unaccompanied women.
The Downtown Women's Center exists because we recognize
that women are a unique subpopulation experiencing homelessness
with corresponding unique needs. For this reason, we continue
to advocate for HUD to officially recognize women as a unique
subpopulation, specifically unaccompanied women.
As an example of the unique vulnerabilities faced by
unaccompanied women, they are 4 times more likely to be
chronically homeless and for this reason need resources to
serve them. The areas of focus should be on increasing data and
research, targeting services and housing toward women, and
requiring that gender competency and program evaluation be a
criterion to receive funding for housing and service provision.
At the Downtown Women's Center, we serve anyone who
identifies as female or was an identified female at birth.
Women experiencing homelessness on Skid Row identify as LGBTQ
at a rate of 15.4 percent, compared with 3.4 percent of the
general population. For this reason, we are strong advocates
for maintaining the Equal Access Rule without changes but would
otherwise support H.R. 3018.
Ninety percent of women residing in Skid Row have
experienced some form of violence during their lifetime, and
for this reason, we are advocating for H.R. 6545 and for the
release of additional dollars from the Victims of Crime Act
Fund.
As we know, women in the military experience high rates of
sexual harassment and assault, making them vulnerable to other-
than-honorable discharges and thereby ineligible to receive
HUD-VASH vouchers. For this reason, we ask for support in
advancing H.R. 2398.
Even with the level of risk that we know women face on the
streets, 64 percent of women experiencing homelessness in Los
Angeles County are unsheltered. And unsheltered women remain
without stable housing for an average of 14 to 16 years. And
because of insufficient shelter in Los Angeles, just 1 in every
12 is able to access a shelter bed on any given night.
Women who are unsheltered age close to 20 years faster, and
between 2014 and 2018 in Los Angeles, the number of deaths
among homeless women more than doubled. While the life
expectancy for women is typically longer than for men, for
homeless women it is shorter. The average age of death for
women experiencing homelessness is 48. For this reason, it is
crucial that H.R. 1978 receives the necessary support, and we
also hope to see more House Members cosponsor H.R. 3272.
In Los Angeles, economic hardship is the cause of 53
percent of homelessness. We have seen rents increase by 32
percent, while income has gone down by 3 percent.
Income inequity bears especially hard on women, who
continue to make only 79 cents for each dollar earned by men,
and women of color are the most significantly impacted.
There is also vast disproportionality by race of
individuals experiencing homelessness due to systemic racism.
The racial inequities of the justice system have caused
African-American women to be the most significantly impacted by
histories of incarceration when seeking employment, with an
unemployment rate of 43.6 percent, almost 10 percent higher
than any other demographic.
Women also comprise a significant portion of single-parent
households. And in the event that HUD moves forward with the
proposed change to the mixed-status rule, we support H.R. 2763.
Homelessness is a matter of resources, and for that reason,
ongoing support of H.R. 3163 is essential to ending
homelessness. And most importantly, the investment of H.R. 1856
would significantly increase the likelihood that organizations
will have the opportunity to get ahead of the curve in meeting
the needs, ensure focus is maintained on ending the homeless
crisis, protect our progress, and help us gain more ground
through mandatory spending.
Thank you, Chairwoman Waters, for introducing this
legislation, and I thank the committee for your support of this
bill.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Hartman can be found on page
89 of the appendix.]
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much, Ms. Hartman.
Ms. Al-Mansour, you are now recognized for 5 minutes to
present your oral testimony.
STATEMENT OF CHANCELA AL-MANSOUR, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, HOUSING
RIGHTS CENTER
Ms. Al-Mansour. Good afternoon. Thank you, Madam
Chairwoman, and thank you, other respective Members of
Congress, for allowing us this opportunity to speak with you
today.
I am Chancela Al-Mansour, the executive director of the
Housing Rights Center. I am also on the board of the National
Fair Housing Alliance and the California Reinvestment Coalition
as well.
In 1993, I was here, and a similar hearing was held in Los
Angeles at the Federal Reserve Bank, and Members of Congress
came here to determine what were the reasons for the civil
unrest, what was the reason for the lack of income and housing
and so forth in South Los Angeles.
And we talked about poverty, we talked about racism, lack
of access to credit, no banks. We talked about no grocery
stores, no jobs. And the one thing we didn't really highlight
was homelessness. Here we are 26 years later, and the main
issue we are facing right now is homelessness caused by all of
those things.
As you have heard, the U.S. Government's history of
financing and promoting redlining, which was the denial of home
ownership and home mortgage loans and home improvement loans to
Black and other racially targeted groups, created racially
segregated and highly racially concentrated neighborhoods with
no services. This created the urban blight that depreciated the
value of Black-owned homes that today have made those
neighborhoods ripe for gentrification and displacement.
Everybody complains about LA's traffic, but with new access
to public transportation and revitalization measures, Boyle
Heights, Highland Park, Crenshaw District, Chinatown, and other
parts of South Los Angeles are all experiencing extreme
displacement of Black and Brown and low-income Asian
communities.
And for those fortunate groups who were able to purchase
their homes and own their own homes, those abuelas/the
grandmothers/the big mommas, they have lost their homes. When
they pass away, their home is often sold. It is too valuable
for the family to hold onto. Those houses transition, and those
families will never be able to come back into Los Angeles.
Also, just the attack on Black-owned homes in general, the
lack of access to credit and the targeting through predatory
home mortgage loans and so forth, has created the circumstances
which we see now in which Black home ownership has just been
devastated in Los Angeles.
And when you talk about--big momma's home was the refuge,
right? It was the place where people who had been evicted--
maybe they were formerly incarcerated, maybe they otherwise
lacked housing--those children and those grandchildren could go
to big momma's house to live. But now that she does not have
that home, many of our community members don't have that place
of refuge to go to.
And also, the Housing Rights Center, I want to identify
that the prevalence of housing discrimination and the
devastating effects of housing discrimination are also causes
of our homelessness crisis. While race discrimination is highly
reported, not necessarily by tenants, but we find it in our
investigations at the Housing Rights Center, because oftentimes
people don't know that they have been discriminated against
based on race, and so investigations and testing is strongly
needed.
And I thank Congressman Al Green for his March 2018 letter
supporting the Fair Housing Act, supporting Fair Housing
Initiatives (FIT) funding. And all of you Members of Congress
who signed that letter, I thank you as well, and I encourage
for those who didn't sign it, to sign it as well.
The FIT program must be fully funded, and we are asking for
at least $52 million of funding, which isn't that much
considering it goes to 100 organizations over the country to
combat housing discrimination.
Testing and other programs is the only way we can really
determine oftentimes if race discrimination happens. Persons
with disabilities also face high rates of discrimination in
housing. More than 50 percent of the complaints that are filed
with the Housing Rights Center are based on discrimination
based on disability.
The Fair Housing Act also must be preserved as well and
disparate impact. Disparate impact is being challenged. It is
being targeted by this current Administration. The use of the
disparate impact theory to prove unlawful discrimination must
be protected.
HUD has initiated its plan to weaken the Fair Housing Act
by making it impossible to bring a case using the disparate
impact theory, which maintains that a facially neutral policy
when applied can have a disparate impact upon a particular
group because of their membership.
Banks and insurance groups are leading the charge to
dismantle this important fair housing protection. So we ask
that in all ways, the use of the disparate impact theory be
protected. Also, HUD's Equal Access Rule must be reinstated as
well.
Moreover, families with minor children, Latinos, African
Americans, and women are disproportionately impacted by these
facially neutral policies and face eviction every day in the
City of Los Angeles, and we ask for their protection as well.
I also ask that we preserve the Community Reinvestment Act.
A way that this committee and other Federal agencies and
departments can address the homelessness crisis is to
strengthen the Community Investment Act. It did well for
California as well. A recent survey by the California
Reinvestment Coalition found that over $27 billion in 2016 came
to low-income communities in California because of the
Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).
HUD approved a conciliation agreement just a couple of
weeks ago that settled a Los Angeles area redlining case
against OneWest Bank and CIT Corporation. That was a case filed
by the California Reinvestment Coalition for HUD because of
OneWest Bank and CIT's redlining policies here in Los Angeles.
They had over 60 retail bank branches in Los Angeles and
Southern California, and not one of those was located in a
community of color.
The CRA exam also must be strengthened and must consider
fair lending law violations. Until recently, all of the bank
regulators considered unlawful discrimination lending as a
factor when denying CRA exams. They don't anymore.
Finally, a right to counsel. We must have a right to
counsel to protect tenants who are being evicted.
Thank you.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much, Ms. Al-Mansour.
Ms. Vizcaino, you are now recognized for 5 minutes to
present your oral testimony.
STATEMENT OF ALMA VIZCAINO, SPEAKER, DOWNTOWN WOMEN'S CENTER,
ON BEHALF OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE HOMELESS SERVICES COALITION
Ms. Vizcaino. Good morning, everyone. My name is Alma
Vizcaino, and I thank you so much for listening to my
experience.
I am here today to bring some light to some statistics you
will hear about the impact on homeless women. What is troubling
me is that I was one of 216,000 women experiencing homelessness
across the nation. In Los Angeles, among both sheltered and
unsheltered women, approximately half experienced domestic
violence.
Of course, please keep in mind this is a count of women who
felt comfortable sharing that they had experienced domestic
violence. Due to the stigma surrounding domestic violence, we
know that this is an undercounted experience.
This was the case for me. I did not acknowledge that I had
experienced domestic violence until just 2 years ago when I was
sitting in a mental health support group at the Downtown
Women's Center, a local nonprofit that supports women with
housing and healthcare. I swept it under the rug for a long
time. There was never a good time to talk about it, so I
didn't.
Consequently, I have experienced periods of homelessness,
mental health problems related to the impact of trauma, and
chronic health conditions like diabetes as a result of my
hardships.
I was born in Tijuana, and raised as a toddler in South
Central. At an early age I started running away from a home of
alcoholism and depression. That impacted my ability to stay
housed.
My life was filled with struggle. The depression ended in
having many unhealthy relationships. Domestic violence blanked
me out mentally.
Many women are ashamed and do not admit to control and
abuse that they suffer, and some find it hard to get the help
that they need. When I first reached out for help at a shelter
in the 1980s with my two kids, it didn't really work. All of
the shelter staff were white. There were no Hispanics or
Blacks, and that was really weird for me because I grew up in
South Central. And we ended up leaving the shelter because it
was just awkward.
I did ultimately find the help that I needed through a
domestic violence shelter called the House of Ruth. After our
stay there, my kids and I left to housing through Section 8
they gave us, and we lived for 20 years in that housing. I also
became a board member with the House of Ruth and found
fulfillment in giving back in that way.
For many years, we lived in the Los Feliz community. We
felt safe, and my family thrived. My kids were doing well in
school, and I had a few jobs. We were comfortable, and we did
not have to move around or fear facing eviction.
But then my building was sold, and I couldn't find another
owner to rent to me with my voucher, so I ended up back in
South Central. And it was very different, just in the same
City, but South Central and Los Feliz was such like day and
night.
I put my kids in private school through scholarships. But
we couldn't escape the violence, the gang-related violence also
in the neighborhood. And we were evicted because of a shooting,
and my children and I just had to go--everyone had to go
wherever they could. We didn't have a plan. We didn't have
anything.
I now live in a single-room occupancy in the Skid Row
community, and I love Skid Row. It looks very bad and it
stinks, but there is so much good also going on in it, and I
really love it.
When I got the room, I thought, now I can apply myself to
achieve my goals and all that, and I have ended up more
depressed than when I was homeless. It was so hard to adjust.
Now I am in a room and now I have a place, but in my mind, I
wasn't able to focus properly.
I needed more support to heal from my trauma, and I am in
the process right now of that. The support that most
effectively helped me were the shelters--I love the shelters--
the ministries and individuals who came through Skid Row just
to be nice and good to the people. That really touched my
heart, and that really helped.
I am now at a job with the Downtown Women's Center, a
training called LA:RISE where I am a support staff at a social
enterprise, and I look forward to graduating the program.
Congress should take many steps to end homelessness and
prevent violence against women, including ensure that the HUD
budget--okay.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Vizcaino can be found on
page 119 of the appendix.]
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you, Ms. Vizcaino.
Ms. Gallo, you are now recognized for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF DORA LEONG GALLO, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE
OFFICER, A COMMUNITY OF FRIENDS
Ms. Gallo. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, members of the
committee, and the LA Congressional Representatives here today.
I appreciate the opportunity to provide testimony to the
Financial Services Committee.
My name is Dora Gallo, and I am the president and CEO of A
Community of Friends. We are a nonprofit, community-based
development corporation with a very specific focus of ending
homelessness for people with mental illness.
It began 30 years ago. Our organization has been developing
what is now called, ``permanent supportive housing'', long
before this particular term was created. By combining
affordable housing with services for the most vulnerable in our
community, we have ended homelessness for thousands.
In the 30 years that we have been around, we have created
50 apartment buildings throughout Los Angeles and Orange
County, including 2 in San Diego. We have 1 building in
Representative Waters' district, we have 3 in Representative
Barragan's district, 1 in Representative Napolitano's district,
and 12 in Representative Gomez's district. Currently, we house
2,500 adults, including over 600 children.
People who have a chronic disability, such as mental health
or addiction, have always been particularly vulnerable to
losing their housing. They have limited financial resources,
less family support, and they need extensive help and services
to exit homelessness. These are the people whom we serve.
As some of you have noted, the recent explosion of
homelessness in LA County is not caused by an increase in the
number of people with chronic disabilities. Many people are
falling into homelessness due to the extreme lack of affordable
housing in Los Angeles. And the longer they stay homeless, the
more likely they are to develop mental health issues.
Stagnant wages, rising rents, and decades of disinvestment
in affordable housing have enabled a heated real estate market
to cause havoc on our limited housing supply. Rents are rising
faster than renter incomes.
The median monthly asking rent in Los Angeles is now
$2,471, so that means renters in LA need to earn $47 per hour
to afford the median rent. Seventy-nine percent of extremely
low-income households in LA are paying more than half of their
income for housing.
The supply of affordable rental housing is also not keeping
pace with demand. Recent studies show that LA needs over
516,000 more affordable rental units to meet the demand.
In 2018, the City of Los Angeles permitted 27,000 homes,
but only 2,900 of them were affordable, 11 percent. And
according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there
are only 18 affordable and available rental homes for every 100
extremely low-income rental households in this metropolitan
area.
So, housing for the lowest income must be available if we
are to end homelessness. And for those with chronic disabling
conditions, supportive housing, combined with a harm reduction
approach, is the most effective tool to keep people with
disabilities from cycling back into homelessness.
No matter where in the community our buildings are located,
from the San Fernando Valley to San Pedro, Boyle Heights to
Hollywood, Compton to Koreatown, we have found that given an
opportunity to live in decent, safe, and affordable housing,
people can begin focusing on those other issues that led to
their homelessness.
Providing the level of support and services needed to end
homelessness for people who have been in the streets for years
requires a sustained and long-term commitment. Investments in
Federal programs must continue if homelessness is truly to be
eradicated.
So we agree with Chairwoman Waters that it is difficult to
make significant progress towards ending homelessness in LA
without substantial new funding. The citizens of LA have done
our part by voting to tax ourselves to provide the resources
needed. We need Congress to take action as well.
We commend Chairwoman Waters for introducing H.R. 1856, the
Ending Homelessness Act of 2019. The $13 billion proposed would
be amongst the most significant investment towards this crisis.
In addition to homeless programs, Congress should continue
increasing capital investments to build, preserve, and rehab
homes affordable to people with the lowest income, such as
Housing Finance Reform related to GSEs. That is an opportunity
to increase resources to the National Housing Trust Fund.
We also support efforts to expand and improve the Low-
Income Housing Tax Credit. In LA, it is used to create
supportive housing. So, we urge Congress to support H.R. 3077,
the Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act, that would
expand the housing credit authority by 50 percent. And we urge
Congress to continue project-basing rental subsidies to ensure
housing affordability, including project-basing HUD-VASH
vouchers.
And I want to conclude my remarks by saying that despite
the challenges and the scale of the problem, there is hope. LA
has a strong community of nonprofit organizations, public
officials, business leaders, and private citizens with the
passion, skill, and commitment to end homelessness.
Partnering with our congressional leaders, we know we can
do this. We don't have a choice.
Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, for holding this hearing and
for soliciting our input.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Gallo can be found on page
73 of the appendix.]
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much, Ms. Gallo.
I am now going to recognize myself for 5 minutes for
questions. But before I do, I would like to give special
recognition to Ms. Jasmine Borrego, who is the president of
TELACU Residential Management and Property Management, and
thank TELACU for all of the work it is doing for developing
low-income housing. Thank you very much.
And I did mention the veterans, but Ms. Akilah Templeton,
who is the executive director of U.S. VETS in my district, is
doing a fabulous job. Thank you very much for being here.
I see the yellow T-shirts are here today. They are from the
Alliance of California for Community Empowerment (ACCE). Thank
you very much, ACCE
And Susan Burton, from A New Way of Life, that is
transitioning women from incarceration into our communities.
Thank you so very, very much. I thank all of you.
Mr. Watkins, of course, I know WLCAC very well. My career
has been developed along with the long-time services that have
been presented by WLCAC, and I thank you for your leadership. I
worked with your father, so you know I know the origins of
WLCAC and all that you have contributed.
Mr. Watkins. Thank you.
Chairwoman Waters. And I am very pleased to hear about even
another housing complex that you have developed, the Dolores
McCoy Villa Apartments.
I have cut ribbons for you and that organization more than
once, and I congratulate you one more time on a project
providing housing opportunities for those who certainly would
not get them, but for WLCAC or an organization like yours.
You mentioned that sometimes, it is something with public
policy that creates homelessness and a lack of opportunity, and
I agree with you on that.
And I wanted to ask you if, in fact, being located right
adjacent to, and surrounded by, Nickerson Gardens, Jordan
Downs, Emperor Courts, and a number of the public housing
projects--Guntec Village is also there--have you witnessed
those who have been evicted from public housing because of a
failed policy that we have in the Federal Government that
evicts families sometimes because one member of the family may
have gotten into a problem of some kind, trying to return back
maybe from incarceration, et cetera? Are you familiar with that
policy?
Mr. Watkins. Absolutely. And to my chagrin, sometimes
families in multiple are evicted summarily, and there isn't any
clear explanation.
There is an article in either Popular Science or Popular
Mechanics--I believe it is Popular Science--where some of their
writers went along with the LAPD one night to witness the
effectiveness of shock-and-awe tactics. They used explosive
devices and bright light to wake families in the middle of the
night, and summarily evicted 44 families in one night in
Nickerson Gardens.
Despite my efforts, the only source of news on that subject
that I was able to find was in that article, and that is one
example. I hear too many stories about people being evicted
because their child visited them without a permit to park
overnight or that the child got into trouble.
But here is the thing. If you are living in the lowest,
most affordable--because if you are a billionaire, affordable
housing means something different than if you are in the lowest
income group. And so, the lowest most affordable housing is
what I consider public housing to be, and when you get evicted
from that, I know there is nowhere to go.
You will recall that I have talked to you a number of times
about who makes up the population downtown. It would be very
interesting to find out how the population downtown is made up
of people who have been evicted from the most affordable low-
income housing.
Chairwoman Waters. And what about an attempt to keep people
from sleeping in their cars who had no place else to sleep and
taking people's possessions on the street, are you familiar
with those policies and what it does to those who have no place
else to go and no place to keep their possessions?
Mr. Watkins. I get criticized because I allow small groups
of homeless to live on public property that we own. I get
criticized internally and externally, because my risk manager
says that this is a liability-prone policy for WLCAC to allow
this.
I allow people to come in and freely use showers. We have
showers that are available to the general public, and they come
in at all hours of the night. So, we don't lock our compound
overnight.
But I do get criticized for it because, after all, it isn't
legal to allow people to live on a vacant lot.
Meanwhile, I am trying to break ground on a 46-unit
compound in Compton, 126 Compton Boulevard, and we have been
waiting for months to just get out of the planning process. We
get promised week over week over--I just got a message in here
today that we are getting told it will be another week before
we get the signoff on the plans, yet we have been in there
since March.
And this happens all the time. The process, although I
grant that it is necessary, it is far from streamlined. It is
anything but streamlined.
Chairwoman Waters. I want to thank you very much.
And I want you to know that I had a town hall meeting
recently where I advised the County that you are feeding people
the hot lunch program, our seniors, and they are wandering in
from all over and sleeping on the ground all over the City, but
they are wandering in to be fed.
And so, I am coming out with some representatives from the
County so that we can get these seniors off the street, whom
you are feeding, in addition to all of the other stuff that you
are doing.
Thank you very much.
Mr. Watkins. Thank you.
Chairwoman Waters. The Chair now recognizes Representative
Brad Sherman from the 30th District of California.
Mr. Sherman. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. And I want to
thank you for holding these hearings in my district and
throughout Los Angeles.
Homelessness is the number one problem I hear about. The
Federal Government has to do more as far as resources. We have
to be more efficient in how we spend them.
But these hearings will also, hopefully, shine a light on
local policies that cause rents to be so much higher in Los
Angeles than they are in so many cities around the country. The
rents are too damn high, but also the wages are too damn low.
We are told that there is a low unemployment rate, but I
won't be satisfied until I have a bunch of guys--and it is
always guys--in thousand-dollar suits blockading my office and
using tactics that some groups in here may occasionally use to
say, ``Oh, my God, we can't find enough workers,'' and my
response will be, ``Have you tried raising the wages?''
Wages have barely kept up with inflation, and they have
never kept up with the inflation and the cost of housing in
metropolitan areas.
One issue that comes up, and this could be controversial,
is how large should a unit be? In Europe and in Japan, each
person, even middle class and wealthy people, have smaller
units per the number of people living there. If it was our
option and our choice, we would want to provide every homeless
person, every housing endangered person with a traditional
American mini-mansion or as many square feet as we could.
But I will ask, first, Ms. Gallo, but maybe Mr. Watkins or
others would comment as well, are we being prevented from
building units? The Japanese have been forerunners in how to
make people comfortable in less square footage. Is that even
legal?
Ms. Gallo. It is actually legal. The building codes
actually are quite lenient as it relates to size of a
particular apartment that is eligible to be occupied. I will
tell you that the building codes require 120 square feet for
one person and an additional 70 feet for every additional
person. So, it can be small.
Mr. Sherman. It can be done.
Ms. Gallo. And that is one reason you have seen some cities
promoting microunits, what we call studios, 300 square feet,
325 square feet.
What I would caution, though, is to make sure that whatever
size unit we are proposing, that it is appropriate for the
people living in there for long-term sustainability. If it is
too small, and someone gets stable in housing over time, and
starts to accumulate things, then they can become dissatisfied
with the size of the apartment. So it does require thought, but
it can be done.
Mr. Sherman. Has anyone else had difficulties being able to
site a unit? I know there are neighborhoods in this country
where if you try to put more than four houses on an acre, the
NIMBYs rise up. Mr. Watkins?
Mr. Watkins. Housing policy demands--and you all know about
this--ADA compliance. ADA compliance oftentimes makes a project
near impossible to plan and complete. But more often than not,
it is all of the provisions for square footage within a certain
footprint of land.
And we have been trying to put forth a project to build
1,000 single occupancy units. We are not sure how far we are
going to get, but we think that would be a good response for
people coming out of homelessness by way of incarceration. So,
we are planning that as we speak.
I don't know if I answered your question. Those are going
to be small units, single occupancy.
Mr. Sherman. I only have 40 seconds left, so I yield back.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
The Chair now recognizes the gentlelady from California,
Ms. Barragan.
Ms. Barragan. Thank you.
First, I want to start by thanking you, Ms. Gallo, for your
work in my district. I know you have four sites there. Thank
you very much for that work.
Mr. Watkins, since the first day that I was a Member of
Congress, I reached out and we had an opportunity to talk, and
I have learned a lot about the work that you are doing in Watts
and in the greater community. I want to thank you for that
work. We have actually done a number of events at the Watts
Labor Community Action Committee where you have your location.
I want to talk a little bit about seniors who are
experiencing homelessness. The rising housing costs, compounded
by insufficient retirement income and life's calamities, are
driving more seniors into Los Angeles streets. In LA County
alone, senior homelessness spiked 22 percent in 2018.
Nationally, only one of every three seniors is eligible for
housing assistance because housing programs receive inadequate
funding to meet existing growing need.
Can you talk a little bit about what unique needs older
adults have, from your experience, and how well it is that the
homeless services system can help set them so they can get out
of homelessness quickly? And maybe share some feedback for us
on what Congress can be doing to help the situation, to better
serve this population.
Mr. Watkins. We are one of the largest senior service
providers in the City, and we have--I don't just say this to
blow smoke--the best crew, the best staff, and the best
leadership for that work.
And my director, Phyllis Willis, is an absolute expert who
is putting input, policy input to the City and the County of
Los Angeles on how we should deal with not only the problem of
senior homelessness, but seniors who can't get into our places
because they are raising children. Oftentimes they have second-
and third-generation children that they are responsible for and
can't get out to get the services that we provide. So we will
go to them.
But I think the single largest impediment to seniors
availing themselves of the services that are available is
information, information that makes them aware of what the
possibilities are--where do they go, what do they ask for, what
can they ask for--and that number is so much larger than the
number that we actually serve. And I have to think that that is
at least the underbelly of part of that beast.
Ms. Barragan. Right. The other thing I want to touch
quickly on, and I know that you are doing a lot of work on
this, can you share some of what you are doing in the community
to make sure the homeless population will be counted in the
census? Because we know that could have a disastrous impact on
funding for services and programs.
Can you talk a little bit about what you are doing in the
community that maybe we can all hear about and learn about?
Mr. Watkins. Certainly. As I said, we are building low-
income affordable housing. When I say low income, I mean very
low income. We have been very low-income affordable housing
providers for 54 years with nearly 1,000 units within 5 minutes
of our headquarters in Watts.
I said we want to build 1,000 single occupancy units. But
we have hundreds more that now need to be rebuilt, that need to
be rehabbed. And the problem with doing that again is the
bureaucratic process and what it costs to make a project work.
But as far as what we are doing to address the problem, I
know this afternoon I have a meeting with a gentleman who
specializes in container housing.
Ms. Barragan. Right.
Mr. Watkins. And when we thought about doing container
housing 15 years ago, we were told that it would never make it
past the City Council because it appears as though it is
warehousing human beings.
We think that container housing is a solution that
Congressman Sherman spoke about when he talked about small
spaces. Container housing can be affordable. It can be
completely comfortable with built-in furnishings. It can be
made available to people in large numbers without needing to
build it into the ground.
Ms. Barragan. Right. Do you want to comment on the census,
to making sure everybody counts in the homeless population
counting for the census?
Mr. Watkins. Yes. Every year we participate in that, and
our site is a hub where literally, I don't know, 80, 90 people
go out into the community and count. And they have to be very
adept at getting under the freeway overpasses, down into the
canals, and like I mentioned earlier, who is living under
someone's home.
It is a difficult proposition, but it is also made more
difficult with the current administrative policy of targeting
people who have questionable documentation, and that hurts us.
That hurts Watts tremendously. For a community that is 75
percent Hispanic/Latino, we can't even fathom what is going to
happen when people who just refuse to be counted are left out
of the congressional distribution of resources.
Ms. Barragan. Thank you for your work.
And I yield back.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Mayor of the City of Los Angeles
has arrived. We are going to continue with our last two
questioners, our Members of Congress, and then some of the
discussion that has been going on about what is happening in
the City, I think will be addressed in the Mayor's testimony.
So, Mr. Mayor, we just have two more Members who will be
asking questions, and then you are on. Thank you very much.
And now, the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Green, is recognized
for 5 minutes.
Mr. Green. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
I am, to a certain extent, grateful that I was born into
poverty, and I say this because for a good deal of my life, I
saw life from the bottom up, as opposed to the top down. And
when you see life from the bottom up, you learn the true
meaning of, ``But for the grace of God, there go I.''
I arrived early enough to visit what is known as Skid Row.
I find that name distasteful, by the way. But I visited Skid
Row, and I will tell you that people who talk about this
problem based upon what we have read cannot truly appreciate
the human tragedy unless you see what is happening on what we
call Skid Row.
It was my misfortune and the misfortune of at least one
person for me to be there today because I literally passed a
person who had died on the street. I am told that this is not
an unusual occurrence and that it doesn't happen all the time,
but it happens too often.
I saw people who were homeless, but also, you could sense
the hopelessness. You could sense the feeling of, ``Society has
abandoned me.''
It really is a human tragedy of the highest magnitude. And
I appreciate what all of you are trying to do to resolve it and
to help us. I appreciate what the City is trying to do. I
appreciate the County. But in the final analysis, we have to
get more people involved who understand, ``But for the grace of
God, there go I.''
Unfortunately, Mr. Watkins, we have a person at the highest
office in this land who, in my opinion, does not appreciate,
``But for the grace of God, there go I.''
I think that if I could have a wish that would not cause me
to find my way to the gates of hell, it would be that the
President could live one day on Skid Row. I think he would have
a different appreciation for the human tragedy that he, as
Commander-in-Chief, should have a greater sense of
responsibility for aiding and assisting and resolving.
So, I thank you. I wanted to let you know that I appreciate
all of you for what you are doing.
Ms. Al-Mansour, you mentioned testing. Explain again--you
explained it to a limited extent--how important this is in
dealing with invidious discrimination, because it is much more
pervasive than a good many people would think. Because if you
live your life from the top down, you don't see all of the
suffering that we who have seen it from the bottom up can
appreciate. Would you kindly explain testing again?
Ms. Al-Mansour. Yes. Testing is basically an undercover
measure that fair housing organizations use to determine if
there is evidence to show that there was any discrimination in
applying for a rental unit or applying for a home or a home
loan. In Los Angeles, we do primarily rental testing at the
Housing Rights Center.
For somebody who is disabled or elderly, who maybe has
children, oftentimes they know they have been discriminated
against when they apply for an apartment or if they are being
evicted because they have asked for reasonable accommodation,
and it has been denied. They asked for a caregiver or a support
animal or a change in rules.
Maybe they get their Social Security benefits on the 3rd,
but the rent is due on the 1st, so they keep getting late fees,
which is setting them up for eviction. So it is very obvious,
that discrimination.
It is very obvious when a family is told, ``Your children
can't play outside. You are going to be evicted if your
children come outside and make too much noise.'' Again, that is
an obvious form of discrimination.
Race discrimination is not so obvious. Today, most
landlords don't say, I don't want you because you are Black,
Latino, or something else.
And oftentimes, a tenant who is applying or an applicant
doesn't know that they have been discriminated against. So we
send similarly situated people in different categories--it
could be race, sexual orientation, a lot of different
categories--to go apply for that apartment and let us know, how
much were you told the rent would be? Were you given an
incentive? Were you told you had to move out early, and so
forth?
It is very prevalent, and it happens every day, and
unfortunately, most people never know they have been
discriminated against.
Mr. Green. Thank you.
I will yield back the balance of my time. Thank you, Madam
Chairwoman.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
The Chair now recognizes the gentlewoman from Texas, Ms.
Garcia.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. And
again, I am so appreciative of your efforts to have this
hearing and to bring such a great panel together that are the
direct providers on the ground.
And while I regret that I won't be able to spend the
afternoon with some of you to see some of your programs, please
know that I truly appreciate all of the work that you are
doing.
And when I listened to my colleague from Houston talk about
growing up from the bottom up, it kind of reminded me of some
of my own story. People have often asked me, how did it feel
growing up poor, and I just simply tell them it felt great. I
didn't know any better.
But I am glad that you all are there working with people to
make sure that you can give them some inspiration, working with
them so that they can each feel their comfort zone and feel
their comfort level of what space they need in terms of housing
because, obviously, we know that some folks don't want to be
pushed into a house, don't want to be pushed out of underneath
that house. There is a certain level of making sure that we
know what the individual needs and wants.
Mr. Haynes, first of all, thank you for sharing your story.
When you look at this issue, what is your best advice to
someone about transitioning, and how do you approach them? What
can we learn from you, who has transitioned, in terms of
helping others to transition, if they choose to?
Mr. Haynes. The most important thing is to really listen to
what they are saying. We might ask them a question, but we are
not going to really listen to the answer.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Right.
Mr. Haynes. We are just going to tell them this is what we
have and expect them to make do with what is being offered when
it is really not what they need.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. We need to let them make their own
choices?
Mr. Haynes. Yes.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Thank you for that.
Ms. Vizcaino, you mentioned the domestic violence
situations of women, and you also mentioned, I think, some
about veterans. I know from some of my work in Texas serving on
the Veterans Committee in the State Senate that there are more
minority women, Black and Brown, who are going into the service
than ever before.
So what specific needs or challenges do we have for that
population that we need to try to be mindful of as we consider
the funding challenges not only locally, but federally?
Ms. Vizcaino. That is a good question. I am not sure what
the answer is to that. Just have more hearings and meetings and
let it be brought to the table, the specific needs of the
women, because it is not like a generalized thing. Each one is
an individual, personalized case, and so it is hard to just
like assembly-line everyone, whether it be women, men, or
veterans.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Ms. Gallo, do you have any
suggestions? And I was wondering, too, because as I said
earlier, I started as a social worker, then I was a Legal Aid
lawyer, so I have dealt with a lot of poverty issues throughout
my career.
And it seems like there are more women and children in the
homeless population, at least that I have seen in Houston, and
from the data, it shows that there is an increase. It used to
just be an individual male.
Ms. Gallo. Right, right.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Now, we are seeing more women and
children. So is there any--again, a similar question as I asked
Ms. Vizcaino, are there any different issues that we need to
address that are specific to that population?
Ms. Gallo. Yes. I think Ms. Hartman also had made some
references to this in terms of the specialized needs of women,
both women unaccompanied, as well as women in the military
service. I think frequently when we talk about individuals and
families, we are doing exactly that and not focusing on the
particular needs of women.
I think you are right in noticing an increase. We started
serving families or even women in early 2000. When we first
started 30 years ago, we were focusing on individuals and
mostly males. And then, we started noticing women out on the
streets more often.
And one of the things that we noticed immediately is the
level of trauma that they are encountering. and the reasons
that led to their homelessness; in many cases, it was related
to domestic violence or intimate partner relationships, and as
Ms. Vizcaino said, the hesitancy of talking about it.
So it takes a long time to figure out what the issue is.
You understand the homeless status, but building that trust and
providing that level of services and the mental health support
for an individual, for a female to talk about what led to their
homelessness, that is an additional level of support that we
don't quite push and focus on in the beginning of the services
program. But I think we are starting to do that with some of
the recognition and noticing the increases that have come out
for women who are homeless.
But trauma is a big part of it and then recognizing the
safety issues related to their discussion of their past
histories with domestic violence and intimate partner
relationships.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Thank you.
And thank you, Madam Chairwoman, and I yield back.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
I would like to thank our second panel of witnesses for
their testimony here today.
And I would like to say a very special thanks to Ms.
Vizcaino and Mr. Haynes for coming here and telling your
stories. And to our panel of witnesses here today, it is your
work that causes Mr. Haynes and Ms. Vizcaino to be here today
to talk about how their lives have been changed.
So, everybody give a big round of applause to our second
panel of witnesses.
We will now pause for a minute to set up our third panel
for today's hearing. And Mr. Mayor, it is all yours.
[brief recess]
Chairwoman Waters. While we have a few people greeting the
Mayor, I would like to thank Ms. Rachel Sunday, President and
CEO of the Power of a Shower that is based in Playa del Rey;
and, of course, Ms. Lori Gay, President and CEO of the
Neighborhood Housing Services of LA County; Reverend Omar
Muhammad, Faithful Central Bible Church; and of course, we have
here representatives from the Love Mission, Community
Development Incorporated, and People Helping People.
A round of applause additionally for those who are involved
with assisting with our homelessness crisis.
If I could get you to take your seats now, I would
appreciate it.
I would now like to welcome our final witness for today's
hearing, the Honorable Eric Garcetti, Mayor of the City of Los
Angeles. As you know, Mayor Garcetti is the 42nd Mayor of Los
Angeles and has served as Mayor since 2013.
Mr. Mayor, we welcome you, and I thank you for the
opportunity that you afforded to me and other Members of
Congress to visit with you recently while you helped to help us
understand exactly what you are doing and what other assistance
could be helpful in what you are attempting to do.
So with that, Mr. Mayor, you are now recognized for 5
minutes to present your oral testimony.
STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE ERIC GARCETTI, MAYOR, CITY OF LOS
ANGELES
Mr. Garcetti. Thank you so much, Madam Chairwoman, and
thank you for your friendship, thank you for your leadership,
and thank you for your presence here.
It is not the first time we have testified together in
Exposition Park, but whenever Maxine Waters is in Exposition
Park on an important subject, I am there. And this is the most
important of all of the subjects I have ever come before you to
talk about.
And I am so grateful for you to have two Tejanos here,
Thank you to Representative Green and Representative Garcia for
your lived experience and your perspective.
And my dear friend Brad Sherman, who represents my hometown
in the San Fernando Valley, thank you, too, for being a part of
this.
I come before you today as a mayor, as a parent, as a
foster parent, as a volunteer and organizer, and as a long-time
activist on the issue of homelessness. Representative Green,
when you were talking about Skid Row, I started when I was 14
on Skid Row, something that predated even my birth by decades
as a place where we deposited our social ills and trauma.
And I sometimes think about what the 14-year-old Eric
Garcetti would tell the 48-year-old Eric Garcetti if he could
talk to him about how far we have come and how far we have not
come.
I am asked all the time what causes homelessness, and I am
sure you have had great testimony. I am the last panel, I
guess, a panel of one. You are probably a little bit tired,
probably a little bit hungry, and probably a little bit
depressed hearing some of the things that you have heard today.
But I hope to give you a perspective to kind of give you some
hope and some belief that this is a human-caused problem that
ultimately can be a human-solved problem as well.
There is no issue I work on more than this. And I have
brought together mayors across the country on this issue.
Mayors, ironically, have little direct power over the causes
and the cures of homelessness.
We have police forces, we have sanitation departments or
bureaus, but you can't clean or arrest your way out of
homelessness. When it comes to building housing, preventing
evictions, when we come to the most simple way to explain where
homelessness comes from, I say it is unaffordable housing meets
trauma.
That trauma may be the manifestation of veterans coming
home from war and the horrors of war; women, 91 percent of whom
on Skid Row are the survivors of sexual and/or domestic
violence; children who emancipate out of a foster care system;
mental health that has gone untreated; substance abuse issues;
low wages.
These things are different in each person, but some
combination of all of those pieces of trauma are shared by
everybody. It might be just economic trauma for some.
The good news here in Los Angeles is, we don't come to this
conversation saying, ``Wow, we have a crisis. Please figure it
out for us.'' We come, as you heard today, from a place that
the recent national conference for the Coalition to End
Homelessness brought together saying LA is now seen as the
model.
And I have this conversation with people a lot. Well, I
guess the plan isn't working because homelessness in the County
went up 12 percent, or in the City 16 percent, in a State where
the counties, on average, went up 35 percent this last year
alone.
One of the things I point out, though, is that this isn't
about whether a model is working now. It is about whether we
have the resources to actually fuel that model to success.
In military terms, I served in the Navy for 12\1/2\ years,
and you can have the best-trained people and equipment, but if
you don't have scale, you will be defeated eventually, even by
folks who have less than you do.
And it is an interesting thing. To stay with that metaphor,
today people demand, and rightfully so and impatiently so when
they see the horrors on the streets of America in our worst
places where there are homeless, you see folks who want us to
have D-Day, a conquering of Europe, and the Marshall Plan all
overnight.
So one of my first points would be we have to extinguish
that belief and get rid of that fantasy that there is some
magic formula that within a few weeks or months, this will
disappear, that we can ship people off to this place over in
the desert or on the beach or create a massive tent and just
move them away. That is not how this gets done.
But on the other extreme, I want you to hear that it is
time to get rid of the cynical hopelessness that we can't solve
this problem, and I will give you a couple of cases of how I
have that faith in my bones.
In just 4 years of addressing this problem here in Los
Angeles, we have doubled the success that we have in the number
of people that we house. And statistics are tough, because they
can cut both ways, but statistics really are stories. Numbers
are really narratives of real people.
I spend a lot of time on the streets with outreach teams.
Yesterday, I was walking the Los Angeles River talking to folks
who are living in tents, hearing their lived experience, trying
to take my power as Mayor, saying, this is the day you should
come home. You should go out of homelessness.
And we went from 9,000 people being housed a year to 21,300
last year. Now if you told me that 4 years ago, I would say we
are on our way home to solving homelessness.
You all are public policy folks. It is rare to get that
kind of success where in a short period of time you can double
that.
Put on top of those 21,000, the 27,000 who found their own
way out of homelessness. So last year, 48,000 real people in
the County of Los Angeles moved from homelessness into homes.
But 54,000 new people went into homelessness.
So when we see an increase, it is not that the success
isn't working. It is that we don't have the scale, and we are
not preventing it from happening in the first place.
Second point, the Federal Government has to be a part of
this. And I know I am preaching to the converted with the four
of you, but back in the 1980s when the Federal Government
started to step up on homelessness, when I was first becoming
an activist on this, it made a difference.
We calculated between State cuts--which aren't the
responsibility of the folks here from Texas, nor our Members of
Congress here--which got rid of our redevelopment dollars, and
Federal cuts to our affordable housing dollars--we calculated
this--$20 billion of affordable housing over the last decade
disappeared.
In other words, if we had just kept the level of funding
from 10 years ago, about 20,000 people's worth of housing would
have been put in LA County, enough for us not to have gone up,
but probably to have reduced homelessness.
I see the red light is on, so I will try to wrap things up.
But let me leave you with two things.
First, this is a public health crisis. New data that just
came out said those who are unhoused versus those who are in
shelter, those who are out on the streets versus those in the
shelters, are 25 times more likely to have triple morbidity of
substance abuse, mental health, and physical health problems.
If we think this is only a housing problem, we need to make
sure that the health issues are there.
Second, when the Federal Government stepped up for our
veterans, here in Los Angeles we housed more homeless veterans
than anywhere in the country. We had more to begin with, but we
reduced by 80 percent the number of veterans. In fact, we have
housed double the number that we started with. There just are
the 20 percent left because of the new folks who are coming out
onto the street every single day.
And third, we have to look at prevention. It is time to
pass Maxine Waters' Ending Homelessness Act now.
And I will say this last thing to our President because you
invoked our Commander-in-Chief. I retired from the Navy, so he
is not in my chain of command militarily anymore. But when he
was in Japan recently, he said a few words about this City and
about San Francisco.
He said the streets were so clean in Tokyo. Nobody was
homeless. He said it is disgusting, or whatever words he used,
in my City and in San Francisco, and he said he might have to
do something about it. He said this problem started 2 years
ago.
In my response--and I know we are just supposed to punch
our political opponents back--I didn't. I said any day the
Commander-in-Chief of this country is talking about
homelessness is an opportunity and a good day.
And I said, if he is really willing to come to Skid Row and
walk that walk, maybe not spend the night, but walk that walk,
or have us come to the White House and bring a coalition of
independent Republican and Democratic mayors who struggle with
this issue across America, and he wants to save lives, we will
call his bluff on that, and we will say we can save lives
together.
I told him this problem didn't start 2 years ago when he
became President, and it didn't start 6 years ago when I became
mayor. This has been the legacy of too many decades of neglect,
but it is on our watch to end it. And Washington, D.C., must
and will, with your success, be a part of that solution.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mayor Garcetti can be found on
page 78 of the appendix.]
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor.
I will now recognize myself for 5 minutes to raise a few
questions with you.
I am very pleased about your support of my legislation. We
developed this legislation understanding that $13 billion was
going to raise some eyebrows, but we believe if we are to end
homelessness, we have to supply the resources to apply to the
problem.
Having said that, I wanted to ask you a little bit about
your budget. In addition to the Federal money that you receive
from Washington, D.C., and the grants that we give to all of
the States and Cities, there was an initiative that was passed,
I believe it was HHH--
Mr. Garcetti. Yes, correct.
Chairwoman Waters. --where you received additional
resources. And I know that you have put those resources to
work. I am interested in one aspect of that right now, and that
is the transitional housing, which I think is extremely
exciting, and you showed us an example of it on the screen. And
I want to know how many have you developed, how many are you
going to develop, and will that include South Central or South
Los Angeles?
Mr. Garcetti. Absolutely, it will, including in your
district, Chairwoman.
It is interesting that you talk about the $13 billion,
which shouldn't raise eyebrows. It is a sad commentary when we
think $13 billion will raise eyebrows when the City and County
together through Measures HHH and H have raised about $4.5
billion in housing money and services money.
And we are 3 percent of the nation's population. If you do
the math, we should have $120 billion just to match what we
have raised locally.
So your ambition is not only impressive, it should be
looked at as a start, because if you match just what LA has
done, the Federal Government would be putting in $120 billion.
Now, not every community has homelessness equal to ours, so if
you looked at the homeless population, maybe it would be $40
billion or $50 billion.
But, yes, we have two measures that passed. HHH is for Los
Angeles City itself, the largest housing measure in U.S.
history to pass by a vote of the voters.
It leverages about $5 billion worth of housing from people
looking at shipping containers and new innovative ways to do it
cheaper and faster, to traditional, really beautifully-built
apartments for folks who have the deepest need and perhaps
sometimes the triple diagnosis that I mentioned before and will
need to have services for the rest of their lives.
We have 110 projects of permanent housing. And on the
transitional housing side, we have 25 transitional housing
shelters that we are looking to open up in this next 12 months,
4 of which are already open.
In South Los Angeles, we have, I would say, almost a
preponderance of those, including in the former animal services
yard next to where we had an unused kind of dog park. It is
going to be opening up in about a month, month and a half.
We have a group of engineers, architects, and builders,
who, almost like a war room, manage and we can get up in 60
days span tents, right now, that have cubicles where people can
have their own beds. It is a new model where people can bring
their pets, their partners, and their property, which is why
people have been shelter-resistant in the past.
My personal wish, though we don't know where the money will
come from--though if this passes, we could--is to double the
number to about 50. That would give us at that point somewhere
around 3,000 to 4,000 beds, which would turn over every, let's
say, 6 months or so. So you are looking at every year almost
9,000 to 10,000 people being served. Put that in for a few
years, and we could not only make a dent in homelessness, but
we might have a chance of ending street homelessness in LA.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
I was interviewed on KJLH the day before yesterday, I
believe, and Dominique DiPrima, whom you are familiar with, had
an idea, and I told her I would share it with you.
Mr. Garcetti. Great.
Chairwoman Waters. She thinks that you should buy up some
of the motels that are problematic in the community and convert
those into housing, and she didn't identify whether it is
transitional or permanent supportive housing, or what have you.
But I thought it was a pretty good idea, particularly if
those motels are presenting us with a problem that causes you
to have to use resources to respond to complaints and violence,
or any of that.
Is that something that you have thought about or you could
or what would you tell Dominique DiPrima?
Mr. Garcetti. I would say, ``Dominique, you are one of the
smartest people I know,'' and all of her ideas are good.
We are moving on motels. We need a little bit of State help
to change the residency, that there is a maximum of 29 days, so
that we can take existing motels today and just do leases on
them while we are looking for money to buy motels.
Now, we have to get the owners to do it, where we have had
problematic ones. They are far and few between that they are
ready to seize, but absolutely, that is part of it.
We, in fact, had tens of millions of dollars lined up
through the Salvation Army and some other folks to do just
that, and those monies, unfortunately, fell through for the
developer that was going to do this.
But we will not be deterred. I think those motels are a
twofer: get rid of blight; and at the same time, have a great
place to put housing right now. So we do expect a number of
those--San Fernando Valley, there are some in South LA, as
well--in the next 12 months or so to come online.
Chairwoman Waters. Well, you certainly have a friend in
Governor Newsom--
Mr. Garcetti. Yes, we do.
Chairwoman Waters. --who is doing everything that he can to
be of help.
With that, I will recognize Representative Sherman for 5
minutes for questions.
Mr. Sherman. Thank you.
Mr. Garcetti. Hello, Representative Sherman.
Mr. Sherman. Mayor, thanks for being here. And thanks for
your dedication to this problem.
We pass a lot of laws in Congress, we repeal some, but we
cannot repeal the law of supply and demand.
Mr. Garcetti. Yes.
Mr. Sherman. We need more units. We especially need more
rental units. It is best if we can get the construction of
affordable units. Even if we get luxury units built, somebody
is moving in there who would otherwise be in a non-luxury unit.
I want to focus on the fiscalization of land use planning
where our system for financing government--and government needs
money, but it is important how you raise the money.
If you wanted to build an auto dealership, I have a dozen
Cities in this County that would give you free land, and the
Mayor will come in and help you not just cut the ribbon, they
will help you build.
Mr. Garcetti. Yes.
Mr. Sherman. And on the other hand, if you want to build
housing, you pay an impact fee.
You may have seen the headline in the Los Angeles Times,
stating that one reason housing is so expensive in California
is that cities and counties charge high developer fees. So what
do we do so that we finance government based on ability to pay,
which the State income tax being a good way to measure that and
instead, we finance based upon whether you are building
something that the City Government has to provide police and
fire protection for?
Mr. Garcetti. Absolutely. As somebody who led on tax policy
on the Board of Equalization, and as a tax lawyer, it is a
great question from you, Representative.
A couple of things. One, between impact fees--and I do
believe that 40 years after Tom Bradley first proposed it, we
did pass a linkage fee, which says if you are building luxury
housing, just like we do for parks and other things, you do
have to put money aside for affordable housing. And I think
that will raise as much as $100 million or $100 million worth
of subsidized low-income housing out of that with the building
boom we are having.
But you are right. You can't keep putting everything on
developers. But between getting nothing done by having no fees
on them and having fees, there is something in between that
enough cities don't use, which is the power of zoning. It
doesn't cost you anything, but it can produce more housing, and
then you can ask for something in exchange.
Mr. Sherman. At a minimum, I hope you would join me--and
this is a State matter--in trying to get the sales tax that is
generated by building, because you have all of the--
Mr. Garcetti. Of course, the materials.
Mr. Sherman. --building materials allocated to the city
where the building takes place, rather than where the warehouse
for the building supplies is located.
I do want to point out that we are focused on homelessness,
but I think there was general agreement before you got here,
that the rents are too damn high.
Mr. Garcetti. Yes.
Mr. Sherman. And it is not just for the homeless.
Mr. Garcetti. Correct.
Mr. Sherman. The homelessness is the tip of the iceberg,
and the homelessness we see is the tip of that iceberg. But for
every homeless person, there are so many who could get evicted
tomorrow. And they may never get evicted, but they are losing
stomach lining today because they could be evicted tomorrow.
There are people cutting back on their medicines. There are
people going to payday lenders to be able to make the--there
are people who are 1 month delinquent and paying a late fee,
and they will somehow stay in their unit. And we have to do
everything possible to build more housing, and the more
affordable that housing is, the better.
I want to focus--you and I, I think, are going to be
together in Chatsworth tomorrow, where there was the old LA
Times plant.
Mr. Garcetti. Yes.
Mr. Sherman. Now, it is going to be, in part, housing. And
you had to sweep aside some problems for that to happen because
the land was zoned industrial.
But what can we do on a systemic level to make sure that if
you want to build affordable housing and rentable housing, you
can do it regardless of zoning restrictions? I can see that you
might not want one unit among a bunch of factories.
Mr. Garcetti. Sure.
Mr. Sherman. But what can be done to say yes to those who
want to build the rental housing--
Mr. Garcetti. That is where I was headed.
Mr. Sherman. --without the Mayor having to intervene?
Mr. Garcetti. Of course. And it shouldn't require political
leadership because mayors change and councils change, and
things like that. So, we have changed the zoning.
We are investing in 15 new rail lines in Los Angeles, the
biggest program of a city in U.S. history, thanks also to the
voters of Measure M.
What we started doing already along those transit lines--
and there will be one in the Northwest San Fernando Valley
around CSUN--is we have said, if you are close to transit and
genuinely big transit stops--
Mr. Sherman. Let me point out that in other parts of the
City, you are close to a subway or rails or a grade-separated
rail. And only in the San Fernando Valley do you call it
transit because you have a bus stop. But we will talk about
that one.
Mr. Garcetti. Well, you and I have. And we made sure that
the valley where I am from was not written out of that this
last time. So, we look forward to equitable treatment there.
But what we have done is we said you can go higher and
denser around transit if you build affordable housing on your
own dime. It is not a linkage fee, so it is not additional
costs. It is an additional opportunity and an additional
benefit.
And half of the housing now in Los Angeles City is coming
through this one change, fully half of it. And Los Angeles is
building 75 percent of all of the housing in LA County, and we
are just 40 percent of the population.
So your point about those neighboring cities and towns,
nobody can afford to say no and then say where does
homelessness come from if you are not willing to build housing
in your own neighborhoods, and affordable housing as well.
And to your rent piece as well, at the State level, I hope
that the State legislature will pass, and I know the Governor
will sign, 1482, which is an anti-rent gouging ordinance, which
says you cannot raise rents 25, 50 percent.
Mr. Sherman. And I do want to put in one other thing. We
may or may not get split roll, but if we get split roll, it has
to be tied to ending fees at least for rental housing.
Mr. Garcetti. Absolutely.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
I now recognize the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Green, for 5
minutes for questions.
Mr. Green. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. And I thank the
Mayor for appearing.
Mr. Garcetti. Thank you.
Mr. Green. Mayor, for simply edification purposes, while
you may appear to be alone, it is happening in Houston also.
Mr. Garcetti. Yes.
Mr. Green. It is happening in Washington, D.C. And the
numbers are growing for various and sundry reasons.
One question for me to take to my constituents and persons
who are interested in this in an acute way would be, what can
we do to prevent--while we are not where you are, but we are
headed in your direction, what should we do now to take
preventive measures?
Mr. Garcetti. Three things, and thank you for that
question. First, restore at least to previous levels the
housing funding from the Federal Government and pass this
measure that Chairwoman Waters put forward.
Second, put up assistance for eviction, legal assistance.
Fund that. We are doing that out of dollars we don't really
even have. But I know, Representative Garcia, you talked about
being a Legal Aid lawyer. We are seeing--most landlords are
good, but the unscrupulous ones have a disproportionately bad
impact on your neighborhoods, and so we are giving legal
assistance to folks who are threatened with eviction, who often
face language barriers and poverty barriers and other things.
And third, have a mental health system that isn't Stage 4
intervention. If you really want to understand the folks on the
street, not the people in the cars, necessarily, but in the
shelters who are equally struggling and could become those
folks on the street, but with the deep mental health needs, we
wait until somebody is Stage 4.
And if the four of us came into the emergency room with a
substance abuse issue or a deep mental health problem, I bet
none of the four of us would be seen, maybe one. If the four of
us came in with broken legs, we will be treated anywhere in
America. It is reprehensible that in this country at this time
we wait until we are basically at Stage 4.
And as you said, people are dying on our streets before we
intervene with the right to mental healthcare in this City.
When I walked that river yesterday, 9 out of 10, if not 10 out
of the 10 people I spoke to, you could just see have mental
health problems that are going untreated.
And if you expect this just to be cleaned up by a bunch of
folks who are going to bring either police officers or
sanitation workers, that isn't going to happen. It has to be
that at the same time we put housing in.
And what I didn't finish with the President is, I found out
that in Japan, where he said homelessness doesn't exist, it did
a few years ago. A lot of seniors were homeless on the streets,
and treated terribly in Japan. They were ashamed of it and
shuttled away.
And guess what the Japanese government did? They put
forward housing assistance and income assistance and there are
not homeless people on those streets of Japan anymore. This is
about putting those resources in place on mental health, on
income, and treating these things earlier.
Mr. Green. Thank you, Mayor.
Additional question. I don't want you to put yourself at
risk by answering this question, but if you had the resources--
you have mentioned resources--what are we talking about and
over what period of time?
Mr. Garcetti. Yes.
Mr. Green. If you had the necessary resources, how much and
then over what period of time before you would give us what
results?
Mr. Garcetti. I remind people that those of us who are
veterans are not different from non-veterans. We are as diverse
as the non-veteran population, and that in 4 years we could
reduce by 80 percent the veteran population in all of our
complexity.
It shows that if you had the resources, you could make a
sizeable dent in 5 years, and you could end street homelessness
in 10 years. But will people have the will to do that?
And back to the Marshall Plan, will we build something to
never let this happen again? So that when we see that day in
Los Angeles, in Houston, and other places where homelessness
comes down, will we have a system to catch people early, the
mental health indicators, people being released from prison?
There are great Federal changes, but is there a plan for these
people?
I say that in all seriousness because here in California,
those of us who supported criminal justice reform, we saw a lot
of people come out of our jails and prisons, but there was
nobody to meet them and greet them and train them for a job and
give them the substance abuse or mental health counseling they
needed.
So if they were in prison because they had a gram of
something too much and went away for 20 years, they have never
had that problem dealt with, and 3 weeks later, they are using
again on the streets, and they are living in a tent. And they
might be breaking into cars to feed that habit.
We can do better. So, it is also put that in place. But I
think a decade is what we are talking about.
Mr. Green. Finally, and this is probably at a different
level for us to take up, perhaps at a later time, but we have a
circumstance wherein about 1 percent of the people hold about
40 percent of the wealth, and the top 20 percent, hold about 90
percent of the wealth.
And I marvel at how we have been conditioned to believe
that this is normal, this is the way it should be, that people
at the very top should have enough wealth such that they alone
could fund solutions.
Mayor, I am not going to ask you to get into the
distribution of wealth, but--
Mr. Garcetti. I am always happy to do that.
Mr. Green. --with the top 20 percent holding 90 percent of
the wealth, is this a factor in this homelessness problem--and
many others as well--but in the homelessness problem?
Mr. Garcetti. Unquestionably. This is the biggest income
gap and the biggest wealth gap we have had since the Great
Depression. I say that as often as I can because this second
gilded age feels like a lot of fun if you are doing well. There
has never been a better time to be in cities in terms of the
culture and the museums and the food and everything else.
But even the successful cities have a deep underclass, and
the other cities are being completely left behind. That is not
what this country is. It is not who we are.
When people get scared about redistribution, I always say
forget about what is being taken away. What is the cost to you
to drive through your own City and to see people living on the
sidewalks and in tents? What is the cost to you when you tell
me, your Mayor, to clean that up?
Fifty thousand dollars a person at a time, and we won't do
something to control our rents or do something to give people a
little bit of assistance for 6 months so they can make that
rent. That is what is perversely wrong in this moment.
But I appreciate your voice and the voice of these Members
to make sure that we don't forget there are structural reasons
that we have a homelessness problem in Los Angeles and across
this nation.
Mr. Green. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.
Madam Chairwoman, I yield back.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr.
Mayor.
I now recognize the gentlelady from Texas, Ms. Garcia.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, again.
And thank you, Mr. Mayor, for being here today.
Mr. Garcetti. Thank you.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Your presence here today is a strong
indicator of your concerns and your sentiments on this issue.
I want to focus on something that several of the other
speakers talked about, but no question has really come up that
directly addresses it. I have had some real concerns, even in
my own City, about the criminalization of homelessness.
In addition to being from the same City and both being
lawyers, my colleague, Representative Green, and I here at the
table, are both former judges. And in lower jurisdiction
courts, he saw a lot of landlord-tenant cases. I saw a lot of
what I call tickets that are criminalizing behavior that really
need to be addressed with proper treatment and care.
And when I look at what some cities have done in having
ordinances against camping or sleeping in cars or feeding of
folks in public spaces, taking property that they have with
them, there is just--I could go on and on.
I just don't see where that gets us, and quite frankly, I
don't like hardly any of these at all. I don't think that it
solves any problem. I think it just creates more because all
you are doing is incarcerating them. They stay there a little
while, then they go back, and it is back to the same situation.
I was raised Catholic, and I was told very early on in my
growing ages that we are all God's children. And I was also
taught to follow the Golden Rule, ``Do unto others as you want
them to do unto you.''
I ask you the question, quite candidly, and I hope you
don't take offense--
Mr. Garcetti. Yes, sure.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. --but if you lost your job today and
lost your house and lost everything and became homeless, would
this be the way you would want to be treated, to get a ticket
because you were sleeping in a car--
Mr. Garcetti. That is right.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. --or not being able to just have your
own space somewhere that you can call your own?
Mr. Garcetti. That is right. No, of course not. And thank
you, Representative Garcia. First of all, welcome to LA.
There is a double heartbreak going on--
[Disturbance in the hearing room.]
Mr. Garcetti. There is a double heartbreak that is going on
right now. One is the number--
[Disturbance in the hearing room.]
Mr. Garcetti. One is the number of people--
Chairwoman Waters. Please refrain from interfering with the
testimony.
Mr. Garcetti. The double heartbreak is, one, seeing so many
people who are brothers and sisters on the streets and in cars
and in shelters.
The second is the loss of--
Ms. Garcia of Texas. I'm sorry. I am really having
trouble--could you get closer?
Mr. Garcetti. Sure. There is a double heartbreak that is
going on in many American cities, and I think Los Angeles is
one. First and foremost, it is the sheer number of people who
are now living on the streets, in cars, and in shelters.
But second is also--
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Right. But how does giving them a
ticket solve the problem?
Mr. Garcetti. No. I am going to get to that. I hear you
loud and clear.
But the second one is the death of public space in many
communities where there is a second heartbreak that goes on
every time somebody comes off of an offramp or walks through a
park or is on the sidewalk.
I do agree with you. And we are looking at an amnesty of
all of those low offenses that have been built up through past
Administrations and past years of those infractions here in Los
Angeles.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Well, if you give them amnesty, that
means they still stay on the books because--
Mr. Garcetti. No, and to expunge.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. So you would actually repeal all of
those ordinances?
Mr. Garcetti. Correct. And that is what I would like to see
be done.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Excuse me, Mayor. But when would that
be done?
Mr. Garcetti. Our City Attorney is an independently elected
individual, so we are working with the City Attorney's office,
but to me, it can't happen soon enough.
And our police chief has announced that as well. So it has
the backing of our police department, which I think we are the
largest city in America to have said that and to have done
that. So we are ready to go as soon as our City Attorney and
the court system is ready to go, too.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Right. Now, you are the City that had
the ordinance also on taking property that, I guess, somebody
has decided people don't need to be carrying around or have
with them. And property was taken. Do you all keep track of
that and return it to them--
Mr. Garcetti. Yes.
Mr. Green. --and if you do, at what time?
Mr. Garcetti. We would invite you to the storage centers
that we have and the need that we have for many more. But
downtown, we have probably the largest storage center in
America for individuals who are experiencing homelessness.
They get a ticket to--that is their property. We keep it
for them. They don't have to worry about it getting stolen on
the street. They can take it out any time of day or night. They
are able to go and have that and know that it is safe and
secure.
And we have said we cannot begin to do that--and the courts
have agreed with us--you can't take people's property. By the
way, you can never take their critical property unless--
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Yes, we are talking about due process,
and I might note, Mayor, that behind you, there are a couple of
people who are shaking their heads that that is not true.
Mr. Garcetti. No, and they are right. I would not say that
there have not been mistakes in the past or that everybody is
perfect even today when you talk about the tens of thousands of
interactions that happen. My goal is to bring that as close to
zero as possible because that is the standard we need to have.
Second, a lot of communities, just like they say no to
shelters, say no to even storage centers. So the difficulty of
just finding the sheer number of places to do that and the
expense to do it when there is no funding for this and you have
to figure out a way to fund it, they are very expensive to run,
in the millions of dollars a year just to do the storage.
Third is, ideally, you have the storage where people are.
So the new model that the chairwoman asked me about of where we
are having shelters in the communities where people are
homeless, where you can bring your pets and your property and
your partners, it is that second piece that is absolutely
critical. People aren't going to come off the street if they
can't bring their stuff.
Now, at the other end, we do have to all say there isn't an
unlimited amount of space ever that when we have homelessness
workers who are coming to us complaining that they can't get to
and from work, because sometimes the single individual's
belongings are as wide as this entire table, we have to be able
to make that a services-led, not law enforcement, interaction
to reduce the amount of space that somebody has so that folks
can get to and from the services they need to have, so that
people don't become cocooned.
And I will say one last thing. For serious crimes, if you
want to get deep into this, for the encampments that happen,
there are people who prey on the folks who are there, who set
up shop, who are the serious drug dealers, who are folks who
are raping people in tents, and people's unhoused status should
not ever shield you from accountability for serious crimes.
And so we can't go so far also that we kind of back off
completely of any police presence to protect the very same
people who are themselves going through the deepest of traumas.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Yes. And certainly, I am not talking
about any serious crimes. I am talking about what I call--
Mr. Garcetti. Of course.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. --some of the things that a lot of
cities are doing to target the homeless to, ``get them off the
street and not be seen,'' especially in downtown areas. And
again, I have seen that even in my own City.
Mr. Garcetti. Sure.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. But my concern was when I read the
memo that the committee gave us, it was saying that in this
City, it had increased by 31 percent since 2011. That is really
significant.
Mr. Garcetti. No. That number is because for the first
time, I demanded we track those. It is not comparing apples to
apples. It is for the first time we are actually counting them.
So it was counting over the years in which we barely
counted or did not even count. I now wanted to know. Code every
single time there is something that is happening to or by
somebody who is experiencing homelessness so that we can have
those numbers. In the coming years, we will be able--but it has
not gone up 31 percent.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. So are any services provided while
they are in jail to kind of help them transition or help them--
Mr. Garcetti. In my opinion, no. And the cities don't--we
do have small lockup facilities. But the jails are the County
and State, and prisons are the State's responsibilities.
Absolutely not enough.
And if we want to solve homelessness, I think a big part of
that small sliver of criminal activity that is happening among
people who are unhoused is happening because people are coming
out of the jails and prisons without a plan. The savings we
were promised by the criminal justice reforms that would go to
local government, instead of putting folks in a prison system,
we don't see.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. One final question. So if we could put
a package together or to add to address this specific issue,
to--again, I fail to see why cities even do it, but to help you
to make sure that you didn't have to criminalize homelessness,
what would that one thing be other than funding?
Mr. Garcetti. We need storage, for sure.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Storage.
Mr. Garcetti. I don't know, other than funding, if there is
anything that the Federal Government has the power to do or
that we would want. We need money to be able to create the
systems where people can store their goods.
Training for law enforcement officials and City officials
who do this. We think we have now some of the best practice. We
have been meeting with advocates and from their suggestions
have a different regime.
It used to be led by six or seven police officers and then
sanitation officials, and it was the wrong message. It was
traumatic for people in the streets. Now it is led by people
with lived experience, mental health professionals, and people
who are even giving trash bags to folks.
We are paying 20 people. We just launched 20 people, who
are themselves experiencing homelessness, with jobs to clean up
around the areas where they are unhoused, so to empower them
with job experience, with some income. They want to clean up,
and they say give us the trash bags, let us have the training.
So those sorts of things help, but I don't know if it
doesn't come without money, any of them.
Ms. Garcia of Texas. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.
I yield back. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, for your
indulgence on the overtime.
Chairwoman Waters. Thank you very much.
I would like to thank the Mayor for his valuable time, and
again thank all of our witnesses for their testimony today.
The Chair notes that some Members may have additional
questions for today's panels, which they may wish to submit in
writing. Without objection, the hearing record will remain open
for 5 legislative days for Members to submit written questions
to these witnesses and to place their responses in the record.
Also, without objection, Members will have 5 legislative days
to submit extraneous materials to the Chair for inclusion in
the record.
And before adjourning, I would like to recognize from Watts
Century Latino Organization, Arturo Ybarra, the Executive
Director. Thank you, Arturo, for being here.
Also, Reverend Reginald Pope, Bethel Missionary Baptist
Church. He is one of the leaders in the Watts Ministers. He had
to leave, but give him a big round of applause anyway.
And of course, last but not least, someone that we all know
as an advocate on everything, ``Big Money Griff'' is here.
Without objection, this hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 1:43 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
August 14, 2019
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