In a continuing effort to assist unsheltered individuals, the Los Angeles City Council launched the Citywide Street Engagement Strategy to help people transition from outside encampments to indoor housing options.
Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas, the architect of L.A. city’s Right to Housing framework and possibly the region’s most ardent proponent of initiatives to aid the homeless, was one of the sponsors of the motion to develop a targeted approach to move unhoused people to interim or permanent homes.
“The Council is pushing hard for housing options for the homeless. It is all grounded in the context of the right to housing. The city is establishing itself to address homelessness in a strategic, thoughtful, compassionate manner that gets to results of people being housed and having the appropriate safety net, which the county is responsible for,” said the councilmember.
On July 28, the office of the City Administrative Officer (CAO) issued a report detailing their proposed recommendations to implement the street engagement strategy as a pilot program. According to Ridley-Thomas, the plan is an attempt “to put something in place … that is uniform, substantial and sustainable.”
In a statement, he explained, “The strategy would ensure standardized assessment of encampments, an adequate period of dedicated street engagement at all sites where unsheltered people reside, and a transparent and accountable process by which street engagement teams work collaboratively to help unsheltered individuals transition indoors to moreappropriate and dignified housing options with services attached.”
Seeking to educate the public and gain input from the community, the councilmember hosted a panel discussion on the City’s strategy on August 5 via Facebook Live that featured experts who are highly knowledgeable about the area’s homeless crisis, currently involved in engagement procedures and well-informed about the City’s funding capabilities.
The panelists were Libby Boyce, senior director of programs for L.A. County Dept. of Health Services Housing for Health; Veronica Lewis, director of Homeless Outreach Program Integrated Care System (HOPICS); and Yolanda Chavez, an assistant city administrative officer for the City of L.A.
Introducing the forum, Ridley-Thomas said that as the representative for Council District 10 and chair of the City Council’s Homelessness and Poverty Committee, his goal was “to help bring dignity to those who are homeless,” and to correct the assumption of some that engagement means enforcement. Calling on Chavez, he asked her to explain the strategy from the CAO’s perspective.
“The street engagement strategy as proposed really tries to outline the framework that has been used by our city/county/nonprofit outreach teams and best practices providing targeted outreach to people experiencing homelessness. At the core of that outreach is assessing people’s needs and being able to connect them to services and housing. The goal is to connect people to a suitable shelter or interim housing or permanent housing,” Chavez said.
The program also works closely with L.A. County, which contracts with service providers that directly interact with homeless individuals and strive to meet immediate needs, whether physical, medical or mental, through the use of 50 multi-disciplinary teams, explained Boyce.
“Each multi-disciplinary team has a health, mental health, substance abuse and lived experience providers and a case manager, who all oversee street-based engagement from a clinical perspective and all have a territory that they are responsible for throughout L.A. County. Their job is to know the homeless in the area and begin engaging them, to move them from engagement to connection to services and ultimately, to bring them inside,” said Boyce, the county’s first homeless coordinator who has served in the position since 2004.
She noted that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) also operates engagement teams, partially funded by the City of Los Angeles, which include professionals with lived experience, mental health expertise and case management skills. Another interesting fact Boyce shared is that the County divides service areas into eight sections and designates a lead agency in each area. For the South L.A. section, HOPICS serves as the lead and Lewis outlined the nonprofit’s focus.
“HOPICS has been working with these [engagement] teams ever since they started. What works is recognizing that we [are] going to serve human beings and taking our support to those folks in a way that we meet them where they are. It’s not a force thing because all of us are adults and we know what we want. So, [we work to] build a rapport, meet their basic triage needs, whether that’s food or medical, and have people to speak with them that have been in their shoes,” said Lewis.
“The bottom line is nobody wants to live outside. Our goal is to get them off the street. In the last year, we’ve moved over 350 people off the street into permanent housing. So, it’s possible to do this and make a significant impact;we just need additional support. We know what works and we want to offer people clean spaces where any of us would want to live,” she declared.
All of the panelists cited various challenges unique to the homeless crisis. Boyce frankly stated, “For every one person we get off the street, two more come in. You have to have services to connect them to and have permanent housing opportunities. Also, people don’t want to leave the community where they are homeless. They don’t want to go to Antelope Valley or Long Beach. We have to honor that.”
Chavez highlighted the importance of allotting an adequate period to address the distinctive needs and situation of each individual in an encampment. “Time is needed to really provide a proper needs assessment and also an assessment of services and housing options available. That is critical because it takes time to develop trust,” she said.
Agreeing with that outlook, Lewis stressed, “We also need time to engage people. This is their community too, they just happen to live outdoors. Often, the homeless person went to school or grew up in the area where they are encamped. Also, some people are traumatized or don’t have the identification and documents to move in order for any landlord to rent space to them and that takes time to assemble.
“It is difficult to come inside after you’ve lived outdoors a long time. Critically important beyond the housing subsidies are the services to help people sustain or move to more appropriate housing. We need housing more than anything,” she said.
Concluding the hour-long session, Ridley-Thomas emphasized the intricacies surrounding the homeless crisis and the difficulties individuals encounter – both the unhoused and those seeking to assist them – when attempting to find resolutions.
“The major point we want to make is that it is complicated, deeply involved. There are not easy or simple solutions, but we are obliged to stay at it. The longer we work at it, the better we will become because we will design systems that make sense,” said Ridley-Thomas.
“Every element we put forth will push us closer to restoring dignity and purpose to the lives of people, who in many instances are homeless through no fault of their own and the impact is on the housed as well. So, we need to put this together in a real way.”
To learn more about initiatives to relieve the homeless crisis, visit [email protected]/issues/homelessness. To view the full event, visit markridley-thomas.lacity.org/articles/facebook-live-citywide-street-engagement-strategy .
