Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass acknowledged LA is “not close” to meeting her 2026 promise to end homelessness in an interview with CNN’s Elex Michaelson. Bass blamed decades of failed policies and bureaucratic resistance for the problem. “This is a problem that all Angelenos experience,” Bass told the CNN anchor. “And we have got to have a commitment that this has to end. The city and the county never made that commitment before. And I found something that surprised me. I found a lot of people who work internal in this system who were very resistant to ending street homelessness.”

ELEX MICHAELSON, CNN: So when you talked to Jake Tapper in 2023, you said that your goal was to end street homelessness in LA by 2026. It’s now 2026. LA MAYOR KAREN BASS: And we haven’t ended it. MICHAELSON: We have not ended it, and we’re not close to ending it. How are you so off? BASS: Well, basically when I said that, it was at the beginning of my term. I am very committed to achieving that goal. I didn’t anticipate some of the bureaucratic barriers that I would experience, but I am prepared to take those on now. And let me just give you an example. Los Angeles made a decision probably 20, 25 years ago to not address street homelessness, to focus solely on building. And granted, I have fast-tracked 42,000 units of affordable housing, but it still takes a couple of years. So basically the policy of LA City and LA County was we could accept street homelessness as long as we were building. We didn’t anticipate the problem metastasizing. In my three and a half years, for the first time two years in a row, street homelessness has decreased in our city. There hadn’t been a decrease before. That is a quality of life issue that impacts all Angelenos. Whether you are unhoused or whether you run a business and your business can’t function because there’s tents outside, whether you’re a parent that’s trying to navigate through tents to get to school or whether it’s residents where it has decreased the quality of life. So this is a problem that all Angelenos experience. And we have got to have a commitment that this has to end. The city and the county never made that commitment before. And I found something that surprised me. I found a lot of people who work internal in this system who were very resistant to ending street homelessness. MICHAELSON: But you promised that it would go away 100 percent and it’s only gone down about 17.6 percent. BASS. Right. MICHAELSON: So why should people trust you that you’re going to be able to get to the 100 percent? BASS: Because let me just tell you, for the first time we’ve had a decrease at all. There was not a decrease before at all because there was no commitment to get rid of street encampments. And we had encampments all over the city. So I would ask for people’s trust in the sense that we have absolutely made progress. We know what we need to do now to end street homelessness. We need to end the failed policies of the past, which is all we’re going to do is focus on building. And we are going to ignore street homelessness. That is what the city and the county has done for years, ignored street homelessness. MICHAELSON: What would you identify as sort of the biggest obstacle that you learned maybe being in the job? And how are you going to tackle that differently in the next four years? BASS: The biggest obstacle is the resistance to building interim housing. So basically, it was an all or nothing type policy. I think probably for a good reason, we didn’t want people to languish in shelters. But the shelters of the old was a big room with cots all around. That does have to end. But now there’s new and improved shelters where you can house multiple people. It’s not a motel room. You can house multiple people where they do have a modicum of privacy. And one thing that we have specialized, that we have absolutely conquered in my time, which is we know how to get people off the streets. We know how to get them to accept the services that they need. And the only people that refuse at this point, and it’s a very small number, are people who are so profoundly ill, they don’t even know they’re homeless. Or you have the criminal element. And that’s a very small element of the homeless population. But it does exist, and they should be held accountable. MICHAELSON: All of the candidates for governor said that people who refuse shelter should be forced into it. Do you agree with that? BASS: Well, it depends. Let me just explain. People who are profoundly mentally ill, and they don’t even know that they’re ill, I do believe there should be involuntary hospitalization. Right now, the laws don’t allow for that. And even if they did, we didn’t have the facilities. But you can’t just incarcerate people. And let me tell you, call up our sheriff and ask him what he thinks about that. The jails are already overpopulated. And if you are upset about how much it costs, it costs far more money to incarcerate somebody than it does to take care of them. So that’s an emotional response. And I understand that that response comes out of frustration. But it is not a productive response.

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