LA Mayor Karen Bass: Homeless “Outreach Team” Consists Of The Former Homeless, Incarcerated, and Addicts
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass defended her homelessness strategy in an interview with the “Enchale Podcast,” arguing that her emergency response and the “Inside Safe” initiative have helped reduce homelessness. LAST WEEK: CNN Host to LA Mayor Karen Bass: You Promised To End Homelessness, It’s Only Gone Down 17.6%
JOSE QUINTERO, ‘ENCHALE PODCAST’ HOST: Let’s talk about homelessness, because — let’s talk about Inside Safe. Your team says street homelessness is down 17.5 percent since you took office. MAYOR KAREN BASS: Yes. QUINTERO: The first time in 20 years we’ve seen two years in a row of a decline. BASS: That’s right. QUINTERO: So that’s an actual real number. What actually changed that made that possible when nothing else has worked for decades? BASS: Sure. I think first of all, we use a different approach. I don’t feel that people should die on our streets. And so with a sense of urgency on day one, when I took office, I put our city in a state of emergency, which gave me additional powers. So I sent out a team to go out and talk to people. But we used to have these large encampments everywhere. Now they do still exist, but not as many as before. But we house everybody in the encampments because what a lot of people don’t realize is when you see a group of tents like that, that’s a neighborhood, that’s a community. They don’t want to be separate. And that’s what was happening in the past. They would pick this person and that person and that person. And and Angelenos never saw a difference. We take everybody now. And I believed it was an emergency. I wanted to jump in and act immediately. Now, recognizing that the system around homelessness has been dysfunctional for day one, and it’s a 30 year old system. But I am doggedly determined to completely change that system while getting people off the street. But here’s one of the things that we’ve used that is a part of our magic. Everybody that’s on our outreach team, they were all either formerly homeless, incarcerated, maybe suffered from addiction or mental illness. And they can identify with the people on the streets and they do not have a problem. It is a myth that people want to be on these streets.
