Shay Carrasco was standing outside a homeless shelter in Los Feliz on a recent gray, foggy day, dressed in a knit cap and jeans. She’d been pushing a baby stroller down the block. Inside the stroller was her pet cat, named Dog.
“I was told by the caseworkers that as long as you comply with what we ask you to do, we'll be looking to move you as soon as possible,” Carrasco said. She’d hoped to have permanent housing lined up soon after entering the shelter. But, she said, three months later, she’s still sleeping at the shelter with no prospects for finding a permanent address.
“I’m trying to find work,” Carrasco said. “But it's difficult having to find somebody to watch my cat. It’s difficult to get out there when this isn’t really what I’d call a foundation.”
For more than a decade, Los Angeles city and county have prioritized the worst cases — the people most likely to die on the streets — as first to receive permanent supportive housing, meaning rent-subsidized apartments that come with social services. But under a policy shift enacted by LA Mayor Karen Bass, that’s changing. Now, unhoused people in the city who are already in shelters, like Carrasco, can jump to the front of the line for many city-funded supportive housing units, as long as they meet the baseline requirements for income and disability.
“We are pursuing a systemic change, where people living in encampments can move through the homeless system to permanent housing,” said Mercedes Marquez, Bass’ outgoing chief of housing and homelessness solutions. “So that we can maximize available housing and show people that interim housing is a pathway to permanently being housed.”
But some advocates are concerned that this change could politicize who receives scarce housing subsidies and who doesn’t. Because, they say, shelter access often depends on which corner someone happens to pitch a tent on, and whether it becomes a problem for elected officials.
The city has 46,260 unhoused individuals and only 16,521 shelter beds, by last count. Programs like Bass’ Inside Safe Initiative, which breaks up street camps one by one and moves people from the street into shelter, often focus resources on particularly large or unsightly encampments that generate complaints.
“The City of Los Angeles has been allocating those interim housing resources based on political decision making, rather than the needs of folks who are unhoused,” said Shayla Myers, a senior attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. “These systems are inherently problematic when they are based on things other than need.”
The way it's been
Fifteen years ago, Ed Givens was identified by LA County officials as one of the 50 people most likely to die on the streets of Skid Row.
At the time, Givens had struggled with homelessness, substance abuse and depression for two decades.
“I couldn’t trust anybody,” he said. But a program called Project 50 had been set up by the county to house the most vulnerable people living on Skid Row’s streets. Its outreach workers were relentless, and eventually Givens accepted help.
“If it wasn’t for Project 50, I don’t know where I’d be right now,” he said. We spoke inside the studio apartment on Skid Row where he’s now lived for 13 years. He recently decked it out with Halloween decorations. “Project 50 saved my life.”
Project 50 was one test of an approach that later became the standard across LA County: Seek out the neediest people and put them at the front of the line for subsidized apartments.
From that concept, the city and county developed a computerized database known as the coordinated entry system. Overseen by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, this system assigns numeric scores to unhoused people waiting for housing, meant to reflect vulnerability. The higher the number, the higher a person’s place on the housing list.
Marc Tousignant is director of vulnerable populations at the nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners. He says the coordinated entry system was a reaction to an older approach that simply favored whoever could best navigate LA’s complicated housing bureaucracy.
“You’ve got limited supply relative to need,” he said. “So you're trying to come up with a way to prioritize who actually needs that housing the most.”
Even with thousands of new permanent supportive housing units opening in the city this year and next thanks to the bond measure Proposition HHH, supply still pales in comparison to need.
But the coordinated entry system has problems, says Tousignant, who has worked with affordable housing developers and city officials to improve it. For example, clients high on the priority list who still live on the streets can be hard to find, making it slow to fill available apartments.
Marquez from Bass’ office agrees. “It was a strategy of finding one person at a time who could not be found, and keeping apartments open for two, three, four months,” she said.
The City of LA has added thousands of shelter beds in recent years with efforts like Inside Safe, or former Mayor Eric Garcetti’s A Bridge Home. Too often, Marquez says, people in those facilities who qualify for permanent supportive housing and are ready to move in end up stalled by their rank in the coordinated entry system.
A new approach
In August, LA’s Housing Department, under the direction of the mayor’s office, sent a memo to developers using city funding to build permanent supportive housing. It announced that they no longer have to rely so heavily on the coordinated entry system to find tenants for their buildings. Now, they can opt for an “alternative matching” method for up to 75% of the apartments in a given project.
This alternative approach, the letter says, prioritizes people in shelters and will “help reduce street homelessness by freeing up beds in interim housing, and demonstrating to people experiencing homelessness that a move to interim housing will be a pathway to permanent housing opportunities.”
It also opens up the process to more input from politicians.
For instance, the Palm Vista Apartments is an 89-unit permanent building in the Winnetka neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley. LA City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who represents the area, says he “fought tooth and nail” to secure about two dozen of the projects’ units for people from nearby, temporary shelters — something he wouldn’t have had any say over under the old way of leasing buildings through the coordinated entry system. To him, this is a badly needed change that connects the city’s temporary shelters to its permanent housing stock.
“We invest blood, sweat and tears into getting these permanent housing facilities built in the district, often with protests and community concerns,” Blumenfield said. “Part of that is convincing the community that this is going to help get people off of our streets and get people into housing.”
But Myers from the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles is troubled by the idea of council offices handpicking tenants for supportive housing projects. “Political decisions, based on constituent complaints and those kinds of things, are inherently not taking the needs of unhoused folks into consideration,” she said.
Stephanie Klasky-Gamer, head of the nonprofit affordable housing developer LA Family Housing, says the coordinated entry system is far from perfect, and replacing it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
But, she added, “I think our end goal needs to remain: How do we prioritize those most in need of permanent housing? I just don’t want us to go too far in the policy shift that we forget why the system was created.”