County's homeless initiative hits skids, heads in a different direction

Excerpts taken from the LA Times Article.

By Susannah Rosenblatt, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 7, 2007

City officials launched similarly ambitious plans to reduce homelessness, with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spending $150 million over the last three years to develop affordable housing with accessible social services. But while the city's year-old police crackdown on the sidewalks of skid row has sharply reduced crime in the downtown area, it has also pushed people farther from the aid centers concentrated there...

"Many of these are pilot projects," Sheehan (the county deputy chief executive who has coordinated much of the county's homeless prevention work) said. "When you haven't done it before and you don't have a cookie cutter to apply, it makes it very difficult."

The city and county recently began collaborating more closely to move homeless people off the streets; in the past, city-county communication focused more on defusing crises rather than planning for the future, Ollague said.

"We made a mistake in thinking that it was going to be easy once the money was identified," Long said. "The hard part is to come up with the ideas."

In spite of the delays, advocates for the homeless prefer the thoughtful approach: "Should funding just be thrown out there onto the streets in the hopes that it'll do some good? No," said Tanya Tull, president and founder of Beyond Shelter, a Los Angeles nonprofit that helps connect people with permanent housing.

Tull gives the county high marks for "focusing time, energy and much-needed money" on what was long an invisible issue. But, echoing the worry of homeless prevention organizations around the region, she said $100 million is just "a drop in the bucket to what is needed."

Read the full article over here.