Here's what is passing for progress on solving Los Angeles' homeless problem: People won't be arrested for sleeping on the street between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. That's what the city agreed to do earlier this month to settle a lawsuit.
That cheerless scenario will exist until the city creates 1,250 additional units of supportive housing, at which point the city will again be free to arrest people for the crime of sleeping on sidewalks. The settlement has the germ of the right idea, however. The central antidote to homelessness is not a police sweep or a shelter bed. It's housing.
In Los Angeles, especially on skid row -- ground zero of homelessness in our nation -- the goal of ending this disgrace may seem naive and unattainable. But across America, cities large and small have made significant progress. The numbers of homeless people on the streets of Miami, Philadelphia, New York, St. Louis, Seattle, Denver, Portland, Ore., and 20 other cities have declined in the last several years.
What have they done that Los Angeles has not? Within the context of a strategic plan, framed around business principles, they have moved homeless people with serious mental disabilities or addictions directly into housing units that include access to mental health and recovery services. As a result, these cities have stopped cycling homeless people through shelters, emergency rooms and jails -- and, overall, are seeing cost savings. It turns out that what is more humane is also more economical.
When we add up the arrests, incarcerations, emergency medical care and other crisis interventions, the true costs of chronic homelessness are staggering: $35,000 to $150,000 per person per year. By contrast, the annual cost of supportive housing for a person with serious mental illness or addiction disease is between $13,000 and $25,000. And once stabilized, many can qualify for federal disability and health insurance or get jobs that will further reduce local costs.
Yet Los Angeles seems stuck maintaining the expensive and ultimately unproductive policies of the past. On skid row, for instance, the Los Angeles Police Department deployed 50 additional officers and also expanded its drug enforcement effort. In the first year of that initiative, the LAPD issued about 12,000 citations for minor offenses and made about 9,000 arrests -- in an area with a population of about 12,000, about 5,000 of whom are homeless.
