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Susan Shelley: The ‘housing first’ approach is a failure in California for obvious reasons

April 13, 2023

If you would like to see graphic evidence of the catastrophic failure of the “Housing First” model to address what is called the homelessness crisis, look no further than the story of the Skid Row Housing Trust in Los Angeles.

The Skid Row Housing Trust owns 29 buildings that provide housing for 1,500 tenants described by City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto as “among the most vulnerable people in our City, requiring health services, security and daily assistance.”

The occasion of the city attorney’s statement was a court decision on Friday to place all 29 of the buildings owned by the trust into receivership. Initially, L.A. Superior Court Judge Mitchell L. Beckloff considered placing just 26 of the buildings into receivership, but when a deputy city attorney presented information about recent overdose deaths, the judge put all the buildings under the control of the new receiver.

A provision of the state health and safety code allows a court-appointed receiver to borrow against the value of the buildings in order to rehab them.

The core of the problem is that it’s not just the buildings that need rehab.

By state law, specifically Senate Bill 1380 enacted in 2016, all housing programs using public funding must adhere to the requirements of the “Housing First” model. The key principle is this: no one may be required to be clean and sober, or to participate in programs and services of any kind, as a condition of receiving housing from the government-funded program.

Now let’s take a look at what happened in and to the 29 buildings owned by the Skid Row Housing Trust.

A recent report in the L.A. Times noted that “soaring maintenance costs to keep aging buildings habitable took a financial toll,” but the age of the buildings is only part of the story. “Some of the people the nonprofit served had substance abuse and other issues that could lead them to damage buildings and inflict chaos on residents,” the Times reported.

In lawsuits filed last year on behalf of residents of two of the trust’s buildings, residents “alleged a lack of security” as well as “violence by other tenants.”

The Times said it found “similar issues in other buildings where tenants said that drug use and prostitution were a problem. They put the blame on lax security that gave intruders easy access.”

But the access is always easy when a resident opens the door from the inside. What residential security could possibly protect against that?

SB 1380, authored by then-senator and now L.A. County Supervisor Holly Mitchell, requires the operator of the building to accept tenants with severe substance use disorder. It assumes that four walls and a ceiling will have a miraculous ability to cure the problems that caused that person to be on the street in the first place. In reality, the law enables addicts to inflict harm on themselves and others, at taxpayer expense.

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One obvious problem with “Housing First” is that it takes only a few residents to throw the whole building into chaos, disrepair and financial distress. Everybody else in the building is a victim.

There is absolutely no justification for continuing this destructive and dangerous policy.

We need housing for residents who won’t destroy it, quality mental health hospitals and residential rehab facilities for people who need care, shelters for people in crisis, and the return of the city streets and sidewalks to their intended purpose. As I have written before, we can accomplish this by repealing SB 1380’s “Housing First” mandate, and by asking the federal government for a waiver from the “IMD (Institutions of Mental Disease) exclusion” that prevents Medicaid reimbursement of patient care in mental health facilities with more than 16 beds, and by building both emergency and long-term shelters sufficient to allow the enforcement of anti-camping ordinances.

Instead, California is spending $20 billion and counting on the same failed policies, as homelessness experts and non-profit executives draw lavish salaries and big contracts, all funded by taxpayers, to continue the policies that are destroying what once were livable cities.

This has to stop. Call your city, county and state representatives and tell them that.

Write [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley

Orange County Register

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Susan Shelley: The ‘housing first’ approach is a failure in California for obvious reasons

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