Karen Bass admits falling short on goal to end LA homelessness crisis
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Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has drawn heat for her past promise to end street homelessness in the city, but she admitted in an interview published Wednesday that she has unfortunately fallen far short of that goal.
Bass, who is running for re-election, is running for St. Louis, a former hospital that has been converted into a mental health, addiction treatment and homeless housing facility. He was interviewed by CNN at the St. Vincent Behavioral Health Campus. Los Angeles is one of many cities in California known for homelessness.
Host Elex Michaelson asked: “So when you talked to Jake Tapper in 2023, you said your goal was to end street homelessness in Los Angeles by 2026. Now it’s 2026 and we haven’t ended it. How are you doing?”
“We’re not done with this,” Bass confirmed. “Actually, I was at the beginning of my term when I said this. I am extremely determined to achieve this goal. I did not anticipate some of the bureaucratic obstacles I would encounter, but now I am ready to overcome them.”
LA GIVES A TRAGIC REMINDER THAT THE PROBLEM OF HOMELESSNESS WILL NOT CONTINUE IGNORED
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass faced criticism in an interview about her past promise to end the city’s homeless crisis. (Getty Images)
He noted that Los Angeles has fast-tracked many affordable housing units in recent years, arguing that it has made a choice not to combat homelessness and focus solely on construction.
“So basically the policy of LA City and LA County was that as long as we were building, we could accommodate homelessness on the street. We didn’t foresee the problem metastasizing,” he said. “For the first time in my three and a half years of life, street homelessness has decreased in our city for two years in a row. This decrease has never occurred before.”
Bass added that although this is a policy that affects people from all walks of life, there are actually some bureaucrats who are determined to continue it.
“So this is a problem that all Angelenos are experiencing, and we have to have a commitment that this has to end,” he said. “The city and county have never made a commitment like this before, and what I found surprised me. I found a lot of people working within the system who were very resistant to ending street homelessness.”
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California has been one of the states most associated with homelessness in recent years, especially in the wake of the pandemic. (Los Angeles Daily News via Hans Gutknecht/MediaNews Group/Getty Images)
“But you promised it would 100% go away,” Michaelson said. “And it was only down around 17.6%. So why should people trust you to get to 100%?”
Bass stated that the problem has decreased for the first time and argued that the successes achieved so far are due to his leadership.
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Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass argued that there has been significant bureaucratic resistance to truly combat the homeless crisis. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
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“We need to end the failed policies of the past, which is, ‘All we’re going to do is focus on construction and we’re going to ignore street homelessness.’ “Our municipality and district have been doing this for years,” he said.
