Albert Einstein never said, “insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.” That oft-misattributed quote came from a 1980s Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet. Ironically, it thus makes perfect sense to use it when discussing Los Angeles County’s proposed Measure A, which would increase and make permanent a sales tax to fund homelessness programs.
Why is it appropriate? Because we can all see that people living on the streets of Los Angeles is a terrible problem. And we are all addicted to the idea that spending money is the same as solving the problem. It most certainly is not. For one thing, in the five years since Measure H, the original sales-taxes-will-end-homelessness proposal, we know that billions of dollars have been spent, ($2,206,061,913.00 give or take a hundred large) but we don’t exactly know on what.
“The state doesn’t have current information on the ongoing costs and results of its homelessness programs” according to a devastating article about the lack of accountability in California which I found while trying to nail down how much H dollars were disbursed. We also know that groups that oppose it say LA’s “unhoused population has increased 37% since then,” which certainly doesn’t seem like a win or an effective use of taxpayer dollars.
The text of Measure A sure seems to promise a lot— it’s going to “create affordable housing, support home ownership, provide rental assistance, increase mental health and addiction treatment, reduce and prevent homelessness; and provide services for children, families, veterans, domestic violence survivors, seniors, and disabled people experiencing homelessness.” Who could be against that?
But all we need to do is check out what the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) has done with the money they’ve taken in from the sales tax to date. They promise to “engage, support, disseminate” … to do everything but solve the problem. Over 85 employees of LAHSA earn over $100,000 per year in just salary. They “provide training and technical assistance for over 30,000 provider staff” while helping “fund homeless prevention services and financial assistance for 4,400 individuals and families.” Don’t those numbers seem a bit lopsided? They should be helping 30,000 people who aren’t staffers.
Check out what they did with the over $800 million dollars they got last year. Remember that after all this was spent, homelessness in Los Angeles increased.
Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association wrote the official statement in opposition to Measure A that was printed in sample ballots and partially based its pitch for No on A on cost. There’s a reason Daniel Greenfield calls programs like LAHSA’s the Homelessness Industrial Complex. To spend that much money and increase the scope of the problem while appealing to taxpayers to double their tithe takes incredible chutzpah. If Angelenos say yes, that will indeed be insane and prove that we are addicted to appearances instead of results.
But there’s another, even more important reason to vote No on Measure A. Homelessness programs are big money for the purveyors of programs, but don’t heal the broken souls whose addictions and/or mental illness have them on the streets. Calling them the unhoused is a linguistic trick meant to fool us into thinking that a house will solve everything. But that’s not how you beat drug addiction or schizophrenia. I recently spoke with a French-Canadian journalist about the challenges we face in Los Angeles, which no longer looks like a first-world country, and how a conservative approach that addresses the sad victims on the street while making our public areas accessible and safe for all is the way forward.
Those people are all someone’s child, or brother, or father, or sister, and they deserve better than being used as ballast to keep budgets afloat. The claim from proponents of the tax increase is that without it, homelessness will increase because there’ll be no money for all their programs. Well, County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath has been making her pitch for increasing the size of the BOX by saying they have enough money, and can use it better. So do that with the bloated county budget. If there are efficiencies to be found in staffing, why wait? Homeless people die on the streets of Los Angeles at an alarming rate, mostly due to overdoses.
If housing affordability is the issue, more government is not the solution. In August of 2018, I wrote my first OpEd for the Daily News, titled “Our Elected Officials Shoulder Much of the Blame for California’s Homegrown Housing Problem.” They still do. As former U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, says, “the best way to make something expensive is for government to make it affordable.”
Measure H and Measure A prey on those of us who want life to be better for everyone by adding that the money they’re hoovering up from your pocket will go towards making housing cheaper. As I said back then, “We need to remove the obstacles for developers who would like to build — and yes, to make a profit when they do. … Decreasing impact fees, eliminating or reducing the ability of groups to use CEQA as a form of extortion and stopping the ever-increasing number of mandates on housing construction would go a long way toward increasing supply, and thus, slowing the rise in costs.”
To fix the lack of housing, we need to let builders build. To fix the surplus of lost souls and broken bodies on our streets, we need to let law enforcement enforce the law and get people to make the hard choice between drug treatment and moving on from their encampments. Measure A is a transfer of cash from already-strapped Angelenos to the Housing Industrial Complex. We already know what results they produce. Vote No on A for sanity.
Roxanne Beckford Hoge is a mother of four, Los Angeles resident since 1988 and a volunteer with the LAGOP.