As the former sheriff of Los Angeles County, I worked closely with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a joint effort between the city and the county of Los Angeles to address the growing crisis of homelessness. In this capacity, I was witness to some wonderful work being done at street level, and some mind-boggling incompetence being done at the political level.
When I took office, one of the first things I did was to greatly expand the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Homeless Outreach Services Team, taking it from a skeleton crew of 5 to a robust unit with 24 deputies, two sergeants, a lieutenant, and an analyst. Using the five step protocol we developed, which included identification of homeless encampments, assessment of each individual’s needs, outreach to connect each individual with housing and services, notifications of a pending cleanup, and lastly move out day/cleanup, we were extremely successful.
The political establishment has created what I’ve dubbed the “Homeless Industrial Complex,” a collection of nonprofits and non-governmental organizations that receive grant money from city, county, state, and federal sources, allegedly to provide services and housing to the homeless. I say allegedly because in reality only a trickle makes it onto the streets and changes lives. Most of the money is lost in a murky bureaucratic nightmare of red tape, bloated salaries, political connections, progressive delusions, and outright corruption.
To illustrate this, from 2011 thru 2021, the county of Los Angeles doled out $6.5 billion in funds to a multitude of politically-connected nonprofits or spent it themselves ostensibly to reduce homelessness. The result? 38,000 homeless across the county in 2011, and over 80,000 ten years later. The problem more than doubled in size! Even Gov. Gavin Newsom admitted he can’t account for over $20 billion in state money devoted to combating homelessness.
Evidently there is no correlation between increasing spending on homelessness and reducing the homeless population. The exact opposite happens because all the resources offered locally only serve to attract the homeless, including drug addicts, those suffering from mental illnesses, and combinations of the two from across the nation. When the HOST team ventured onto the Venice Boardwalk, we encountered residents from 23 different states represented among the 200+ pop-up tents that lined the boardwalk.
We embarrassed Mike Bonin, the Los Angeles city councilman famous for volunteering public beach parking lots as homeless shelters, tourism industry be damned, and eventually saw the boardwalk cleaned up, businesses reopened, and the community supportive of our efforts. We cleaned up the homeless encampments on San Vicente Boulevard in front of the VA Center in Brentwood, Plaza Olvera, Topanga Canyon, Larios Park in the San Gabriel riverbed, Parnell Park in Whittier, and hundreds of sites throughout the county.
Every encampment we cleaned up happened without arrests, force, or citations. By reclaiming and regulating public space, our HOST team proved that we can responsibly address homelessness and see that they move on into housing and accepting services, but not allowed to remain indefinitely occupying and despoiling public space. We did all this within the budget already established for the LASD, and did not require additional funding. This is a prime example of optimizing the resources and manpower we had in order to positively address a major public safety concern.
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Measure A is a regressive tax hike that will make LA County’s sales tax one of the highest in the nation. The county and the city, along with the Los Angeles Times, falsely attribute rising homelessness to housing costs. They refuse to spend the money where it matters most: building emergency shelter for the able bodied, supportive treatment facilities for the mentally ill or drug dependent, and the toughest of all – send the non-residents back to where they came from.
Just like our nation does not have the resources to receive the entire world’s immigrant population fleeing poverty, crime, and corruption, Los Angeles doesn’t have the resources either to house and feed the entire nation’s indigent population. Measure A will raise the cost of living in LA, while rewarding incompetence and graft. The kicker? It will lead to even more homeless, not less.
It’s time to turn off the “SUCKER” sign in Los Angeles, vote NO on Measure A.
Alex Villanueva is the former sheriff of Los Angeles County.