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Jan. 15, 2021 - Epoch Times
26:10
How LA Profits from City-Wide Homeless Crisis | Soledad Ursua
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Can you tell us what's going on in Venice Beach with homelessness?
It has been complete lawlessness and just a breakdown of civilization.
There are people who are living in tents, RVs.
They are surrounded in their filth.
There's feces.
There's needles on the floor.
They're living in squalor.
Can you give us some examples of the crime?
We're seeing drug dealers coming in because they dominate the market and it's a supply and demand issue.
They prey on the homeless.
Now we're seeing different gang members fight for control of the area, of the boardwalk.
There was a measure that was passed that allocated $1.2 billion to this problem.
So what's been the approach that LA County has been taking?
Controller Ron Gelpern did an audit of Prop HHH and found that 30 to 60% of the funds were used towards soft costs.
So that's consultants, architects, and it didn't actually go to housing.
So it's been a real failure.
This problem of homelessness in your community, the special interests are really involved in using the funding to do what they think the solution would be, but they're feeding themselves essentially the process.
I see it as just a big racket where everybody has their hand in the pot.
It turns out that the homeless are just big job creators.
Everybody is making money off of this very vulnerable population.
So these group of key players, they don't really care what happens to these people.
They have no incentive to solve this crisis because if they did, they would not have a job.
The homelessness crisis in Los Angeles County continues to rise despite the support from both local and state governments.
My guest today is Soledad Ursua.
She serves on the Venice Neighborhood Council.
Today, she discusses how the increase of homelessness in Venice Beach is impacting the community and how the special interest groups are benefiting from the crisis.
Welcome to California Insider.
Soledad, it's great to have you on.
Welcome.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
We want to talk to you about your neighborhood.
Can you tell us what's going on in Venice Beach with homelessness?
So I live in Venice Beach.
It is located within Council District 11 in Los Angeles.
It is about three and a half miles wide, and we have, next to Skid Row, the largest number of homeless, unsheltered homeless people.
Last year, after the homeless count, there was about 1,100 unsheltered people living in Venice Beach, and today we suspect that that number could have doubled.
And what is going on in the streets of Venice as you are a resident there?
It has been complete lawlessness and just a breakdown of civilization.
There are people who are living in tents, RVs.
They are surrounded in their filth.
There's feces.
There's needles on the floor.
They're living in squalor.
And you mentioned the numbers have increased.
Why do you think the numbers have increased?
Doubled, right?
Is that...
There's many reasons.
One has been lack of enforcement due to COVID-19 restrictions.
The CDC came out with guidance saying to not move homeless encampments because they want people to shelter in place.
So we normally used to have the encampments cleaned once a week, so they stopped that.
So we've gone a good six months without any kind of cleaning.
And we've seen the number just spiral, where more people are coming, more You know, belongings are piling up and the conditions are just getting worse.
And then also there has been a lack of enforcement.
LAPD has gone through massive budgetary cuts.
We've lost close to 20 officers on the Pacific Division Patrol.
So we are dealing with, you know, increased squalor on the streets and, you know, more people coming to Venice.
And we've seen an uptick in homeless and homeless crime.
We have less enforcement, so it's just created the perfect storm.
Can you give us some examples of the crime that is increasing?
So 56% of aggravated assaults, one of the people involved is homeless, whether it's a homeless victim or if they're involved in it.
So we're seeing that there's really a turf war going on.
There's so much limited space.
And so now people are fighting over the areas where they occupy.
People are slashing each other's tents.
They're burning people's tents.
We're seeing drug dealers coming in because they dominate the market and it's a supply and demand issue.
They prey on the homeless.
So they will come to this population in order to sell them drugs.
And now we're seeing different gang members fight for control of the area, of the boardwalk.
Is there a lot of drugs in this community?
Yes.
Drugs are rampant.
You know, there are needles out there, so people are doing heroin, but meth really is the drug of choice in Venice Beach.
It's very easy to do.
There's tons of drug dealers on the beach already.
And your community, you guys have seen this, right?
Is that the neighborhood has changed over the last few years?
People in the community see that?
Yeah, it's gone through, you know, a sharp change.
It's become very dangerous.
There are people who do meth and they go through a form of psychosis when they're high, so they may be arguing with an imaginary person.
They might attack someone.
That sort of stuff is just constant.
And people are doing meth in the street, in open?
Open air.
And so, you know, also they have tents.
So it's a really great way where they can go in, they can do drugs in their tent, and they're allowed to be on the beach.
And we've also seen that the drug dealers are using tents because it's a great way to operate without the police being able to see you.
So there is a big criminal element that is using the homelessness to hide under.
And as a result of this, you mentioned to me offline about some of the crime cases.
Can you explain to us some of the situations that you've seen in the neighborhood?
Well, what we've seen really happen, and it's mostly due to Prop 47, what used to be a felony has now been reduced to a misdemeanor.
And so, you know, drug possession is one of those.
You would have gotten a felony for something like that and you would have served jail time.
Now it's a misdemeanor.
And so it's turned into a real catch and release type issue.
And so, you know, the police, they're not even going to deal with someone, you know, who has drugs on them.
There's nothing that they can do with them.
It's just a slap on the wrist now.
What about things outside of drugs, like violence?
Is there some violence in the community?
We had a local Venice man.
He was an elderly man.
He was about 71 years old.
He was walking on the boardwalk with his bike.
A homeless person came up to him, I believe that he was on meth, and he attempted to steal the bike from him.
And as he took the bike, he pushed him.
That man fell on his head and suffered a stroke, and he later died from that.
And that was during the day.
So there's really no safe time to be walking around Venice.
Another issue that we had is just there's been so many shootings on the boardwalk.
And that is because the gang members are there.
They're selling drugs.
This happened about three weeks ago.
It was about 5.20, right before sunset.
A couple had rented some scooters.
The scooters were then returned, and they ran into a group of three men.
And the men asked them, you know, where are you from?
They got into an altercation.
One of the men opened up his gun, fired off some rounds, and fatally killed the girlfriend that was with them.
And so these things are happening in the daylight on Venice Beach.
We've also had a serious increase in rapes.
About a month ago, a 29-year-old graduate student from Arizona was visiting.
She was violently raped by three men, and she was left for dead near the Venice bathrooms.
I think that our murder rate in Los Angeles is up 300%.
And this is also due to some of the COVID restrictions and just some of the budgetary issues that LAPD has gone through.
But we've seen a massive spike in crime where residents do not feel safe leaving their house at night anymore.
Burglaries are up.
Residential burglaries are up 26% in Venice Beach.
And it's because, you know, people are trying to break into homes to steal something so that they can go and buy drugs with that.
We've also had massive car break-ins.
And, you know, meth is very cheap.
So it doesn't take much to steal from someone to go sell that and then buy drugs with it.
What about the homeless population?
How are they doing?
These are incredibly vulnerable populations.
There are some that suffer from serious mental illness.
They may have schizophrenia.
You know, we have just put them on the street and we just forget about them.
It's just nobody wants to deal with that.
Those people are a threat to themselves and others.
They need real care.
And we've just, you know, we've classified all homeless as one type of person.
You know, there are some people who are drug addicts and those might be the easiest to save because we need to sober them up.
But we look at it as it's just one kind of person and we've just put them all on the streets.
There's also working families that have experienced homelessness and they need help to get back on their feet.
They don't want to be on the streets with these other people.
They don't want to go into the shelters.
You would never want to take your family to one of these shelters because the gang members are running it.
They're there because they're selling drugs to the drug addicts and the mentally ill end up getting addicted to drugs as well.
It's just this awful cycle and nobody seems to care what's happening.
So LA County, there was a measure that was passed that allocated $1.2 billion to this problem.
So what's been the approach that LA County has been taking to solve this problem?
The money has been coming, right?
So Prop HHH allocated $1.2 billion towards creating permanent supportive housing.
The idea was to get people off of the streets.
Unfortunately, due to increased costs, which were unexpected, very few housing units have actually been produced.
Controller Ron Gelpern did an audit of Prop HHH and found that 30 to 60 percent of the funds were used towards soft costs.
So that's consultants, architects, and it didn't actually go to housing.
So it's been a real failure.
What is the city doing about this problem?
They created bridge housing.
And so what that was, it's 154 beds in a tent that cost about $8 million to set up.
And so the idea there was to get people off of the streets where they would await permanent supportive housing.
That too has turned out to be a huge failure.
What's happened is people don't actually want to come into the shelter because you can't do drugs there.
So they would rather stay on the street.
They've come up with this new metric of success, calling it dual residency, where they consider it success if a homeless person has a bed inside bridge housing, but then they also have a tent on the street.
So that, in my mind, should not be considered a metric for success, but that's what they're leading with.
And they are in the process of creating permanent supportive housing.
The site that is underway and will be approved shortly, it's the Reese Davidson Project.
It's 140 units of permanent supportive housing.
It's located in the Venice Canals.
Why is it only 150 housing for 150 when you mentioned there's 2,200 homeless in Venice?
Well, Venice Beach is a very small community.
You have a lot of duplexes.
I don't think that we could build enough housing in the neighborhood to house all of the homeless.
There have to be other solutions.
We need a huge tower in order to do that.
So the plan is to house 150 people out of the 2,000, 2,200 that you mentioned.
And what is the cost of this housing?
For the Reese-Davidson project, it's 140 units of permanent supportive housing.
There is also going to be wraparound services.
They're using Prop 2 money, and that means services for the most mentally ill.
You normally see wraparound services used by a mental institution or a facility.
So there will be some sort of hospital facility in the ground floor, and a lot of people don't realize that, that it is going to be similar to a mental institution.
And the cost of these units, is it pretty high?
So right now, people are averaging permanent supportive housing units at about $700,000 per unit, and that's for about 450 square feet.
And the cost can also range up to $1.2 million per unit, because a lot of these projects do not take into account the value of the land.
And that's something that you need to include to have the total development costs.
So we're still unsure what the true cost will be.
Everything is still moving.
But it does look like the city planning officials will approve the project.
It's up for project approval on January 13th.
So the solution is the city is providing housing at very high cost to a small number of the homeless.
That is the solution that the city is sticking to.
They believe in a housing first model and that seems to be the only thing that they can think of.
Do you think there are better ways of handling this problem?
There are many low-cost solutions.
Some people have looked at tiny homes.
Some people have looked at, you know, nice tents.
There's a nonprofit in Venice called Share Housing.
And what they do is they get formerly homeless people to share housing together.
So it's like having a roommate.
And they work to match people.
They're renting directly from landlords with existing units.
So there's no construction.
Everything is ready to go.
And they've had about an 80% success rate because when you put people together, There's less of a chance of them isolating.
When you put somebody in a room by themselves there's more of a chance that they could isolate or they could end up using again.
This is almost like a college dormitory route and it really acts as a method of encouragement because it's a sense of community You're looking out for your roommate.
People will cook together.
And it really helps to make sure that nobody slips through the cracks because people are looking out for you.
And so what Share does is they're able to house someone for $8,000 a year.
That includes the rent and that includes the services that they provide.
They have a plan in place to shelter 2,000 people for a cost of $8 million.
That proposal has been given to our council member.
We do not know what the status of that is, but if we wanted to take care of the unsheltered population right now, we could.
And it's a very low cost and a highly effective route.
Why do you think the city is not doing that?
Because there's not enough money to be made.
If you look at Prop HHA specifically, you have to use new construction.
It did not let you use the money for these low cost and highly effective solutions.
And that's just because there's too much money to be made off of, you know, this crisis.
And how's the money made?
Is it in the construction of these units?
So there's affordable housing developers that are nonprofits.
They're the ones that are really leading the effort to build permanent supportive housing.
So they make, on average, about 10% to 13% of the total development costs as a developer fee.
So they have no incentive to really keep costs down.
You have to ask yourself, would you rather make 10% on $10 million or 10% on $100 million?
So what they do is they seem to jack up the prices.
They're building in the most expensive neighborhoods where land value is incredibly high.
And they're also using prevailing wage.
So You're looking at, you know, probably costs that are about 60% more than, you know, regular housing.
What about the government, the city officials, the city councilmen?
Do they look at this issue?
How do they look at it?
So I know that Councilmember Mike Bonin will not consider any solution unless construction is part of it.
And that's because his constituents are the trade unions.
The unions get these contracts to build permanent supportive housing and they're getting prevailing wage.
So that is what they are looking for.
He has to keep his constituents happy.
So it seems like this problem of homelessness in your community, the special interests are really involved in using the funding to do what they think the solution would be, but they're feeding themselves essentially in the process.
I see it as just a big racket where everybody has their hand in the pot.
It turns out that the homeless are just big job creators.
Everybody is making money off of this very vulnerable population.
So these group of key players, they don't really care what happens to these people.
They have no incentive to solve this crisis because if they did, they would not have a job.
What do you think is going to happen to your community if you guys don't solve this problem?
There really is no end solution because even if you built, you know, 10,000 units, more people will come.
We've created this environment where we're just furthering drug addiction and we're, you know, we're creating these awful conditions and so there's just no end in sight.
More people will keep coming.
And what do you think will happen to Venice Beach?
I mean, the conditions already are horrendous.
I can't imagine it getting much worse, but it already is.
You know, I have not seen conditions like this in the first world.
I spent about a year and a half in South America.
I was working for a non-profit...
For children who are born with HIV-AIDS, what I see today reminds me of favelas.
We have people who are constructing these makeshift tents on the street.
They're very dangerous.
The people in there, they have their items in there.
There's tanks, there's grills.
It's just I've never seen these kind of shanty towns on the streets.
Could you explain to us, it seems like there are non-profit developers involved.
Is there a component of for-profit in these entities?
How do people benefit from this industry?
So there are two different types of developers.
There are those that are nonprofits and they build affordable housing.
There's also for-profit housing developers.
But what we see today is that most developers have both.
They have a for-profit entity and a nonprofit entity, and that's just to do different deals.
But that seems to be the most tax-advantaged solution.
So they're positioned as a non-profit developing entity, but they do have a for-profit component.
Correct.
According to Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority, they're saying that they've given 22,000 permanent housing to homeless people and then they've also provided 18,000 bridge housing.
But they can't keep up.
What are your thoughts on this?
So I live about a block away from the Venice Beach Bridge housing.
And we were sold on this saying that, you know, if we have this bridge housing here, we would get increased cleanups.
It would be this cleaning zone and basically there would be more patrols.
And so that's really how they sold it to the community.
What we've seen is the complete opposite.
There are now tents outside of bridge housing.
They promised us that there would be no new encampments.
We've seen there's at least 50 new tents right outside of bridge housing.
And, you know, they're operating at about 30%.
It's so frustrating to live right there.
And this whole new encampment set up, you know, we just don't understand why they can't get people inside.
It's just people don't want to go in there.
And then...
Increasingly, we've lost the patrols that we were promised.
They had allocated a special police car to patrol bridge housing.
That was gone during the LAPD budget cuts.
So now we're stuck with increased homelessness.
We have increased, you know, pop-up tents and we have no patrol or no security.
So residents are just so frustrated.
Why has the prop HHH run out of money?
It was just gobbled up so quickly.
You know, it was supposed to be made for shovel-ready projects.
That never happened.
And one of the main reasons the money is gone is because the costs are just astronomical.
And we're finding 30 to 60 percent of those costs going towards consulting costs, soft costs.
So this is the money that was never spent on the construction.
Correct.
So the Reese Davidson project with 140 units of permanent supportive housing, the nonprofit developer was originally planning to use Prop HHH money.
So that money has been gone.
So now they're looking to other incentives and they have found Prop 2.
Which is for the most mentally ill.
And what that is is wraparound services.
So it's something that you would use to finance a mental asylum or a facility.
That's the definition of wraparound services.
So these developers are sort of an example how they are not building for the end user or the community.
They're building around the financial incentives made available to them.
So they are looking to now use long housing tax credits and layer it on with Prop 2.
So what residents don't really understand is you're going to have a ground floor mental institution, mental facility, with upstairs low-income housing.
So where does the funding come from for these developments?
So the value of the land is astronomical as is, and that's given to these nonprofits for free.
A lot of the money comes from the council members, from some of their designated funds.
Money's coming from the state.
And then many of the developers use the low-income housing tax credit, and that's a federal tax credit.
This population that you mentioned is increasing, the homeless population that are in Venice Beach, where do they come from?
Unofficially, we're seeing that about 70% are from out of state.
Milton Friedman once said that you cannot have a welfare state and open borders.
And California has really become, you know, a draw to homeless, you know, from other states.
And that's because meth is legal and you can sleep on the beach.
You will not end up in jail.
Right outside Bridge Housing, which, you know, I live near, there is a man specifically who came directly from an Arkansas prison.
He came here because meth is legal.
He will not get in trouble and he will not go back to jail for it.
He spent most of his youth in prison for a murder charge.
And when someone asked him, did you do it?
He admitted to it.
So California has sort of become this haven for anybody who doesn't want to follow the rules, for people who don't want to sober up.
And I don't see an end in sight.
And I see just a big opportunity for some of these developers to keep building at $1.2 million per unit.
It's supply and demand.
And for them, it's great money.
There's no incentive for them to ever fix this.
So what you're seeing in Venice Beach, is this happening in California, the rest of California as well?
So homelessness is increasing in the large cities, notably the expensive cities.
And it's happening in California statewide.
And when you think about it, California, we pay the highest utility taxes.
We pay high property taxes.
And so people wonder what causes homelessness.
You know, it's just we pay so much money to live here.
And then when developers are building at $1.2 million per unit, they're driving up housing costs.
So people wonder why the cost of housing is going through the roof.
It's because the city is building in this manner.
Everybody has to keep up with it.
What do you recommend Los Angeles residents and California residents need to do?
I think that we need to demand a full audit.
We need a forensic accountant to go in and look through some of the books for the service providers.
We need to see their contracts.
We need to see what the metric of success is.
Did you meet your contract?
Did you fulfill it?
I think that we need to really start exposing some of the corruption.
And that goes for the developers as well.
Let's see the cost and the budget for these $1.2 million units.
It's just absolutely ridiculous to think that a unit, a 450 square foot unit, would cost $1.2 million.
The solution isn't working and we need to follow the money because someone is making a lot of money off of these very vulnerable populations.
Well thank you.
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