Community court appeals to delegates
CITYWIDE — The delegation of officials who traveled to New York last week returned optimistic that the Los Angeles metropolitan region can similarly address and alleviate its homeless problem.
The delegation — including representatives from Santa Monica — attended 10 meetings and tours last Thursday and Friday to glean information on how New York is running its homeless programs.
The 30 homeless advocates who attended represent a cross-section of regional government entities and social service providers. In light of the trip, they hope to reconvene in a month to plan ways to bring a community court to the region. In addition, they hope to create greater collaboration among organizations so Los Angeles County can combat homelessness as well as New York City seems to have managed.
“It made me very optimistic — the way New York has taken itself back,” said Ed Edelman, Santa Monica’s homeless czar, one of three officials from City Hall who attended. “The city has gone from a bad situation eight to 10 years ago and has turned itself around.
“It made me realize we can do it here, too.”
The trip was organized by California Sen. Gil Cedillo (D-22) and the Los Angeles Police Department. The 30 officials who participated in the trip had their travel expenses paid by the government bodies they represent, including airfare, meals and two nights’ stay. The delegation stayed at the New York Grand Hyatt at a discounted government rate.
Of particular interest to the delegation was New York’s community court, through which certain homeless individuals may be removed from the criminal justice system in exchange for their willingness to undergo treatment. The delegation hopes to meet within a month to see where such a court could be placed in the metropolitan region.
The court could be located in downtown Los Angeles, serving the more than 20,000 homeless individuals who live there.
In addition, the delegation may discuss creating a second court on the Westside, Edelman said.
Santa Monica City Councilman Richard Bloom said the community court seems to have been crucial in addressing homeless and other concerns and cleaning up New York’s streets. Another component that’s been needed to make New York’s homeless efforts successful is its affordable housing and job training programs.
“It’s one thing to have a court which provides alternatives to jail for relatively minor crimes,” Bloom said. “It’s another thing to actually have the funding for those programs offered, so they are actually available.”
Bloom said one of the greatest challenges facing Los Angeles County, as compared to New York City, are the sheer number of entities involved in the governing process. New York has five boroughs and a strong mayoral form of government whereby that city’s lead official also has significant control over its purse strings.
On the other hand, Los Angeles County is comprised of more than 88 municipal jurisdictions. Trying to mandate homeless funding for a region in which there are so many ruling bodies has been difficult, Bloom said. However, he also feels after the New York trip that establishing some method by which cities will be required to contribute their fair share to address homelessness is more needed than ever.
“It’s a complicating factor we have here, but clearly we have to do something about it,” Bloom said.
The delegation in future meetings will begin to explore options which would provide better regulation of homeless pro-gramming and funding, Bloom said. He said that people must keep in mind that seriously addressing homelessness will likely be an extensive endeavor.
New York City spends $750 million a year to address its homeless problem. That money goes toward providing the homeless with a variety of services, as well as housing them. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Services Authority — the county agency charged with addressing homelessness within the region — operates on a much smaller budget of less than $50 million, according to spokesman Scott Ito.
LAHSA funds homeless social service programs, but it doesn’t house homeless individuals directly, Ito said. That responsibility is handled through the Los Angeles Housing Authority, a separate entity with its own budget.
It was not known at press time what the Housing Authority’s budget is. However, since there are more than 93,000 homeless individuals living in the Los Angeles region, according to recent studies, it’s fair to say the Authority’s budget is not enough to address the problem, officials said.
“It’s fair to say New York puts substantially more funding toward it homeless programming compared to Los Angeles,” Ito said.
Shannon Murphy, Sen. Cedillo’s spokeswoman, said the senator plans to introduce legislation, called the Community Reunification Act, with several provisions aimed at combating homelessness downtown. The legislation calls for making the Skid Row area a “narcotic zone” in which there will be tougher penalties for drug dealing within 1,000 feet of treatment centers.
In addition, the legislation will seek to require that municipalities throughout the state do their fair share to address their homelessness. Murphy said this element of the legislation would aim to limit the homeless “dumping” that goes on in downtown Los Angeles, in which some cities relocate homeless people after they commit infractions within their city limits, she said.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 31, 2006. Read the original PDF.