The mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, recently pleaded with the city's wealthier residents to help address homelessness by funding a housing project.
Speaking during her State of the City address, Bass said funding from the city's "most fortunate" could significantly speed up the acquisition of more temporary housing for the homeless.
"Right now, we're working to move past nightly rentals. We are asking the most fortunate Angelenos to participate in this effort, with personal, private sector, and philanthropic funds - to help us acquire more properties, lower the cost of capital, and speed up housing," Bass said.
"LA4LA can be a sea change for Los Angles, an unprecedented partnership to confront this emergency, an example of disrupting the status quo to build a new system to save lives," she added.
Bass also noted that while the number of homeless people in LA may continue to increase, the LA4LA initiative would eventually end the city's homelessness crisis.
"We will not hide people but what we will do is house people," she said. "The crisis on our streets is nothing less than a disaster."
Los Angeles' Homelessness Crisis
In 2023, about 46,200 people in the city were considered homeless, per the New York Post, citing data from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). This marked a 10% increase from 41,580 homeless people recorded in 2022.
This year, nearly 4 in 10 renters (37%) in Los Angeles County said they were worried about becoming homeless in the last few years due to rising housing costs and inflation, according to the results of the 2024 Quality of Life Index prepared by UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs. That same survey also found that 49% of the city's residents do not believe LA's homelessness crisis would see improvements.
The median rent in Los Angeles is $2,083, as reported by Apartment List. That is 3.4% lower than rental prices recorded last year but is still enough to create challenges among renters in the region. In fact, a report from the Housing Initiative at Penn estimated that between 97,000 and 153,000 households in LA were behind on rent as of August 2023 due to economic strains.
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