Press Room

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES - Every year, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce sends a delegation to Washington, D.C. to push for business-friendly policies and vie for federal funds. In the past, they’ve tackled issues related to mass transit, water and education.

The Chamber is returning to the nation’s capital March 15-17, but the lobbying agenda includes a new issue this time: homelessness.

The group plans to press for more federal dollars for local homeless services and for policies that would prioritize permanent supportive housing. The trip will mark the most significant step taken since the chamber and the United Way of Greater Los Angeles teamed up last May on an effort to combat homelessness in the city.

The Chamber’s position comes from a recognition, officials said at the launch of the partnership, that homelessness is costly for taxpayers and bad for business. The Chamber has formed a task force devoted to the cause, recruiting 23 of its members for a panel that has met almost monthly since September.

“The involvement of the business community is a critical means of leveraging political power and political will,” said task force co-chair Renee Fraser, a member of both the Chamber and the United Way board of directors. “In the past, when the nonprofit sector… has raised the concerns and the issues around homelessness, the city and the county listen patiently but action has not occurred at the level that we expect it to.”

The Chamber task force has spent the bulk of its time hearing from local and national experts on homelessness and visiting shelters and permanent supportive housing projects in the region, said Jerry Neuman, a partner at the Downtown law firm Sheppard Mullin, who serves as the group’s other co-chair.

“We wanted to ensure that we weren’t drawing any conclusions initially, that we were not going to exclude any stakeholders and points of view, and try to see what best practices were out there,” Neuman said. “What’s important is that we try to understand how those practices could be applied to the unique community in Los Angeles.”

The Agenda

Although the task force will not finalize its plans until a meeting this Friday, the group has zeroed in on three key agenda items for the Washington trip, said Christine Marge, the local United Way’s director of housing and health.

At the top of the list is a plan to lobby for a change to the federal formula that determines how McKinney-Vento funds, which support homeless services, are allocated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Currently, Marge said, the formula does not even take a region’s homeless population into account, and relies instead on factors such as the age of an area’s housing stock.

As a result, Los Angeles ends up with fewer per capita resources than other areas. The United Way calculates that Los Angeles receives about $1,706 per homeless person per year in federal funding, based on the $82 million the region got in McKinney-Vento money and divided by the 48,000 people estimated to be homeless on any given night. By comparison, Chicago, whose 2009 official homeless count was 6,240, gets $8,119 per person, Marge said.

“At the end of the day it’s about getting Los Angeles’ fair share,” Marge said.

On top of arguing for a change to the HUD formula, the task force plans to ask for an increase in the McKinney-Vento budget, from $1.85 billion this year to $2.5 billion next year.

Housing First

As the task force has studied local homelessness, Neuman said the group has largely come to the conclusion that permanent supportive housing — developments that pair subsidized housing with in-house social and medical services — will be a crucial component to any major reduction in homelessness.

Proponents of permanent supportive housing point to its role in significantly reducing homeless populations in cities such as New York and Denver, and a retention rate that hovers around 80%.

In October, the United Way and USC released a report that studied four formerly homeless individuals for two years before and two years after they entered permanent supportive housing. On the streets, the group cost taxpayers $187,288 in public services such as visits to the emergency room and detox facilities. During the two years in housing, the cost was $107,032, a 42% reduction.

Still, many in the homeless services industry warn that permanent supportive housing can’t be the only solution. Rev. Andy Bales, chief executive officer of the Union Rescue Mission in Skid Row, who is involved with a separate, faith-based coalition to reduce homelessness in the area, warns that permanent supportive housing is more expensive than it appears, namely because the capital construction costs are often overlooked, he said.

He maintains that permanent supportive housing should only be part of a solution that also includes emergency services, like those provided by the mission, and more transitional and affordable housing.

“We still firmly believe in a transitional housing program with intensive supportive services and classes so families can fulfill their dreams and ultimately move out into the marketplace of housing instead of being permanently subsidized,” Bales said.

The role of shelters and other emergency care services are not lost on the leadership of the Chamber, Neuman said.

“The shelter system certainly is a great system that we should utilize as kind of frontlines of defense, and they should be the ones we work with to take people off the streets,” Neuman said. “You’re not saying get rid of the shelters, but use them as part of a holistic system and I think ultimately no one should argue with that.”