We cannot help someone while they're living in a tent.
We need a triage-like approach.
They're not doing it at nearly the intensity or the urgency or the scope that we need it.
This is Skid Row, a 53 square block area of downtown Los Angeles,
where more than 2500 homeless individuals reside on the streets.
California's homeless population has jumped by more than 12% in the last five years,
and it's part of a national crisis.
Skid Row is what I call it the worst manmade disaster in the United States.
There's human waste on the sidewalks. There's all kinds of disease.
Actually I lost my right leg on the streets of Skid Row from getting a staph infection,
from coming in contact with human waste.
Reverend Andy Bales is the CEO of Union Rescue Mission,
which is the nation's largest private homeless shelter.
He says that the city of Los Angeles,
which has the largest unsheltered homeless population in America,
has failed to deal with what's become a public health and humanitarian crisis.
More than a thousand homeless people died on the streets of Los Angeles County last year
according to government figures.
Meanwhile, the city is spending more than a billion dollars on a long-term housing solution
that likely will take more than a decade to complete.
There's a particular type of TB found only in the world on Skid Row.
We've had typhus, medieval disease carried by fleas on rats.
When you leave people on the streets,
they are quickly devastated by what they experience.
Homelessness destroys people physically, mentally, emotionally,
educationally, vocationally, every way you can think of.
And in LA there's nowhere to go, right?
We put a roof over at 25% of the people devastated by homelessness, we leave 75% on the streets.
Los Angeles is now coming together to confront the greatest moral and humanitarian crisis of our time.
Homelessness.
In 2016 Los Angeles voters approved a referendum to spend more than $1.2 billion
building new housing for the homeless.
It's part of a plan championed by Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti,
who declined our interview request.
And I will accept nothing less than a home for every person who needs a roof over their head.
We are here to end homelessness.
The city set a target of 10,000 new housing units within a decade
that we're supposed to take between three and six years to build.
But three years in just 1% of those apartments will be ready for occupancy by the end of 2019.
It's going to be too late. When they get to spend the money,
they're going to be triple the homeless there are out here now.
A lot of these projects are taking forever to build.
They need to find something now. Look at them. They don't have no place to go.
Building anything in California isn't easy.
The state's legislative analyst's office found that increasing competition for limited housing
is the primary driver of housing cost growth in coastal California,
which has some of the nation's highest housing prices and rents
because local interest groups often use tools like zoning and the state's environmental review law
to delay or kill new housing projects.
The shortage drives up prices and some living on the margins are priced out and turn to the streets.
And even after voters approved the more than a billion dollars
specifically to build housing for the increasing homeless population,
a recent report by LA's controller's office attributed the delays
and cost overruns largely to regulatory barriers, permitting challenges, and bureaucratic confusion.
Meanwhile, the existing shelters are running out of space,
threatening to force men like Jimmy Anderson back onto the streets of skid row.
Soon the women and kids are going to take over the Rescue Union Mission
and all the men is going to have to move out there back out here on the street.
The city's approach, known as Housing First, was adopted by municipalities nationwide
after Utah reportedly reduced chronic homelessness by 91%
by giving away permanent apartments with no strings attached.
But state auditors later attributed those findings to a statistical error
and building housing for the homeless is considerably more costly and complex in Los Angeles
than in Salt Lake City.
The city initially ballparked the permanent units at a median cost of $350,000 a piece.
Three years later, the estimated costs rose to more than half a million per unit.
Andy Bales says he saw it coming.
You know I was a critic 10 years ago of this plan, even before it came about.
It's a very expensive way of spending all the resources on a few and leaving the many out in the cold.
Bales wanted the city to allocate a portion of the money to nonprofits and shelters like his
to provide temporary relief.
And they laughed at me. They made fun of me and in the newspaper and here we are afterwards.
There's this group that is so dogmatic about permanent supportive housing as the solution.
They think everybody deserves a $600,000 unit with a granite countertop,
and anything short of that is not good enough.
Bales says that given the current emergency, the city should reconsider its heavy focus
on finding a long-term solution.
If we put four of these up in each district, 15 districts, 60 total, we could get, I want you to hear this,
we could get 13,000 people off the street.
Union Rescue Mission just opened what's called a Sprung Structure,
a relatively inexpensive but sturdy and weather resistant tent with 120 beds.
We cannot spend $600,000 per person per unit and ever get it done,
but we could get there at $14,000 per bunk, in a Sprung Structure,
and we could get there at $50,000 mobile homes or $100,000 container homes
or $10,000 3-D printed concrete homes with a bathroom and kitchen and can be put up in 24 to 48 hours.
We've got to think innovatively or we're going to have a bigger disaster on our hands.
In terms of where to put these structures,
the city owns more than 7500 lots. Though neighborhood councils regularly fight
to keep shelters out.
Property owners in Skid Row would like to see the police clear homeless encampments out of their neighborhood,
which could also help to avert the public health crisis.
But past court settlements prevent that,
and the September ruling on a case out of Idaho from the U.S. Ninth Circuit Appeals Court found that doing so
constitutes cruel and unusual punishment when cities don't have adequate shelter
to accommodate everyone living on the streets.
Los Angeles city and county have signed onto a lawsuit challenging that ruling.
We just firmly believe that the police are not an answer to homelessness.
It should not be part of any kind of homeless service system and definitely
should not be criminalizing people for basic behaviors.
Becky Dennison works for Venice community housing corporation,
which opposes the criminalization of sidewalk camping in Los Angeles.
The idea that folks without housing are out there by choice,
or not trying to get into housing and we just have to arrest people or nothing else will happen
is a complete false hood.
At some point isn't there a conflict of rights between say a property owner or a business owner who
doesn't want tents right in front of their business and the ability of
someone to sleep on the sidewalk?
How do you reconcile that conflict?
Sidewalks should obviously be available to everybody,
so making sure they're passable and all of those kinds of things.
It's a way of sharing public space and acknowledging that
some folks are living in our public spaces because they have no place else to go.
But proponents of the lawsuit say the city needs guidance from the courts
on what constitutes adequate shelter before investing in solutions that might free them
to enforce anti camping laws.
If there was a push for more temporary housing,
let's say they built 30,000 beds,
would that justify prohibiting sidewalk campaign?
I can't imagine it does. If we ever get to that point,
maybe that's a debate and a dialogue we'll have to have as a society,
is there some level of control we want to have over our streets and sidewalks?
I would say no. Maybe there's some arguments to say yes, but we're not there.
We have to focus on solutions and get away from this idea that somehow
we'll be able to fix our neighborhood problems by being able to arrest people.
Given the lack of progress on permanent or temporary housing,
Bales is also hesitant to sign onto the lawsuit for the time being.
But I'm not signing on to remove people from the streets until we have enough
places to go. When we get that,
then we can worry about asking somebody to leave the streets and go to this place.
Under the increasing pressure in recent months,
the city has erected a few of its own Sprung Structures to address the crisis.
Bales says it's still not nearly enough.
It's ridiculous. I mean,
who would want to leave 44,000 people on the streets to die
while you stick with your very expensive plan to help a few?
We do have a FEMA-like, Red Cross-like crisis going on
with homelessness and it needs to be an immediate call to action to get everybody who's willing under a roof.