Karen Bass’s broken promise on homelessness in Venice

Karen Bass likes to tout LA’s progress in reducing homelessness.

Last July, for example, she claimed that the city’s annual homeless count had declined for two years in a row.

She called that “lasting change.”

But it hasn’t lasted in Venice, where homeless encampments keep returning.

The latest example is the encampment at the corner of Rose Avenue and Hampton Drive, which Bass personally visited three years ago.

She promised that she would make sure the encampment “isn’t re-populated.”

Yet as The California Post reported this week, the encampment is back — with all the misery it brings to the neighborhood.

Locals blame poor law enforcement.

But more broadly, the problem is that Bass hasn’t addressed the root causes of homelessness.

These include mental illness, drug abuse, and — as The California Post reported earlier this month — gangs that run homeless encampments.

Bass’s policy, called Inside Safe, moves homeless people into hotels as a supposedly temporary measure. 

But while it has enjoyed some limited success, Inside Safe has done so at great financial cost — and many homeless people who benefit from it simply go back to life on the street.

The obsession with “housing first” has prevented LA — and California — from demanding that homeless people commit to getting sober, getting medical treatment, and getting jobs. Or at least trying.

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Homelessness in Venice is also a reflection of lawlessness in LA. Police have been handcuffed in recent years, and a philosophy of “anything goes” has become all too common.

Good Samaritans also contribute to the problem, unintentionally, when they provide money, food, and services to homeless people who are living illegally on the streets.

What seems like a kind gesture of charity can create bad incentives for people to stay on the street — and for others to replace them when they leave.

Our leaders simply haven’t grappled with the scale of the problem. Gavin Newsom’s Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment (CARE) courts, which are meant to make it easier to commit mentally ill people to institutions, are too limited to be effective. 

CARE courts have cost hundreds of millions of dollars thus far, but have only helped a few dozen people.

The CARE courts have also become a political football, with Newsom blaming LA County and even his former city, San Francisco, for the program’s failures. 

The bottom line: we need more drastic action, and stronger leadership, to fix the homeless problem.

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