Here’s what California’s mayors need to help solve the homelessness crisis

Every year, we do the same dance: Mayors from California’s biggest cities head to Sacramento in search of funding to solve homelessness.

We sit down with the governor. We harangue our legislators. We lay out what we need to build affordable and supportive housing and expand services for our unhoused constituents. We navigate the almost never-ending budget battle among our state leaders, pushing, nudging, imploring and eventually getting everybody on the same page.

At the end of it all, in the last three years, we met our near-term goal — a one-time infusion of funding that allows us to supplement our local investments in temporary shelters, permanent units, public health aid and other support.

These historic commitments have been much needed, and they’ve had a real impact — everywhere from Skid Row in Los Angeles to the freeway underpasses of Oakland. But by its very nature, this yearly scramble is temporary, unpredictable, defined by ever-changing program requirements, and it’s never sufficient. In the words of a recent state auditor’s report, our state’s current response to homelessness is, at best, “disjointed.”

Opinion

We simply cannot afford this kind of piecemeal approach any longer. This moral and humanitarian crisis is simply too vast, extensive and expansive. Last year, before the COVID-19 pandemic, California had over 160,000 people living without shelter. Our state is the epicenter of a national homelessness emergency and our big cities are ground zero.

Our cities can’t fix this problem alone. If we want to end homelessness in California, it’s time for our state to treat homelessness with greater urgency, renewed determination and a comprehensiveness plan. We need truly transformative change.

Fortunately, that strategy is already on the table awaiting action by the California State Legislature right now.

Led by Assemblywoman Luz Rivas, D-Arleta, the Bring California Home plan is the bold, revolutionary thinking we need. It would establish a first-of-its-kind, permanent, ongoing source of statewide funding for combating homelessness, paired with real accountability and oversight to ensure success. This means there would be a sustained, determined investment in ending homelessness that will allow us to expedite and grow our efforts to create vital affordable, permanent and interim housing; enact critical prevention programs and increase support services.

As the Legislative Analysts Office recently put it, “A long-term strategy would make it more likely that the state’s investments would have a meaningful, ongoing impact on its housing and homelessness challenges.”

Assembly Bill 71 would do all of this responsibly. To pay for this, the bill combines the record surpluses our state government is seeing with new revenue generated by holding major corporations — those with $5 million or more in annual profits — responsible for paying their fair share of taxes. The bill does this by closing a major international tax loophole companies use to avoid paying taxes by shifting their profits to tax havens offshore.

California’s small businesses, many of them leaders when it comes to solving homelessness in their communities, would not pay one more dime. These local employers and entrepreneurs tell us all the time how challenging homelessness is for their neighborhoods and bottom lines. By directing a consistent source of funding to solutions and helping people off the street and into temporary or permanent housing, we will strengthen our small businesses while improving our economy and creating jobs.

Some say that with the pandemic still dominating so much of our lives, jobs, schools and economies, this is the wrong time to go big and bold. That’s exactly the kind of shortsighted thinking that gets us into trouble. Indeed, if COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s that we can’t permit big challenges to fester, ferment and grow.

The pandemic has also made life worse for those who were already struggling, further endangering the lives of homeless Californians and throwing thousands of Californians into housing insecurity.

But COVID-19 has revealed our ability to deliver creative, rapid answers to homelessness. We’ve launched Homekey and Roomkey, where Gov. Gavin Newsom, legislators, mayors and others united to turn hotel and motel rooms into housing units for our unsheltered population. Thanks to those emergency response programs, we’ve added 4,841 new emergency and permanent housing beds in our two cities alone — taking mere months to complete a process that ordinarily would take years.

We know what’s possible when we truly transform our approach. Now, we need to take that to the next level. We need to stop nibbling around the edges and embrace a new vision that truly meets the moment and that’s guided by California’s core values.

The Bring California Home plan is that vision. It’s pro-business. It will help millions of Californians, and it is exactly what mayors have needed for years.

Eric Garcetti is a fourth-generation Angeleno and the 42nd Mayor of Los Angeles. Libby Schaaf is the mayor of Oakland, where she was born and raised.