By MAGNOLIA LAFLEUR | Reporter
The Pacific Palisades Task Force on Homelessness hosted a discussion with Congressman Ted Lieu about progress that’s been made in finding housing for people experiencing homelessness at its latest community meeting on Monday, November 15.
PPTFH Co-President Sharon Browning said prior to the pandemic, the Palisades saw a 71% decrease in homelessness, with 1,217 abandoned encampments being removed and cleaned. The projects that initially helped reduce homelessness pre-pandemic included hosting the annual Homeless Count in the Palisades, as well as working with neighboring communities to aid in addressing and reducing homelessness in the Palisades and surrounding areas.
While there has been an increase in homelessness since the pandemic began, Browning said if the same practices and services are implemented by their outreach team—which lent toward their initial success—this current situation should heed vast improvements in the coming future.
Browning explained the Westside is housing approximately 270 people per day in permanent supportive housing, but there are an additional 292 people that are falling into homelessness, causing a “net gain” of homelessness compared to permanent supportive housing.
During his presentation, Lieu explained that getting veterans who are experiencing homelessness off the streets and into temporary housing can sometimes be complicated.
“It turns out that for some of them, they’ve repeatedly been offered temporary housing and other forms of shelter, and they simply don’t take it because you do lose some of your freedom when you go to some of the shelters,” he said. “They get simply more freedom when they’re on the streets, and sometimes they have their own communities on the streets and they don’t want to leave it.”
He described that it gets very “legalistic,” and courts may not allow the removal of encampments and homeless individuals, depending on the location and circumstances.
Lieu also said the issue does not stand in the lack of temporary housing, as the VA has room, but in the lack of desire from the homeless individuals to be persuaded to take shelter in them. He explained that permanent housing is the best incentive to persuade homeless veterans to get off the street.
Lieu expressed his gratitude to PPTFH for being concerned and working to not just reduce poverty but to improve the lives of homeless individuals by working to create and find solutions that will alleviate the entire community.
“For someone to be homeless, think about what that means, that means they have zero support network,” he said. “These are folks that literally have no family, no friends, they have no one that they can turn to, so thank you for being there to help them and connecting them with people that can help them.”
According to Browning, a number of Pacific Palisades Community Council members have discussed posting restrictive signage in sensitive sites such as schools, parks, day care centers and libraries. The task force agreed that encampments ought to be “thoughtfully removed” and not allowed to expand and grow.
Members believe that temporary shelter is more preferable than street encampments, and find that those who refuse housing oftentimes have more severe addiction issues and mental illness. In order to productively move forward, they encouraged the community to support.
“We need help. We need signage and enforcement around at least these sensitive areas in order to work with this significant increase,” Browning said. “We believe that if we don’t do this then the most severely ill individuals will simply be displaced, not only to our community, but to communities throughout the West LA.”
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