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A recently proposed ordinance by the Los Angeles City Council, which would give Los Angeles the power to push people experiencing homelessness farther from service sites, is not only aggressive and cruel – it is not a solution and only further exacerbates the homelessness crisis.

Factors contributing to homelessness are numerous, and solutions to solving any aspect of this ongoing crisis are complex. We should not expect city councilmembers to be experts on a topic that is so complicated and ever-changing. But we should expect our elected officials to tap frontline experts for solutions instead of reactively making decisions that will negatively impact people living on the streets and non-homeless taxpayers.

The recent motion put forward by City Councilmembers Blumenfield, Buscaino, and five others on October 21st seeks to amend Los Angeles’ City Municipal code 41.18 and 56.11 to effectively ban people from “sitting, sleeping, or lying down” within 500-feet of the very places they seek services. As the Executive Director of The Center in Hollywood – a homeless services provider – I adamantly oppose any change to a municipal code that does NOT provide solutions directed at thoughtfully and sustainably offering housing or supportive services.

Sweeping an encampment from one place to another displaces people further, causes more trauma, and moves a visible crisis from the front of one business to the front of another. In the long-term, it aggressively pushes unhoused individuals farther from where they seek life-saving services and drives them deeper into communities where people are harder to reach and engage.

Yet, as someone who has spent years building coalitions with frustrated neighbors (often turned allies), I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the trauma that the ongoing presence of homelessness is causing everyone. Several concerned stakeholders have expressed near exasperation at the growing reality of so many people living (and dying) on the sidewalks outside their homes and businesses. As providers, we often take the time to inform people of the many misconceptions about homelessness while acknowledging the disruption that the crisis is causing for everyone.

Often, the misconceptions allow for echo chambers of anger and misdirected energy. For instance, though it’s frequently stated to the contrary: people do not choose homelessness. And when there are empty shelter beds some shelters are inadequate for various reasons, including that people have often experienced severe trauma in these settings. More fundamentally, there simply are not enough shelter beds. If there were, we wouldn’t be in this situation with more than 41,000 people experiencing homelessness just in the City of Los Angeles.

Prior to and during the pandemic, enhanced enforcement and “cleanups” have proven time and again to make the work in reaching people more difficult. Often these are people who remain close to service sites like The Center, which in many ways serve as their lifelines. Frequently, our outreach team is unable to find clients with impending housing interviews, or medical appointments due to the city’s strategies. Just this week, a client who requires a birth certificate in order to get a California ID, which is to get life-saving services, has disappeared due to the enforcement and cleanup operations. We already have experiences of how reactive, heavy-handed policy negatively affects the work of service providers – what we need is something quite different.

Councilmember Koretz’s suggestion for city officials, service providers, and other advocates to work together continuously is a truly untried and thoughtful idea. We need practical, common-sense approaches that finally make space for the experts (i.e, service providers, grassroots advocacy organizations, people with lived experience, etc.) to help provide urgent, long-term, and cost-effective solutions.

The first step should be in officially stating the obvious, that homelessness is a humanitarian crisis in our city. During the pandemic, many of us have taken risks to save lives and end isolation by providing food security, shelter, transporting people to healthcare. But we have also addressed needs that are taken for granted such as giving people the ability to charge phones and communications devices and providing a mailing address so people can obtain IDs so they might secure housing.

We need the city council to swiftly augment the already existing efforts in some districts by adding more portable restrooms, hand washing stations, and trash receptacles. At the very least, people need essential services so that public spaces remain dignified for everyone – those on the street and those who are housed – while we all work toward moving people into permanent homes. With the amount of energy that goes into amending a municipal code, councilmembers could have worked with the County to identify and convert unused parking lots into Safe Parking spaces. As was done with Project Roomkey, treat this like the crisis it is and use the resources (and willing partners) available throughout the city and region.

As a colleague recently remarked, the immensity of the challenge in Los Angeles in addressing homelessness is unique in its size and scope and some of the answers will have to come from the wisdom within this community. And yet, our organization and others are frequently researching and exploring solutions already implemented throughout the country. We need our city officials to be humble enough to realize that political grandstanding and reactive policy amendments will not make the problem disappear, let alone provide solutions for the tens-of-thousands who need our best effort.

Although it may seem impossible given the scope of the issue: solutions to homelessness DO exist. But the investment in those preventative and reactive measures need to be made now. The time we have to spend proving legislation will not be effective is time we could have been sitting at the virtual table together. As changemakers, we could have been drafting real plans, asking the hard questions, finding the answers, and presenting actionable strategies that will improve the lives of all our communities – both our unhoused and housed neighbors. We’re here as a resource and ready to work with you. Call us.