The Los Angeles Times recently reported a number of unsettling findings about how Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is addressing the homelessness crisis, revealing that 40 percent of unhoused participants of her Inside Safe program were back on the street. The L.A. Times also noted that the longer Inside Safe exists, “the greater the share of participants who have returned to ‘unsheltered’ homelessness.” The mayor’s approach needs a swift overhaul that’s focused on root causes and long-term solutions.
Since coming into office in 2022, Bass has used the Inside Safe program as the main way to address L.A.’s homelessness crisis, clearing encampments and moving people into transitional housing with the goal of finding them permanent housing.
Bass’s office routinely sends out press releases touting the success of Inside Safe, but the L.A. Times’s findings show a different story, revealing that Bass’s focus on transitional housing has created a revolving-door policy that doesn’t keep people housed.
Los Angeles elected leaders have spent more than $300 million on Inside Safe, but the city has been unable to quickly place people in permanent housing, spending millions of dollars to house residents in motels and hotels that often have strict rules that end up with people living on the street again.
UCLA Law School professor emeritus Gary Blasi, an expert on homelessness, told the L.A. Times that Inside Safe needs “a thorough re-engineering.” He added, “Once [Los Angeles officials] started having people in interim housing for nine months or a year, that should have rang some alarm bells, because that’s just not sustainable.”
The stakes are high for people who end up on the street. Between 2014 and 2021, homeless deaths in Los Angeles County tripled over that seven-year period. It was only until 2024 that L.A. County saw a decline in homeless deaths, but 2,208 unhoused people still passed away that year. Activists have long questioned the accuracy of that count, and believe the numbers are much higher.
In addition, Bass’s homelessness policy is not multi-pronged and doesn’t deal with root causes. Specifically, the mayor fails to comprehensively address L.A.’s housing affordability crisis – sky-high rents, according to a major UC San Francisco study, drive homelessness. Excessive rents impact seniors on fixed incomes, working-class families, and students, among others.
Recently, a pair of UCLA research briefs found that student homelessness in Los Angeles County spiked 28 percent between the 2022-2023 school year and 2023-2024. The Westside Current reported that, in the city of Los Angeles, homelessness among seniors increased to 4,680 people in 2025, and the number of unhoused seniors in L.A. spiked by more than 36 percent between 2023 and 2025.
But Bass can turn things around, gaining long-term results for Angelenos.
Activists continue to urge Bass and other state and local politicians to urgently implement the “3 Ps”: protect tenants through rent control and other protections; preserve existing affordable housing, not demolish it for luxury housing; and produce new affordable and homeless housing through such concepts as adaptive reuse and prefabricated housing.
Adaptive reuse can be particularly effective: it costs far less to renovate a hotel or motel for permanent housing than constructing a new building; the renovation can be completed quickly; and people can move into permanent affordable housing, not transitional.
Bass should also work to repeal the Ellis Act, the state law that allows landlords and developers to turn rent-controlled buildings into luxury housing, such as condominiums and boutique hotels.
Housing Is A Human Right recently revealed that the Ellis Act has devastated Los Angeles’s affordable housing stock with 31,469 rent-controlled units taken off the rental housing market between 2001 and 2025. At the same time, L.A.’s housing affordability and homelessness crises steadily worsened. Activists would embrace Bass’s leadership on repealing the harmful state law.
In the end, it’s up to Bass to stop ineffective, and expensive, quick fixes; finally address root causes of the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles; and provide long-term, permanent solutions. The 3 Ps is a tool the mayor can utilize immediately.
Patrick Range McDonald is an award-winning investigative reporter and advocacy journalist for Housing Is A Human Right.