The other week, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said, at a “Pancakes and Politics” forum, that she’d give herself a “B+” for her work on homelessness. She should look at her record again. In terms of actually placing people in permanent housing – a key way to fix homelessness – any professor in his or her right mind would never give the mayor such an outstanding grade.
Bass is running for re-election against L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, and she spoke at a recent candidate’s forum hosted by KTLA and Hope the Mission when she made her remark. For many activists, it was a puzzling thing to hear.
First and foremost in one’s mind is the blaring headline for a Los Angeles Times article in April 2026: “Under L.A. Mayor’s $300-Million Homeless Program, 40% have returned to the street.” That expensive, ineffective program is called Inside Safe, which provides temporary homeless housing with the goal of placing people in permanent housing. The program’s results have been spotty, to say the least.
The L.A. Times found that the “longer Inside Safe exists, the greater the share of participants who have returned to ‘unsheltered’ homelessness,” which is another way of saying people living in the streets, parks, or abandoned buildings. The paper also noted that when “Inside Safe finished its third year, about 40% of [the program’s] participants were back on the street.”
Four months later, in August, the L.A. Times reported that Inside Safe teams, who go out to find homeless persons and place them in temporary housing, “went to nearly two dozen locations five or more times.” In other words, the teams kept going back to the same places, which means unhoused people kept repopulating in the same neighborhoods – surely not the mark of an effective program looking to place people in permanent housing.
In fact, UCLA Law School professor emeritus Gary Blasi, a highly respected expert on homelessness, told the L.A. Times that Inside Safe has become too expensive to justify the poor results and needs “a thorough re-engineering.” He pointed out that the city has been paying for individuals to live in expensive motel rooms for long periods of time, not in permanent housing.
“Once they 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,” Blasi told the L.A. Times.
But Bass and her team have been unable to make tweaks and change course over the past three years, even though the mayor could have urgently utilized the adaptive reuse of Los Angeles’ single-room occupancy hotels (SROs) to place people in permanent housing. Such housing is cost-effective and permanent, and Inside Safe participants could have moved into SRO units in a timely way, saving money and giving people a place to call home.
The odd thing about Bass is that she routinely emphasizes that there are less homeless encampments on the streets – a cosmetic result that may not be entirely accurate. It brings up the question of what’s more important to Bass: less visible homelessness for Angelenos to see or helping people on the street who face the real prospect of death? Each day, around six homeless people die in the Los Angeles area.
Just as disturbing, Bass rarely talks about the need to address a key root cause of homelessness: skyrocketing rents. A wide-ranging UC San Francisco study found that the overwhelming reason seniors, working-class families, and others fall into homelessness is that the rent is too high. That’s particularly true for lower-income people. So one would think Bass would make building lower-income housing a top priority.
In Los Angeles, however, the city’s planning department expects only 33,000 extremely-low-income and very-low-income units out of a state-mandated goal of 115,978 will be built by 2029. In addition, the agency believes only 29,000 low-income units out of a goal of 68,743 will be constructed within the next three years.
Los Angeles needs to get moving – and fast.
Yet L.A. City Hall is notorious for its extremely slow, and dysfunctional, approval and permitting process for affordable-housing development. It’s so bad that city agencies often don’t communicate with each other as a project goes through the system, and routinely a department is waiting extended periods of time for a permit from another city agency so the development can keep moving forward.
As the mayor, Bass has the power to hold department chiefs accountable, telling them to streamline the city’s bureaucratic red tape. It appears, after nearly four years, that Bass has not seriously sought to fix the terribly broken approval and permitting process at city hall. If it was fixed, more affordable units could be built, and more people could move into them – and many people would avoid homelessness altogether.
Bass needs to stop worrying about cosmetic fixes and roll up her sleeves and tend to the hard work that’s needed. Maybe then she could claim a B+ for her efforts on homelessness. In the meantime, roughly 45,000 people – someone’s grandparent or parent or aunt or nephew – continue to live on L.A.’s streets.
Patrick Range McDonald is a veteran investigative reporter and the award-winning advocacy journalist for Housing Is A Human Right.