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Los Angeles’ $22-billion homelessness problem gives leaders a choice: Double down or change strategies

It would cost $21.7 billion to end homelessness in a decade in Los Angeles, two-thirds of which is unfunded, according to a new city report.
Experts interviewed by The Times were split between some who said the report presents a realistic picture of costs and others who argued it revealed a need for less expensive strategies.
City of Los Angeles officials are finally confronting a question that has seemed too big to answer: How much would it actually cost to get every person living on the street today indoors and make sure that no one languished there for years again?

The answer, in a report now circulating through City Hall, is a whopper: $21.7 billion over a decade. And since less than $7 billion of that sum is budgeted, local, state and federal governments would have to pony up three times what they’re planning.

The report presents a stark and sobering picture of how far the city is from solving its most pressing problem, according to homelessness experts who reviewed the report at The Times’ request. It leaves Mayor Karen Bass and other city officials with three paths, they said: Drastically ramp up existing programs and convince elected leaders and voters to fund that $21.7 billion, change course to less expensive programs or continue muddling through in the hopes that larger economic, political and real estate forces improve the housing situation.

Though the experts commended the report for attempting to grapple holistically with an intractable issue, some thought its focus on government subsidies failed to account for the primary cause of homelessness: an inadequate supply of affordable housing in the marketplace.

Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco and director of the school’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, said that the figures in the report represent a realistic accounting of what’s required to counteract decades of starved funding for low-income housing and social services.

“In some ways, it’s an eye-popping dollar amount,” Kushel said. “In other ways, it doesn’t seem that eye-popping to me for the scale of the problem.”

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