This is how dems measure success. Hilarious if it weren’t so very, very sad.

By on Dec 3, 2019

And the heck if it is they learn nothing. They actually think they succeeded here. There is no correlation between cause and effect with democrats/liberals/socialist/communists/progressives (these are synonyms if you were unaware). Does any rational person really believe that you could not solve this problem simply be getting the gov’t out of it? Unless these cities adopt market solutions there is not enough money in the world for a government bureaucracy to solve this problem (or any other for that matter). Just listen to this poor fool who counts it a success that during his tenure they managed to spend a boatload of taxpayer money and homelessness INCREASED by 33%. I suppose when you are a democrat the success is not in solving the problem but in being able to increase your staff fourfold in five years. And these are smart people? Be sure to read the exit interview at the bottom to really get a feel for just how “smart” this genius is.

Top Los Angeles Homeless Official Resigns: Homelessness Up 33% Despite $780 Million Spent & Quadrupled Staff Over 5 Years

Top Los Angeles Homeless Official Resigns: Homelessness Up 33% Despite $780 Million Spent & Quadrupled Staff Over 5 Years

Los Angeles is a glowing example of the destructive policies that drive California politics.

Liberal policies have resulted in Los Angeles County having arond 59,000 homeless people and that number shows no signs of slowing down.

On Monday, Peter Lynn of the LA Homeless Services Authority announced his intention to resign and leave by the end of 2019.

Peter Lynn, who saw homelessness rise 33% during his five years as head of the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority, said he would leave the job by Dec. 31.

“Over these five years of explosive growth, LAHSA deployed more than $780 million in new funding to address homelessness. We doubled our staff and then doubled it again,” Lynn said in a written statement.

“We built and rebuilt our internal infrastructure, and worked with our community-based providers to expand theirs,” he said. The agency said its chief program officer, Heidi Marston, would serve as acting director during a nationwide search for Lynn’s replacement.

As in San Francisco to the north, Los Angeles city officials have come under increasing pressure to reduce the growing homeless population, which has swelled by 12% during the past year as a shortage of affordable housing deepens in Southern California.

Overall, an average of nearly 59,000 people were sleeping on sidewalks, in makeshift tents, in abandoned vehicles or in shelters and government-subsidized “transitional housing” on any given night in Los Angeles County, according to a June study by the agency.

In August an audit by the city’s controller found that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority had missed its goals of placing transients in permanent housing by wide margins.

In September, U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson rejected requests from California for more money from the Trump administration to fight homelessness, blaming state and local leaders for the crisis.

The Washington Post reported in November that White House officials were readying a plan to crack down on homelessness in Los Angeles and other major California cities.

Mayor Eric Garcetti, who has been criticized for failing to solve the crisis in his city, praised Lynn.

“Peter’s leadership of LAHSA came at a time when Angelenos took historic action and made generational investments in confronting the homelessness crisis. He served for five years, with dedication, in one of the toughest jobs — and I thank him for all he did to bring more resources to our most vulnerable neighbors,” Garcetti said in a written statement.

 

KCRW.com conducted and exit interview with Lynn:

Why are you leaving?

Peter Lynn: It’s been five years, and these have been good, solid, but very hard years. I think the agency is stronger than it’s ever been, and I’m ready to try my hand at new endeavors, and I’m frankly a little tired.

Is there anything more specific you can say about what has been hard?

Homelessness in Los Angeles is at crisis proportions. And the housing affordability here has been driving people into homelessness at unprecedented levels. And you know, frankly, we don’t have the resourcing yet commensurate to the need. We’ve voted in new measures, and we are not keeping pace with the number of people falling into homelessness at this point. The expectations are very high, as they should be. There’s a lot of strain. We’ve all grown very, very fast. This agency is five times the size it was when I got here. Over five years, we’ve been able to permanently house more than 80,000 people out of homelessness. And there are still more people on the sidewalks.  

Is one of the challenges of the job that you essentially answer to 20 politicians?

L.A. is complex. The five supervisors each have a perspective, and they’re very, very focused on this issue. The mayor’s office obviously is enormously focused on this and has been working on it closely. And there are 15 city council offices, each of which have significant constituent concerns, and they’re all focused on this issue. So you’re right, there’s a plurality of views. And we try to lift up: What are the actual solutions? And so an entity like LAHSA that sits in the center between the City of L.A. and the County of L.A., it’s a complex role.

Some people may wonder: You’re the head of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, you’ve been there for five years. In that time, homelessness has gone up. How can you look at that and say that it’s anything but a failure? 

People are not falling into homelessness because of LAHSA. People are falling into homelessness because Los Angeles has really under-built housing. There are big structural factors. The key is housing affordability, and we have not built enough housing. 

So in the 1970s, we stopped building housing units commensurate to the number of households in L.A. and California, and we never looked back. You can’t let that happen for decades and expect housing to stay affordable for people. We have the least affordable housing market in America. 

LAHSA has a responsibility to build out — and we have built out — a systemic infrastructure to address homelessness. And we are still quite outgunned by this by this problem and by this crisis. I would say it’s a collective failure to get to the root of homelessness.

What do you point to as your your mark on this agency? What do you think that your big accomplishments have been? Are there mistakes that you’ve made, and things that you’ve learned?

I think that the biggest mark has been in really transforming where LAHSA is the driver of a system, as opposed to a funder of a collection of programs. We were very much positioned as a contract administrator, literally just you tell us what you want to fund, and we’ll fund it.

So basically, rather than just taking city and county money and then distributing contracts as directed, you’ve become more involved with policy and trying to push things along. 

I think that’s right. The purpose of of an organization like LAHSA is to really reframe to the funders: What are the solutions? To focus the attention of folks on housing. Housing is the solution to homelessness. So those are the kinds of things that we’ve worked to inform both the city and the county and their strategies reflect that.

Has one of the frustrating parts of the job been seeing how much this lack of housing, and specifically affordable housing, is really at the heart of the crisis? LAHSA is not a housing developer. Does that put you in a tough position? For example, one of the things that LAHSA has scaled up in the last couple of years is outreach. But…there are a lot of outreach workers who mean well but don’t have a lot to offer. 

It’s one of the frustrations of addressing homelessness. I wouldn’t say it’s a frustration of the job. We have worked to lift that up. We’ve focused on housing affordability as we have educated people and reframed the narrative on homelessness. I think that is one thing that we have done reasonably successfully on the back end … and I wouldn’t say there’s no permanent housing. I would say it’s hard. The challenge is just that the available resources, the available slots, is not equal to the number of people who are essentially needing them.

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Los Angeles is a disastrous hellhole.

Lynn trying to put a positive spin on the situation is exactly that — a spin.

The system has failed taxpayers miserably.

After collecting over a billion dollars in taxes, the “Homes for the Homeless” project is over budget and will not likely meet its goal without additional funding.

Los Angeles’ homeless problem is not improving at all, and by time the homes are built there will be tens of thousands of new homeless without housing.

Filth and disease are rampant and despite what Lynn said upon resignation, no real progress has been made.

The progressives the drive policy have regressed in trying to keep up with the homeless problem.

It is simply out of control.