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LA Mayor Karen Bass declares state of emergency on homelessness

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness on Monday, her first day as head of the United States' second most populated city. Photo by Eric Thayer/UPI
1 of 2 | Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness on Monday, her first day as head of the United States' second most populated city. Photo by Eric Thayer/UPI | License Photo

Dec. 12 (UPI) -- On her first day in office as mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass made good on a campaign promise Monday and declared a state of emergency on homelessness in the city.

Bass, the first woman to lead the city, signed the declaration during a press conference following a meeting in which she briefed city department heads, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and LA Metro on the strategy for their collective work to solve homelessness in the city.

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The declaration, she said, "shows the people of Los Angeles that we are united and serious about the city's crisis of homelessness."

"I will not accept a homelessness crisis that afflicts more than 40,000 Angelenos and affects every one of us," she said. "It is a humanitarian crisis that takes the life of five people every day. In every neighborhood we can see the failure of the status quo -- despair, desperation, human suffering -- and our children are growing up knowing nothing else than this.

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"It must stop and change starts now."

The city's unhoused population has surged in recent years, with the LAHSA stating in a September report that nearly 42,000 people were experiencing homelessness in the city, which is a 1.7% increase from 2020, the last year the survey was conducted.

The slight increase experienced this year though follows a 32% jump between 2018 and 2020, it said.

The declaration arms Bass with powers to lift rules and regulations that have been credited with slowing or even preventing the building of permanent and temporary houses and expedites contracts that prioritize bringing unhoused Angelenos inside, officials said.

Bass told reporters that her office will move with urgency to tackle the problem through an emergency management structure, similar to how the government rapidly rebuilt freeways following the Northridge earthquake of 1994.

"We must drive a proactive, citywide strategy that solves problems at scale and ultimately drives a solution," she said. "This is what this is all about. This is part of a seismic shift we're making to solve the homelessness crisis."

"We must bring people indoors faster, and we will. We must build housing faster, and we will. We must coordinate shelter and services, and we will. We must have coordination among the city officials and the city departments, and we will because we are doing things differently," she said.

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Bass added that she plans to sign an executive order in the coming days to create the Inside Safe program, which will create a citywide approach to tackling encampments and street homelessness by providing people with housing and services while restoring public spaces.

The announcement came a day after U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris swore Bass in as mayor on Sunday during a ceremony held at the Microsoft Theater in downtown Los Angeles.

During the ceremony, Bass said that her first act on her first day in office would be making the declaration and that it would reflect the severity of the crisis.

"It will create the structure necessary for us to have a true, unified and citywide strategy to set us on the path to solve homelessness," she said. "And [if] we're going to bring Angelenos inside and move our city in a new direction, we must have a single strategy to unite our city and county and engage the state, the federal government, the private sector and every other stakeholder."

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