Long Beach is about to embark on its biggest and most expensive single operation to move homeless people out of a local encampment.
Starting this summer, the city plans to offer people living along the Los Angeles River the chance to move into a motel room or other non-congregate shelter with the hopes of moving them along to permanent housing over the next two years.
The city is now looking for a motel to lease near the river to anchor the project.
The plan follows a playbook the city has used to try to reduce homelessness in MacArthur Park and around Downtown’s Billie Jean King Main Library using grant funding from the state of California.
Combined, those two previous projects awarded $6.6 million from the state’s Encampment Resolution Fund, which the city used to quickly get people off the streets and into individual, albeit temporary, housing.
“Although we have not completely eliminated homelessness in those areas, we have seen significant reductions in the number of unsheltered people in those areas,” Paul Duncan, Long Beach’s Homeless Services Bureau Manager, said at a recent City Council meeting.
Funding for Long Beach’s LA River plan project dwarves those previous awards. The state has pledged $11 million, which Long Beach will bolster with another $6.4 million in city, county and other funds. But the scale of the problem in this case is also much bigger.
At last count, there were 246 people living homeless along the 9.5 miles of the Los Angeles River that run through Long Beach. Scores more come and go each year, according to data from the city.
Relatively isolated from neighboring homes and somewhat sheltered from sweeps because of complicated, overlapping jurisdictions split among Long Beach, Los Angeles County, SoCal Edison, Caltrans and others, the riverbed has for decades been a magnet for pitched tents and makeshift shanty villages.
“Although we don’t have data back to the seventies or eighties, it’s safe to say that the LA Riverbed has been the largest longstanding encampment within the city of Long Beach,” Duncan said.
People who find their way to the riverbed can be in especially dire situations.
The vast majority of them — 92% — reported being homeless for more than a year, and a little less than a third said they had a mental health condition, substance use problem or other chronic health issue, according to Duncan.
As outreach workers have asked them what help they most desire, the answer has been consistent, Duncan said: “Permanent housing with an ongoing subsidy or a motel voucher or a shelter space that they can go where they have their own room that locks and their own restroom.”
With that in mind, Long Beach plans to spend the bulk of its LA River budget, $10.4 million, on short-term housing — mostly in the form of the yet-to-be-identified motel or hotel leased near the river.
As people cycle out of those temporary stopovers, hopefully into permanent housing, the rooms will be refilled until money runs out. Already, outreach workers have been compiling lists of people along the river who will be prioritized for the rooms to avoid having new arrivals to the area jump ahead in line.
Ultimately, though, Duncan said, “We can’t continue to lease motels forever and ever.”
At the end of the two-year plan, the city hopes about half of the population along the riverbed will have cycled through temporary shelter, with 80% of those landing in a permanent home.
The biggest crimp in the pipeline may be the availability of long-term housing, something the city acknowledged in its application for state funding.
In response, the city is trying to bring online more permanent supportive housing and pouring some of the project funds — about $3 million — into what’s known as “rapid rehousing,” which are case management services and rental subsidies to help someone land a lease that they eventually start paying on their own.