Human Rights Watch and Advocates Reveal How the Inside Safe Program’s High Expenses and Inadequate Support Services Are Failing to Address the Root Causes of Homelessness
With its sprawling scenery and abundance of luxury rentals, Los Angeles is home to more than 75,000 unhoused people countywide. It is a paradoxical place, both the pinnacle of wealth and the epitome of poverty.
As the county grapples with its war on poor people, all sorts of temporary solutions have been proposed. Politicians here have gone out of their way to present almost any solution short of providing permanent supportive housing to residents in need. One of those proposed temporary solutions is known as Inside Safe. However, advocates say it does not live up to its name.
What Is Inside Safe and Why Is It So Dangerous to Unhoused People and Locals?
Inside Safe is a program that purports to aid and abet the slew of homeless citizens living unsheltered on the streets of Los Angeles. At first glance, the program appears to be a positive asset to the community, but that’s precisely what makes it dangerous.
The designated website boasts of the program’s victories, from moving thousands of people indoors to permanently housing hundreds of them. This is undoubtedly something to highlight because programs where unhoused people are forcibly removed from encampments rarely equate to permanent housing situations for more than a handful of people.
It is not uncommon for multi-million-dollar encampment sweeps to garner only 3 or 4 permanently housed individuals. Most city sweeps have a more than 90% failure rate when it comes to achieving any semblance of housing. Hence, Inside Safe has higher numbers, although they are still comparatively modest compared to other proven approaches, such as Housing First.
It is telling that Inside Safe is more expensive than other proven housing strategies and boasts lower permanent rates of success. However, advocates who investigated the program further found several more immediate flaws, including the fact that it is, in their words, “unsustainable.”
Human Rights Watch Slams Mayor Karen Bass’s Controversial Pilot Program Inside Safe
While HRW subtly applauds the efforts of LA’s Mayor Karen Bass, who inherited an untenable homeless situation with her position in office, they still say that this program she has launched is doomed to fail. After a thorough investigation into the project, HRW concluded the following in a statement:
“Inside Safe, which sweeps encampments and moves their residents to hotel rooms, is unsustainably expensive, plagued by inconsistent and inadequate support services, and stymied by the lack of permanent housing for people to move on to.”
HRW explains that the issue partly stems from a shortage of resources to run and expand the program effectively. More importantly, interim housing often justifies criminalizing homeless people instead of providing real, permanent solutions. Their account highlights that the program’s lack of success is largely due to the ongoing shortage of affordable housing.
“With only 1,500 rooms at its peak, Inside Safe lacks capacity to serve, even temporarily, the over 35,000 people living without shelter on the streets of Los Angeles,” Human Rights Watch explained.
Los Angeles’s limited supply of affordable housing falls far short of meeting the needs of the tens of thousands of unsheltered people who can’t afford rising rents. Until there’s a real solution, sweeping encampments will remain a futile exercise, as most homeless residents have no permanent place to go.
Is Inside Safe an Example of Care Washing?
Earlier this week, Invisible People reporters caught up with Kelsey León, a member of the Community Action Relief Project, CARE for short. León is a full-time qualitative researcher studying harm reduction and barriers to treatment in the unhoused community specializing in wound care. During our interview, León explained the phenomenon of care washing, a political strategy that attempts to usher in a police presence under the guise of caring for unsheltered homeless people.
“I don’t think any policy of criminalizing homelessness is going to be successful on a large scale,” said León. “I think it will only be harmful. There’s no way for these programs to be successful without an adequate supply of affordable housing to back them. And I know politicians at large, especially in LA and San Francisco, but even here in Philadelphia, are using this strategy of care washing.”
“Care washing,” León continued, “can be used to justify an otherwise unnecessary police presence. So, the police are intervening, but the claim is that they’re going to direct these unsheltered folks to resources or that they’re giving them support.”
“It’s really important to interrogate what that support is,” León said. “Is it you offer them a spot in a shelter and then, in exchange for that, they have to hand over all of their personal belongings or get rid of their personal belongings, and it’s only a temporary shelter? Is it that they’re offering a shelter bed, but then when you get there, it’s full? Offering shelter is completely empty until someone is stably and safely with all of their belongings in a bed.”
Human Rights Watch reports that after extensively interviewing unhoused people and LAPD data, it is evident that they are losing many of their belongings during these sweeps into Inside Safe and other programs. Some common items lost in sweeps include:
- Court papers
- Cash
- Identifying documents
- Prescription medications
- Tents
- Furnishings
- Blankets
- Clothing
- Heirlooms
- And what they referred to as general “survival essentials”
All of this is happening to support a program that is unsustainable and bordering on inhumane.
Talk to Your Representatives About the Lack of Affordable Housing
Whenever the discussion of prioritizing temporary solutions to the permanent homeless crisis arises, the underlying obstacle is always the same – a lack of affordable housing.
We cannot continue working backward and claim to be solving the problem of homelessness. We must first have a supply of affordable, supportive housing before presenting temporary accommodations. Without that supply, emergency shelters are merely a bridge to nowhere that directs people back out onto the streets.
Talk to your representatives about forcing politicians to create a robust, affordable housing market by making housing a human right.
