Venice Update totally supports this Mobile Storage Plan that the Homeless Committee of the Venice Neighborhood Council has devised. It is a win-win! It is innovative. It is cheaper and and more versatile.  It will benefit the homeless more. People should take note, communities should take note, particularly  Los Angeles. Take money saved and house the homeless.

This system takes the storage to the homeless, eliminating dragging “stuff” thru the streets (that is a lot of effort and time spent), it takes the supportive services to the ones needing them on a regular, reliable basis. It eliminates hard-to-find centralized structure locations that are cost effective and ready to operate and are also out of the residential areas. All communities could have this up and running in a short time. It is scalable for any community,  adds more benefits to the homeless, and saves money to house the homeless.   Go Venice Homeless Committee!

By Heidi Roberts

This is an ideal solution that our Council should consider implementing city-wide – for all the homeless storage needs across Los Angeles. The ability to scale the program up and down, depending on demand is fantastically flexible. If the City’s plan to house all the homeless works, fewer modified old MTA buses will be needed in the future. And if we need more to accommodate the homeless population, the City certainly has access to buses that can be converted quickly and easily.

One of the benefits of the program that hasn’t been talked about much is the street outreach aspect of the plan. Old-fashioned brick and mortar service-based outreach (a la Westminster Senior Center) has been proven time and time again to be much less effective than on-street “in situ” outreach. When case management experts are on the streets with the homeless, they create deeper, more consistent and more dependable relationships – they’re right there, sitting with the homeless and relating with their daily realities. Anyone who has ever had success lifting someone off the streets will tell you that you must be there – in that very moment – when the service-resistant homeless person hits rock bottom and is finally willing to accept help and start on a path toward rebuilding their lives. By contrast, that same person will never walk blocks away to seek help when they hit rock bottom and are finally receptive to help – for if they did, there would be a line around St. Joseph’s at all hours of every day. Frankly, the Mobile Storage plan is so much more than just storage – think of it like street outreach with a storage aspect to encourage participation.

Another less discussed aspect is cost. The cost to convert the Senior Center and run it is off the charts. The City is spending $542K to fix up the center for storage. And then budgeted an additional $384K to run the program. Say they manage to store belongings for 130 people (ranges have been reported from 110 to 130), that’s going to cost $7,123 per storage unit in the first year and $2,953K per storage unit in subsequent years. And none of this factors in the cost of losing the park for public access – that’s invaluable.

To be clear, that’s an immense amount of money to invest in a program that isn’t even designed to get people off the streets. I have researched and there is no evidence that storage is an effective strategy to shift people off the streets. In my discussion with the VP of Chrysalis (the organization slated to run the program), helping people transition off the streets is not an objective and they don’t even track it. Same goes for the 60-unit storage program that VCH runs on Ocean Front Walk.

One of the biggest issues I personally have with the City’s plan is that it’s a whole bunch of money being thrown at a whole bunch of services that won’t change a thing for either the homeless or the residents and visitors. $10-$12 million a year flows in to Venice-based service organizations as it is. Doubling down on more services that already exist and have not been helpful will not solve a thing. Converting the Senior Center to homeless storage is simply more of the same. The result? Safe to say: more of the same.

The Mobile Storage alternative is designed to work with more precision, more efficiency and more flexibility. Adopting this option would certainly work to bring the community together – it’s an alternative many can agree on. And as an added bonus, it would elevate Mike Bonin’s reputation in the eyes of this community and show that the City of Los Angeles is serious about employing innovative solutions to address a very serious problem they have avoided for years.