By Bill Hooey, Fair Housing Coalition

A few weeks ago, Mayor Garcetti appeared in the media saying that he had a plan to end homelessness in the City of Los Angeles. On Wednesday, two days ago, I received a phone call from the Office of Mayor Garcetti. It was from a newly hired staff member who is part of the team working on the homelessness issue. He wanted to know if I could come in to the Mayor’s Office, on Thursday to meet with him regarding homeless veterans in Los Angeles. He told me that someone at the VA gave him my name and number.

The fact is that I had met with a veterans group last week because I think if we (local landlords) get involved in helping homeless vets, we’ll get good publicity and it will give us some political muscle. Sometimes it is funny how different things come together at the same time.

After I agreed to come in to the meeting, I called Michael Millman who is a friend, an attorney, a landlord and knows much about the RSO and what laws need to be changed in order to make things better for landlords in Los Angeles. After agreeing to come to the meeting, Michael called Matt Millen (good idea) who is a landlord, an attorney, a Commander in the Jewish War Veterans of the U.S.A and has experience with veteran outreach programs.

Now, we are a team of three showing up on Thursday morning for the meeting at the Mayor’s office. There was a total of five people at the meeting. There was the Mayor’s staffer and a woman from the United Way. It seems this major charity wants to help homeless vets too.

The meeting went on for an hour and twenty minutes. A lot of great ideas were kicked around but the bottom line, that the two attorneys made very clear is … for LA landlords to start working with the city (after we’ve been abused by the LAHD for so many years), we must have a waiver from the RSO regarding every apartment that we place a vet into.

The good news is that Congress created a program where HUD will pay one hundred percent of the veterans rent. Also, if the vet becomes a problem to the landlord, the program managers will remove him from the apartment. The landlord won’t be stuck spending money and time going through the eviction. The vet will have signed a previous agreement agreeing to these terms. The vet will also be in job training, therapy for any problem he/she may have and a case worker visiting once a week to make sure thing as going smoothly.

It was really nice having two very smart lawyers laying down the terms. The Mayor’s guy said to me that he was under the impression that I can get the word out widely to the LA landlord community. I told him I would do a huge e-mail blast, write columns about this and talk about it on my radio show on KTYM but before…. We must come to an agreement on the RSO. The two attorneys also talked about a few other details they might need changing such as some management personnel at the LAHD who are known landlord haters.

This homeless vet situation put LA landlords as an object of desire from the Mayor’s office. They made it clear to us that the City needs our help in finding apartments to house homeless vets. I wish you all could have seen this meeting. In a way it was like a “good cop / bad cop” scenario. I was the nice guy with the ideas on geting the word out that they all liked and the two attorneys made it perfectly clear that before we landlords get involved we must come to terms regarding a the waiver, because no waiver is a deal breaker.

The City wants to meet weekly with us. I will keep all of you updated. I think this could be a winning situation for LA landlords and I feel lucky to have two very smart lawyers onboard.

If you have a comment or an idea, do come to our upcoming meetings and share them with us.