L.A. Declares Homelessness Disaster

I’m running a bit behind on my blogging chores, for justifiable reasons, but I was up early at 3:30 a.m. this morning and wanted to bring this one to your attention.

Karen Bass, the newly installed mayor of Los Angeles, was proud to announce earlier in the week that her first official duty would be to declare/proclaim a homelessness disaster for the city of Los Angeles. She pointed out that she would go to the city’s Emergency Operations Center to do so.

This follows the same track that both Portland and Seattle have taken in the past few years. There are two likely primary reasons for doing so. One, it shows the new mayor is going to focus on a very visible problem in her city. Secondly, with a disaster proclamation it will free up her ability to move funds around for emergency expenditures to address homelessness.

Will the above strategy work? I think it is suspect, based only on several factors. I get up to Seattle normally once a week and I was in Portland a couple of weeks ago. Hmm, still seems to be a big problem for both of those cities. L.A., with its warmer temperatures, has to be a magnet for people and their ability to live on the street. There are, I believe, tens of thousands of homeless in L.A.

All of this does highlight how emergency managers and our ability to coordinate or have funding mechanisms will attract more missions outside of what has been our traditional lane. What other new and creative uses of our skills will be proposed? I don’t know, but stand by. We are gaining in becoming a more visible force in government — be it for good or ill — and these other efforts are distracting us from our disaster resilience efforts.