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HOMELESSNESS FACTS - It’s a new iteration of an old story. A recent community meeting in Venice erupted in discord as neighbors blamed crime, trash, and human waste on a nearby permanent supportive housing (PSH) development that houses recently homeless people. Westside LA Councilmember Traci Park demanded that Venice Community Housing (VCH, which manages the building), be held accountable for the problems the neighbors cited. She submitted a City Council motion to require supportive housing providers to conduct far more restrictive and costly screening and maintain dramatically heightened security as conditions for City funding.
Crime, trash, and human waste are serious problems. But to evaluate this proposed remedy, it’s important to look at what we already know about solutions to homelessness.
The “Housing First” model works. Housing First means prioritizing getting people into housing without first requiring resolution of mental health or substance abuse problems. It is based on evidence that homelessness makes it exponentially harder for people to successfully tackle those problems. Councilmember Park, like President Trump and other conservatives, opposes Housing First, instead advocating for a Treatment First policy. In a January interview, Park declared, “Unless we have […] a legal mandate to force the issue with recovery […] we are not going to solve homelessness in Los Angeles. I have never been a big fan of Housing First.” But as recent overviews in the American Journal of Public Health, Health Affairs, and the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health confirm, study after study shows Housing First significantly outperforms Treatment First in improving housing stability and health.
Permanent supportive housing (PSH) works. PSH is a particular Housing First strategy that houses people exiting homelessness in developments that include on-site support and wrap-around services, including for mental health and substance use issues. In the past several years, comprehensive reviews of research on PSH in The Lancet and the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved have reaffirmed the consensus that PSH improves housing stability, especially for persons with “moderate” or “high” support needs.
No one approach works for every unhoused person. Some individuals do have problems too severe to resolve in PSH settings—which is why PSH developments reserve the right to evict residents and refer them to more intensive services if necessary. Public investments in programs to help those with the most acute problems are sorely needed.
PSH projects do not lead to increased crime or depressed property values in the surrounding area. Research by organizations ranging from the Urban Institute to the National Association of Realtors show no negative effects, and some research shows a positive impact on property values and neighborhood crime reduction. A recent Indiana University study demonstrates that moving into permanent supportive housing reduces criminal activity among formerly unhoused people.
Demanding that housing providers resolve community social problems is unfair. Permanent supportive housing providers do what they are equipped to do: provide affordable housing and a safe, supportive environment for residents. No one in that angry Venice meeting provided evidence that the residents of the PSH development are somehow contributing to the crime, trash, and waste. Maintaining safe and clean communities is the job of the City and County, not nonprofits operating in those communities. Venice Community Housing’s project on Rose Avenue in Venice has been a particular target of critics’ ire. Between mid-January and mid-July, 20 crimes were reported within 500 feet of that address, according to LAPD’s CrimeMapping website. That is comparable to the 18 crimes reported during the same period within 500 feet of the Marina Del Rey Marriott, a couple of miles to the south. And yet, there has been no outcry to hold the Marriott responsible for reducing crime in its vicinity.
Supportive housing providers should not be blamed for the crisis they are working to solve. California's homelessness crisis emerged after decades of under-producing housing, disinvesting in mental health systems, and failing to keep wages aligned with housing costs. Holding supportive housing providers responsible for homelessness or every social challenge visible in a neighborhood confuses the problem with the people attempting to solve it. Providers are not failing to solve homelessness; society has yet to make the investments necessary to end it.
The alternative being offered by leading critics of PSH is criminalization of homelessness—which doesn’t work. The proposals made by Councilmember Park and others criticizing permanent supportive housing would screen out unhoused people with high support needs who need PSH the most, and would burden PSH providers with added costs and impossible expectations—setting up supportive housing to fail. They may claim that the solution is requiring sobriety and mental health and greatly expanding treatment programs, but they surely know that in the current political and fiscal environment such an investment is a pipe dream.
Park’s actions reveal what alternative she actually has in mind. Since 2023, she has proposed nine resolutions designating dozens of areas as no sitting/sleeping zones under the LA ordinance known as 41.18 short, along with 13 motions to ban oversized vehicles, which are the only thing keeping many people from sleeping on the street. She is not alone. Councilmembers Padilla and Lee in the San Fernando Valley have also aggressively created and enforced 41.18 areas. In May Padilla secured a resolution naming 26 new such zones, and majorities of the City Council have voted in favor of these and other expansions. They follow up with encampment sweeps and arrests—averaging over 1,000 arrests per year from 2021-24—to drive out unhoused people. In practice, these critics of PSH are offering criminalization of homelessness as the alternative.
But the research—recently summarized by scholars from the University at Albany and the University of South Florida—demonstrates that criminalization does not reduce homelessness. A UCLA-published 2026 study of sweeps in Venice (authored by the CD11 Coalition for Human Rights) found that these actions coordinated by Councilmember Park’s office rarely connected unhoused people to assistance, even more rarely resulted in them getting housing, and instead simply pushed them from one place to another—often confiscating their possessions in the process.
Homelessness policy in Los Angeles and other cities should be guided by scientific research. That means heeding Housing First and expanding permanent supportive housing, not attacking it.
(Chris Tilly is Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at UCLA and a member of the Council District 11 Coalition for Human Rights, which advocates for affordable housing, tenants’ rights, and the rights of unhoused people.)
