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MY VIEW -
"I warned you guys: the more homeless people, the more money Nithya Raman and Karen Bass can launder through their corrupt NGOs. You will NEVER fix this problem by electing people who profit off it." Spencer Pratt
Surprising nobody, except the politicians running the programs and the cheerleader on the local “news” stations, homelessness (a word I hate due to its misleading propaganda value) went up 8%. This statistic is probably a serious undercount of the real population of mentally ill and drug addicts festering on the streets of Los Angeles.
No serious researcher believes the Point-in-Time count is a literal census. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has concluded that HUD's Point-in-Time methodology likely underestimates homelessness by 10 to 25% because it attempts to count a hard-to-observe population on a single night each January.
For more than a decade, Los Angeles politicians have repeated the same mantra: homelessness is fundamentally a housing problem. Build more housing. Spend more money. Reduce enforcement. If it's a lack of housing, why expand harm reduction? The result of that policy has surrounded us in plain sight for years. Tens of thousands of people are living on sidewalks, doing the zombie shuffle. Open-air drug markets proliferate, untreated psychosis is rampant, and parts of neighborhoods increasingly resemble humanitarian disaster zones in need of triage.
Mayor Karen Bass, Councilmember Nithya (DSA)Raman, and a sheepish City Council continue to insist that the answer is simply more housing and more spending. Yet after billions of taxpayer dollars, the crisis has grown, not shrunk. How come? The central failure is a refusal to admit what the problem is. Los Angeles has chosen the wrong diagnosis. The word "homelessness" has become political camouflage, inviting the public to believe the principal problem is the absence of housing. But anyone who spends time on Skid Row, Hollywood Boulevard, MacArthur Park, Venice, or countless freeway underpasses sees something very different.
They see severe addiction, untreated schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, psychosis, and people so impaired they cannot care for themselves. Housing alone does not cure schizophrenia. Housing alone does not cure fentanyl addiction. Housing alone does not restore judgment to someone in active psychosis. The city's preferred narrative ignores these realities because acknowledging them would require a completely different policy response and seriously hurt their campaign backers in raking in the big bucks for NGO world.
Even official Los Angeles data indicate that a substantial share of the chronically unsheltered population suffers from serious mental illness, substance use disorders, or both. Independent analyses suggest the proportion among those actually living on the streets may be considerably higher. Yet City Hall continues to frame nearly every discussion as one about housing affordability. It doesn’t matter how many affordable or free housing units you build if a person is mentally incompetent; they can't take care of themselves.
Councilmember Nithya Raman (the DSA co-governing shill) has been one of the most influential advocates of this housing-first philosophy. Her public message consistently emphasizes housing production, tenant protections, and reduced enforcement. While Raman noodle-brain talks a big game, she seems to be playing one huge game of extend and pretend.
According to the NY Post: “Councilmember Raman, the chair of the Los Angeles City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, introduced the Time Limited Subsidy program in September as a cheaper alternative to Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe Program — meant to get homeless people into an established residence. Just three of the promised 2,000 apartments have been used to relocate the homeless in Nithya Raman’s failed $60 million project to get people off the streets. Well done, Candidate Nithya; you have housed 3 people for $20,000,000 each. I am sure each apartment has solid gold commodes for that price.”
Yet Raman CD4 district somehow saw a huge reduction in homelessness, despite her squandering tens of millions. Any drive through the Encino, Sherman Oaks, and Studio City corridor would show this claim to be false. Don’t trust the bogus count; do your own fact-checking.
Housing policies may assist people whose primary problem is economic hardship. They do very little for a man experiencing untreated schizophrenia while dumping a dookie on the street. Compassion is not permissiveness.
Compassion means helping people recover. Permissiveness means accepting behavior that destroys both the individual and the surrounding community. Unfortunately, the city only practices the latter. In CD6, in the Imelda Padilla district, under the Van Owen and 405 Freeway underpass, for example, is an encampment that, under Imelda’s lack of leadership, has become the model for the whack-a-mole game. In the last 2 years, an estimated 12+ attempts to clean up this encampment have been made. It used to stay clean for a day or two. But now, with absolutely no consequences, the so-called cleanups don’t last 2 hours. Amazingly, within a day, this encampment looks worse than before the prior cleanup.
Open-air drug use is tolerated. Encampments become permanent neighborhoods. Criminal behavior is often excused as a social justice measure rather than treated as conduct requiring intervention. The result is predictable. Addiction deepens. Mental illness worsens. Businesses close. Children step around needles. Families flee Los Angeles. Taxpayers fund ever-larger bureaucracies while witnessing steadily deteriorating conditions. NGO executives get rich.
Other countries have demonstrated that there are alternatives. Singapore maintains one of the world's lowest rates of illicit drug use through vigorous enforcement, aggressive interdiction, compulsory rehabilitation for many offenders, and severe penalties for traffickers. Whatever one thinks of Singapore's legal system, it demonstrates that public drug markets are not inevitable.
More instructive for Los Angeles are democratic countries such as Switzerland and the Netherlands. Switzerland faced one of Europe's worst heroin epidemics in the 1980s. Zurich's infamous "Needle Park" became synonymous with addiction, overdoses, crime, and public disorder. Swiss officials eventually recognized that neither pure criminalization nor passive tolerance worked.
Instead, they adopted what became known as the Four Pillars strategy: prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and law enforcement. Notice what is missing from today's Los Angeles debate. The Swiss did not eliminate enforcement. They strengthened it. Police dismantled open-air drug markets, arrested dealers, and reclaimed public parks. At the same time, treatment became widely available, including medication-assisted therapy, psychiatric care, residential rehabilitation, and intensive case management. A small number of chronically treatment-resistant heroin users entered tightly supervised medical programs. The result was dramatic reductions in overdose deaths, HIV transmission, and drug-related crime, along with the disappearance of the massive public drug scenes that once defined Zurich.
Amsterdam followed a similar path. Contrary to popular mythology, the Dutch did not legalize heroin, cocaine, or methamphetamine. Hard drugs remain illegal. Authorities invested heavily in treatment while continuing to suppress organized trafficking and maintain public order. The lesson from these countries is straightforward. Successful systems are neither permissive nor purely punitive. They distinguish between the addict and the dealer. They treat severe mental illness as a medical emergency. They insist that public spaces remain public.
Los Angeles instead has drifted toward an ideology that often treats enforcement itself as the problem (defund the police). Mayor Bass's administration has doubled down on programs that prioritize moving people into expensive housing they don’t want; most street addicts want to pursue their addiction.
The answer frequently lies in untreated behavioral illness. That reality requires political courage because behavioral illness cannot be solved by ribbon-cutting ceremonies or billion-dollar bond measures. It requires expanding psychiatric hospitals, detoxification facilities, residential treatment programs, assisted outpatient treatment, conservatorship for the gravely disabled, and long-term supervised care.
It also requires acknowledging that some individuals have become so impaired that voluntary services alone are insufficient. No civilized society should simply abandon profoundly mentally ill people to die slowly on sidewalks under the banner of personal autonomy and civil liberties. Nor should society accept that addiction gives someone a permanent right to occupy parks, sidewalks, schools, or business districts while stealing significant amounts to support their deadly addiction.
Compassion without accountability becomes abandonment. Accountability without treatment becomes cruelty. The successful jurisdictions combine both. Los Angeles has chosen neither. Instead, City Hall has institutionalized endless spending without demanding measurable outcomes. Billions have flowed into homelessness bureaucracies, nonprofit contractors, consultants, and administrative overhead while residents watch conditions worsen year after year.
This is the true failure of political leadership. Mayor Bass inherited a serious crisis. Rather than fundamentally changing course, her administration largely expanded an existing policy framework that had already shown clear signs of failure. Mayor Bass’s housing policies, which have produced no results, have been defended by Councilmember Raman, who remains one of its most visible defenders.
The City Council continues appropriating billions, never asking whether the governing assumptions themselves are wrong. A different approach is available. Separate economic homelessness from behavioral illness. Expand psychiatric treatment dramatically. Increase detoxification and residential rehabilitation capacity. Use assisted outpatient treatment and conservatorship for those who repeatedly demonstrate they cannot safely care for themselves.
Aggressively prosecute traffickers and dealers. Restore public order while guaranteeing access to treatment. Measure success not by dollars spent or housing units announced but by reductions in psychosis, addiction, overdose deaths, crime, and the number of people living on sidewalks. That would represent genuine compassion.
The City and County of Los Angeles, because of their street-addiction policies, have made everyone a victim through ridiculously high taxes that support failed programs, or the continuous degradation of the quality of life, or a lack of law enforcement that has perpetuated a record crime wave (official crime statistics in LA can’t be trusted). One thing you can count on during this dismal election season in LA the outcome will be more of the same or worse.
(Eliot Cohen is a longtime civic advocate who has served on the Neighborhood Council, the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, and the Board of Homeowners of Encino, where he was president of HOME for over seven years. A retired Wall Street executive with a 35-year career, Eliot brings a sharp eye to local governance. He critiques the bureaucratic missteps of City, County, and State officials. Eliot and his wife split their time between Los Angeles and Baja Norte, Mexico.)
