Inside Safe… Until You’re Not
Bass' signature homelessness program sees 40% return to homelessness, while failing those in hotels
Last Thursday, the City conducted an Inside Safe operation at the 4th/New Hampshire intersection. Many of our neighbors used to live there. Only a few days after the Inside Safe Operation, the Mayor posted on her Instagram before/after pictures of the intersection at 4th/New Hampshire, touting herself for helping more than 25 unhoused Angelenos move inside while treating them as a blight on the neighborhood.. Her narrative — like many politicians’ — focuses on the removal of visible homelessness. We don’t need the theatrics of Inside Safe and these pictures of before/after cleanup. Our neighbors need permanent dignified housing. The important question is not whether an encampment is gone; it’s whether our neighbors are safe and whether and when they will receive housing.
Inside Safe is a program that places unhoused residents in motels and hotels and removes visible homeless encampments. While Inside Safe does move residents inside, it does not provide a pathway to permanent housing. A recent report shows that 40% of Inside Safe participants were back on the street.
While some of our neighbors are relieved to be inside through Inside Safe, Inside Safe often fails our neighbors' needs. After these Inside Safe operations, our neighbors are displaced to hotel and motel rooms away from their community, isolating them from their existing communities. When they arrive, Inside Safe residents face challenging conditions inside their hotel and motel rooms. Our neighbors tell us about bedbug-infested hotel rooms, curfews, restrictions on cooking one’s own food, strict guest policies, and lack of privacy they have experienced through Inside Safe.
And our neighbors are forced to wait. Our volunteers have countless stories of neighbors who have been waiting for months and years in a motel or shelter, waiting for housing placements that never seem to come.
When traditional media outlets and the public complain that the unhoused are resistant to housing, they’re lying. Currently, our neighbors are not being offered housing. They’re being offered temporary hotels and motel rooms that do not meet their needs and are unlikely to lead to permanent housing.
So while the Mayor and politicians alike will celebrate last week’s Inside Safe Operations in Koreatown and will move onto their next stint to remove visible signs of homelessness, we have questions and concerns about the safety of our neighbors. Our volunteers have been walking around Koreatown, calling our neighbors, texting them, and trying to reconnect to see if they’re doing okay and need support.
We don’t need the Mayor’s theatrical savior narrative. Tell us about the conditions inside the hotel and motel rooms you have placed people in. Tell us whether our neighbors have access to laundry and fridges while they’re inside. Tell us whether they can cook their own meals inside and move freely without the fear of curfews and rules. Tell us the number of months or years our neighbors will have to wait to be placed into permanent housing. Tell us if our neighbors were able to keep their belongings after the Inside Safe operation. Tell us how far from Koreatown our neighbors were placed. Tell us in a year or even in a few months how many of our neighbors actually got into permanent housing.
The Mayor’s office measures success on homelessness by the number of encampments they’ve erased. But solving homelessness isn’t about kicking people out of their community. It’s about helping people move into permanent housing. Anything else is a distraction.