LA has a different solution to homeless camps. But it’s not working for everyone

For some who lived on the streets of Los Angeles, Inside Safe was a lifesaver — giving them a roof over their head for the first time in years, then helping them find a permanent home.

For others, it was a major disappointment. 

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is banking on her Inside Safe initiative to help her solve the largest homelessness crisis in California. The program, which brings people from encampments into hotels until housing becomes available, has moved hundreds of Angelenos into permanent homes. 

But hundreds more have gone from those hotels back to life on the street.

Nearly two years in, the program is successful enough that it spawned a copycat county-wide effort. Yet it has not affected the vast majority of the nearly 30,000 Angelenos who sleep outside. A lack of long-term housing and a shortage of health care, mental health and addiction services remain huge obstacles, as does the program’s high price tag. 

“Lots of people that have been brought inside under Inside Safe, and that’s great,” said John Maceri, chief executive officer of The People Concern, a nonprofit that runs two Inside Safe hotels. “We still struggle with the exit strategy: Where are people going to move to?”

Proponents say data proves the model works: Overall homelessness dropped slightly in the city of Los Angeles in 2024, and the number of people sleeping on the city’s streets is down 10%. 

“Homelessness in LA is down for the first time in years,” Gabby Maarse, spokesperson for Mayor Karen Bass, said in an email. “ The progress made by a new comprehensive strategy, which includes Inside Safe, is a marked improvement since before the mayor took office and she will not be satisfied until street homelessness is ended.”

But the newer county-run copycat program, called Pathway Home, appears to be connecting people with services and permanent housing more quickly — suggesting there are ways the city program could continue to improve.

How LA’s program has improved, and where it still lags

Inside Safe is supposed to be an alternative to the aggressive, law enforcement-heavy sweeps ramping up since the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled cities are free to ban camping even if they have no shelters. More than a dozen California cities already have passed new anti-camping ordinances or updated existing ordinances to make them more punitive. 

Mayor Bass publicly eschewed that strategy, and as of July, police had made no arrests during Inside Safe operations, according to the city. Even so, a report by Human Rights Watch earlier this year accused LA of not doing enough to protect the rights of its unhoused residents.

Bass launched Inside Safe in December 2022. Seven months later, CalMatters reported that fewer than 6% of the people who moved into Inside Safe hotels later went into permanent housing. People living in the hotels weren’t getting the help they needed accessing everything from medical care to mental health and addiction services — something Bass acknowledged at the time was a problem. 

“It was a little chaotic when it first started,” said Maceri.

Tents line the streets of the Skid Row neighborhood of Los Angeles on Oct. 8, 2024. Photo by Carlin Stiehl for CalMatters

There has been improvement since then, but challenges remain. To date, Inside Safe has cleared 67 encampments and moved 3,254 people into hotels — nearly 23% of whom have gone on to permanent housing. 

That improvement from 6% to 23% is “great,” said Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, who has hosted more than two dozen Inside Safe operations in his district. “But it’s obviously not where anybody wants to see it. At the end of the day, interim is interim and permanent is permanent. We want to see folks permanently housed.”

As of July, more people had returned to homelessness from Inside Safe than were permanently housed at the time — 819 compared to 650. 

Getting medical and mental health care, addiction treatment and other resources inside the hotels is still an issue, as service providers continue to struggle with staffing shortages, Maceri said. But it’s gotten “a little bit easier.” The county now sets up resource fairs at the hotels. The mayor appointed Dr. Etsemaye Agonafer as the city’s first deputy mayor of homelessness and community health, tasked with coordinating those services. The mayor also brought in USC and UCLA’s street medicine teams to provide services at the hotels.

It’s still not enough, said Tescia Uribe, chief program officer for the nonprofit PATH, which operates three Inside Safe and three Pathway Home hotels. They have clients with severe mental health and addiction issues who need intensive care. 

 “We are absolutely not set up for that,” Uribe said.

In some cases, living in a hotel room behind a closed door actually allows people’s problems — such as domestic violence between a couple living together, or substance use — to escalate into a crisis, because staff don’t see what’s happening in time to intervene, she said. 

Cost is another huge obstacle for the program: The hotel rooms cost the city an average of $121 per night, and it’s unclear for how long the city will be willing and able to keep paying that. The city bought one hotel in an effort to mitigate those expenses, and is looking into buying additional sites.

“The challenge ahead is about what is the next step?” said Councilmember Nithya Raman. 

‘Ready to go:’ One woman’s experience with Inside Safe

When 51-year-old Shameka Foster moved from her tent on Skid Row into an Inside Safe hotel in October 2023, she was happy to be off the street. 

A chef who makes vegan meats and cheeses from scratch, and who also works at a Skid Row nonprofit helping other unhoused people, Foster thought she’d be in a hotel for three to six months before she found permanent housing. Instead, she’s been in the program a year. 

“(I’m) just ready to go,” she said. “Been ready, but I feel like it’s time now, like it’s past time.”

Foster’s time in the hotel hasn’t always been easy. She’s had multiple bad or humiliating experiences — such as when a staff member walked into her room while she was changing, when the nurse in the hotel wouldn’t give her her blood pressure medication, or when she got food poisoning from a breakfast served, she said. There’s a long list of rules that she sometimes chafes under: Guests aren’t allowed, for example, and residents can’t get fresh toilet paper rolls after 2 p.m., she said. Foster doesn’t know how to access the counseling she wants to help her process the stress and trauma of everything she’s been through in the past few years. 

“I’ve been going through it and shedding a lot of tears,” Foster said, “getting angry and stuff, and sick, humiliated, and just treated like I wasn’t a human.”

Her journey into housing has been frustrating, too. Whenever Foster had a question, such as how to apply or what next steps she should take, her case managers never knew the answer, she said. It took six months for her even to be matched with a housing navigator who had more expertise, she said. 

Eventually, she took matters into her own hands, applied for an apartment in a newly constructed building, pestered the manager with emails and showed up at the building’s ribbon cutting. 

Management at the building told her she should be able to move in by the end of the month. But she’s trying not to get her hopes up. 

A tale of two encampment programs

Eight months after the city of LA launched Inside Safe, LA County kicked off its copycat program, dubbed Pathway Home. The approach was basically the same: Clear encampments throughout LA County, move the occupants into hotels, and then move them from there into permanent housing. 

But the county learned from the city’s challenges. Before the county removes an encampment through Pathway Home, it makes sure it has enough rental subsidies for every camp occupant who is expected to need one. As a result, people are getting housed faster. 

The nonprofit The People Concern runs two city hotels and one county hotel. People stay at the city hotels an average of 240 days, according to Maceri. At the county hotel, it’s just 99 days.

Nonprofit PATH, which operates three city and three county hotels, sees a similar disparity. And people in the county program also are more likely to get permanent housing. Just 36% of those who moved out of PATH’s city-sponsored hotels went into permanent housing, compared to 63% of those who moved out of the county-sponsored hotels, according to the nonprofit.

Leftover materials and trash lay on the ground outside an encampment that was cleared near La Cienega Boulevard and Century Boulevard in Los Angeles on Oct. 8, 2024. Photo by Carlin Stiehl for CalMatters

First: A bike lock is placed around a fence of an encampment that was cleared near La Cienega Boulevard and Century Boulevard in Los Angeles. Last: A tent under the 405 freeway in Inglewood. Oct. 8, 2024. Photos by Carlin Stiehl for CalMatters

It’s also easier for residents in the county hotels to access resources such as mental health care because the county is the one running those programs, according to Maceri and Uribe. When the county clears an encampment through Pathway Home, everything from animal control to the department of mental health has staff on site, Uribe said. That’s incredibly helpful, she said, because people are connected with those services from the beginning. 

“The county, definitely, they bring the resources,” Uribe said. “It is very different.” 

Some cities have said no to those resources. City councils in West Covina and Norwalk both voted down the county’s proposals to open Pathway Home hotels there, after a backlash from the community.

But the program made a big difference in Signal Hill, a tiny city of fewer than 12,000 people near Long Beach. In March, LA County helped Signal Hill move about 45 people from encampments directly into permanent housing. 

As a result, the city achieved the elusive white whale status of “functional zero,” which means it has the ability to quickly find housing for anyone who becomes homeless.

“Immediately after the operation we had zero, literally zero, because everyone we knew was housed, including people living in cars,” said Signal Hill City Manager Carlo Tomaino. “That was literally everybody.”

The city had started trying to move people indoors a year earlier, and its outreach team had developed relationships with everyone living on the street, Tomaino said. But Signal Hill, which has no homeless shelters of its own, wouldn’t have been able to house everyone without the county’s resources.

The city has kept its functional zero status since then.

One couple falls through the cracks; someone else gets housing

LA County launched its Pathway Home program in August 2023 by clearing an encampment known as The Dead End along a cul-de-sac in unincorporated Lennox, near the airport. The operation moved 59 people indoors. 

On a recent Tuesday more than a year later, that stretch of road was empty — no tents in sight.

But nearby, a handful of people had pitched tents under the 405 Freeway overpass. Perched on a milk crate on a hill above those tents, 52-year-old Jennifer Marzette ate Burger King for lunch with her partner, Enrique Beltran, as cars whizzed by. 

The couple lived at The Dead End encampment off and on for about eight years. But when county workers came to move the camp’s residents into a hotel, Marzette and Beltran were told they weren’t on the list, Marzette said. She speculates they probably weren’t at their tent when staff first came by to collect names. 

Jennifer Marzette and her partner Enrique Beltran kiss each other while in a cove under the 405 freeway in Inglewood on Oct. 8, 2024. Photo by Carlin Stiehl for CalMatters

So they’re still sleeping on the street, now a few blocks away from their former camp. They’ve been trying to get into housing or a shelter program together, but have had multiple false starts. They got a housing voucher, but it expired in January, before they could find an apartment that would take it, Marzette said. 

In February or March, they were told they could move into a “family room” at Exodus Recovery’s “Safe Landing” shelter, she said. But they were two hours late to their appointment (the complexities of life on the street sometimes make it hard to get to places on time, Marzette said) and lost the spot. Then, earlier this month, a caseworker said they would get a room at a local hotel. That fell through, Marzette said, and she suspects it’s because they found out she was arrested for domestic violence and jailed briefly in December, over what she says was a misunderstanding during an argument with Beltran.

“I was crying the other day,” she said, as she recounted all of the missed opportunities for someone to help her. “I felt like…that’s just how it goes.”

Chris Felts had a much different experience. He was homeless for two decades, sleeping on sidewalks and in parks, or in doorways when it rained. The 68-year-old had tried several times to get into housing, but it always took so long that he got discouraged and gave up. In February, the county moved him into a hotel in Santa Monica through Pathway Home. Then, in June, he got his very own studio apartment, subsidized with a rental voucher. 

Now, he’s re-learning how to live indoors. He’s practicing his cooking and trying to take care of his health by walking between 5,000 and 7,500 steps a day in his neighborhood. 

But the best part, Felts said, is finally having privacy. 

“I have a chance to just be by myself,” he said. “When you’re homeless you don’t really have that opportunity. There’s always going to be people around.”