Karen Bass

Absolutely.

And when I hear him describe Los Angeles, I have no idea what he's talking about or where he's talking about.

But let me just say that, you know, on day one, when I took office, I actually didn't even begin at City Hall.

I went straight to our emergency room.

management department and declared the city to be in a state of emergency because of homelessness.

In Los Angeles, we had 40,000 people sleeping on our streets and three, four of them don't wake up every morning.

So that to me was horrific.

I absolutely believed it was a humanitarian crisis.

And so my goal on day one was to get people off the street and get them into housing, not shoo them away, not hide them, house them.

And when you house them, address what led to their life falling apart, that they're on the street.

And what do you need to heal them?

so that then they will be successful in permanent housing.

So that is what we have done.

But I will tell you that we have a system that has been dysfunctional for over three decades.

And so while I am getting people off the street, I was also trying to diagnose what the heck was at the root of the dysfunction

and how to change the system at the same time where we have succeeded, but not to the scale that we need to be, of course, but of getting people off the street where we are still in process and have so much further to go is transforming a 30 plus year dysfunctional system.

There are same time.

Well, one piece, and it took me a while to find this out.

Los Angeles made a policy decision, I guess, maybe 20 plus years ago, that the focus should be on building housing.

Now, I agree with that 100%.