Karen Bass

And that state of emergency was over the fact that we had 40 plus thousand people on our streets.

And we set out a campaign to reduce the number of people who are living on the street, street homelessness, to address that situation and to involve people in the process.

And I think one of the most important things that we were able to do was disprove the notion

that people were on those streets willingly and didn't want to leave the streets.

By the way, I must say to you that the African-American population of Los Angeles is 9%.

That's 9% out of 3.8 million people.

But when it comes to who is unhoused, we are over 30% of the people living on the streets.

Los Angeles is about 50% Latino and about 40% of the people on the streets are Latino.

So you are talking about

an African-American and Latino problem, 74% of the people.

And so bringing the communities together to say that we have to solve this problem was critically important.

Now, I do believe we have a long way to go.

We have reduced homelessness for the first time.

second year in a row.

And so I think to me, we have a clear pathway out of this.

I don't think that that was done before in the sense that in my opinion, the city nor the county was committed to ending homelessness.

They were committed to managing it.

And I think somewhere in somebody's mind, they thought it would eventually go away.

And of course, what happened was that we were trying to address homelessness in the 90s as well.

but nobody really cared about it because it only impacted Skid Row and South Central.