Karen Bass

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%.

The problem is, is that in our city, that system is dysfunctional too, in terms of the building process.

So, for example, residents in L.A.

taxed themselves to address building the housing, 10,000 units they were going to build.

Well, they did get it built, but it took way over 10 years to do that.

While they were letting people stay on the street and focusing just on building, then homelessness exploded.

Now, let me compare that to New York.

New York early on

built their system where they have interim housing.

They didn't just focus on bricks and mortar building.