Karen Bass

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.

The minute it hit citywide and even spilling over into communities that were middle class, upper middle class and affluent, then it became a real crisis.

And so trying to utilize the fact that the city felt it was a full crisis, but a punitive approach was just not going to win.

It was not going to produce the change.

We tried that in the 90s.

One thing I think about our American culture,