Issues and Advocacy
Lamp Community has emerged as a leading advocate for Los Angeles' chronically homeless. We partner with other organizations to increase the city’s stock of permanent supportive housing, preserve affordable housing units, and protect and advance the civil and human rights of poor and homeless people living with severe disabilities.
Close to 74,000 people are homeless in Los Angeles–more than in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco combined. Los Angeles’ Skid Row, a 52-block area east of the downtown business district, has the highest concentration of homelessness in the United States. More than half of the homeless men and women in this area are chronically homeless, meaning they struggle with a mental or physical disability and have been living on the street for years.
Cities across the country have significantly reduced their chronically homeless populations by investing in housing linked to supportive services. The federal government, too, has endorsed this cost-effective approach. But Los Angeles has instead invested in a punitive approach to its homeless crisis, arresting thousands for behaviors linked to their disability and to life on the street.
Los Angeles’ lack of a substantial political or financial investment in supportive housing is compounded by the city’s failure to protect its dwindling stock of low-income housing. In the Skid Row area, the city has lost thousands of residential hotel units, last-resort housing for the poor and disabled, in the last decade alone.
Permanent Supportive Housing
Los Angeles has approximately 4,000 permanent housing units. Of those, less than a thousand have a rich enough level of services to be considered permanent supportive housing. New York City, with less than half the homeless population, has 24,000 permanent supportive housing units—all of them with a high level of services for people with disabilities..
Criminalization
On Los Angeles’ Skid Row, a 52-square-block area home to only 13,000 people, officers have made 750 arrests and handed out 1,000 misdemeanor citations each month in the last two years, trapping thousands of poor and homeless people with disabilities in the criminal justice system.
