Head of L.A.’s Top Homeless Agency Resigns After Homelessness Numbers Explode
Upside: Santa Monica has installed a fun, new, 7-foot statue of a homeless man.
The man in charge of the top homeless services agency in Los Angeles is stepping down after five years in the role which has seen the number of homeless explode, and Medieval era diseases hit the city.
Peter Lynn’s resignation from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), which is tasked with addressing the crisis, was announced Monday as the region continues to see increasing rates of homelessness.
Heidi Marston, LAHSA’s chief program officer, will serve as interim executive director when Lynn officially leaves the post at the end of this month, according to a press release. A national search will be conducted to find a permanent replacement.
It would be difficult to imagine who would want to confront the homeless problem, given the progressive restrictions on solutions that can be offered.
Lynn’s agency spent millions on offices and personnel. Yet the number of homeless nears 60,000 and shows no signs of slowing down.
“Over these five years of explosive growth, LAHSA deployed more than $780 million in new funding to address homelessness. We doubled our staff and then doubled it again,” Lynn said in a written statement.
…Overall, an average of nearly 59,000 people were sleeping on sidewalks, in makeshift tents, in abandoned vehicles or in shelters and government-subsidized “transitional housing” on any given night in Los Angeles County, according to a June study by the agency.
In August an audit by the city’s controller found that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority had missed its goals of placing transients in permanent housing by wide margins.
Perhaps the first clue that new leadership is needed came when a seven-foot-tall sculpture of a homeless man made its debut in Santa Monica as part of a new art installation.
Titled “In The Image”, the statue by Los Angeles artist and activist Ed Massey was unveiled Monday in front of a former Home Savings and Loan building on the corner of Wilshire and 26th in Santa Monica.
It features a bearded figure wearing baggy clothes and a red blanket draped on his shoulder, in what the artist says is a “vision that simultaneously references contemporary social themes and historical religious imagery.”
Not all the locals were impressed with the new piece.
Only in #SantaMonica would a statue of a family be replaced w/ a statue of a homeless man. Why not honor a resident, rather than glorify homelessness?
Note: mural was removed too@santamonicacity’s homeless situation is nothing to be proud of. @SaMoCole @SaMoMayor @TedWinterer pic.twitter.com/7NWdt0UOwi— SantaMonicaProblems (@SantaMonicaProb) November 19, 2019
Thanks to bureaucratic mismanagement, Santa Monica this summer lost its iconic “Pleasures Along The Beach” mural. In its place was installed a seven-foot statue of a homeless man “staring at a red plastic cup in his hand.” https://t.co/AR4lzN6zKt pic.twitter.com/aR5hZGjc5O
— Michael Saltsman (@Mike_Saltsman) November 22, 2019
California: Come for the sunshine, stay for the infectious disease!
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“Over these five years of explosive growth, LAHSA deployed more than $780 million in new funding to address homelessness. We doubled our staff and then doubled it again,” Lynn said in a written statement.
That’s how these bureaucrats usually gain job security. They aren’t hired to solve problems but rather to manage them. Problems turn into crises requiring staff and bigger budgets and with the increased scope of responsibility, salary increases.
Mr Lynn must have plans to run for office.
That’s why there is nothing being done to get these people off drugs or find jobs for them.
I think they are hired to feed off the public teat.
Yes, more staff – that will solve the problem. They probably quadrupled the number of power point presentations produced, but still, unimaginably, the problem not only persists, but got worse.
It’s interesting that it’s only blue cities, and mainly in blue states, where homelessness like this exists. Funny that.
Societies put up statues of those who rule them. Ancient societies put up statues of Pharaohs and Caesar’s – we put up statues of homeless bums.
They should have just put up a statue of a giant turd, it would have been even more appropriate.
Gavin Newsome wuolnd’t hold still for the sculptor… 😎
It’s the extreme do-gooder left wing cities. Try taking a crap on the street in front of a cop in Cleveland or Detroit.
I’ll be charitable and offer that it may be out of frustration. California legislative policy has turned the State into a magnet for both illegal aliens and the homeless from other states. It does not help that cities like New York deliberately ship out their homeless.
Further, there is no such thing as cheap housing in mild-weather coastal areas.
Finally, the State is spending fantastic amounts on welfare for illegals and homeless, at the expense of infrastructure, basic policing and schools.
One might be forgiven for wondering if the legislature is really playing “F**k the System,” trying to overwhelm the State, to bring about The Revolution.
They need more mailboxes,
http://66.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lgf2pj1UsF1qh59n0o1_r1_500.gif
“I don’t understand it. We kept pouring more and more money into services for the temporarily-out-of-doors and their numbers kept increasing. The more facilities and freebies we gave them, the more they came. The more we coddled their rampant criminal behavior, the more of them came to our city. It just doesn’t make sense.”
Said the dumb f*cking prog moron.
we’re a special kind of stupid here in Lost Angels, #Failifornia
“deployed” $780,000,000 for 59,000 homeless = over $13,220 pp.
If you truly want to help these people fire 9 out of 10 bureaucrats and just fund a $10,000 bank acct for each person. (and save taxpayers $190 million in the process). Granted some will squander it, but that’s enough seed money for individuals to actually secure a new start in life, rather than stay trapped in the perpetual carousel of meager handouts.
Too bad the politicians responsible for this don’t resign. THIs isnt about jobs it’s about a failed system.
No 2smart, it is about money and power. There was never any intention of getting rid of homeless just as there was never any intention of getting crime, illegal immigration, or any other societal “problem”.
The fact that this guy has utterly failed will never be taken into consideration when it comes time for him to run for mayor and then governor…money and power!!
The only people who matter are those who live in the coastal enclaves and have microphones available to them whenever they need them. Those who live in the central valley…too bad they’ll have to deal with all of this.
It’s all about talk-the-talk, never about walk-the-walk. & Now nobody can walk anywhere..
Ben Carson reported earlier this year that the Trump administration had sent $3B to CA to build homeless shelters in 2018. A little less than half went to LA. Not a single shelter was built. Instead the money went to salaries of preexisting employees, hiring new employees, seminars, needle exchanges, travel and other bureaucratic sumps. This story vindicates that report.
Note that New York houses 19,000 homeless in well run shelters. That Honolulu, which received a pitiful fraction of that sum, in the low millions, has built beautiful tiny homes that are well received by intact families and those driven into the streets by housing costs, but are otherwise able to rationally communicate and function.
To be addressed are the single mentally ill and drug addicts, increasingly the same with meth, who refuse to conform to any rational standards and must be locked up..something Democrats find impossible to accept.
This short video is revealing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mFm7e1lP8U
If you build it, they will come. Los Angeles, San Francisco. Seattle, Portland and now Austin have built havens for the homeless.
Just came back from visiting my two sons in Arizona. I told them what it is like now around their old home in San Jose. How a fire was started two doors down by a homeless person this summer, how the homeless encampments now edge the rail line, the petty crime where NOTHING can be left in your car or it will be broken into, that we have to warn children to be aware of people around them because the homeless now live in our neighborhood (one of the was photo-documented following school children), how you take a chance going to the mall because car break-ins have skyrocketed, that there have been strong-arm robberies around stores on Almaden Expressway …. my sons were incredulous! This is all new. They grew up in a nice, safe neighborhood of what are now million dollar homes … Cali society in suburbia is deteriorating right in front of our eyes.
The elites in the VERY expensive neighborhoods are still insulated. Middle class families are not anymore.
Systemic problems.
California has no limit on how long an able-bodied person may collect welfare. So they stay.
The power that be have code enforcement which restrict building, so all housing is priced unreasonably.
Businesses leave because of taxes and regulations.
The homeless problems are symptoms of greater problems.
We need to plan on our response to state bankruptcies caused by major city bankruptcies. I favor return to territorial status, termination of all public, non safety employees, and division into smaller states. Further, once upon-a-time, states usually had senates based, not on population, but by region. Return to that to keep excessive power away from the large cities.
Phil Valentine has repeatedly offered a common sense (ignored by progressives) solution to the homeless and illegal immigration crisis:
“If you demagnetize America, like I’ve been saying for 20 years, and make it impossible for somebody to be able to function in this society unless they’re legally here, you’ve solved that problem,”
He must feel like Cassandra.
Import the third world, become the third world.
I know Peter personally. Our department worked closely with his at the Housing Authority, City of Los Angeles, 10 years ago. He doesn’t deserve the blame. He tried, but his hands are tied when he has to report to over TWENTY politicians (!) He’s a good man, actually, and I seriously doubt he planning to run for any kind of political office, as a poster alleges above. Guy’s probably just burned out as hell….
I guess these poor homeless people aren’t smart enough to know that as a result of man-made global warming, they should be seeking shelter farther north than Losa Angeles!
On the other hand they could be smarter than the so-called-intelligent people who spread the man-made global warming nonsense!