LA celebrates protected recipe while awaiting the noun at 700,000 dollars per unit
PROVIDENCE, RI — A federal court’s rejection of the Trump administration’s bid to shift homelessness funding away from the housing-first model has been received in Los Angeles with cautious relief and one clarifying observation from the region’s service providers: the ruling preserves the philosophy that housing should come first, in a county that has yet to schedule the housing.
The decision, reported by LAist, blocks the federal effort to redirect funds from the housing-first approach, which prioritizes placing people in permanent homes before addressing other needs, a model with decades of supporting evidence and, in Los Angeles, a waiting list with its own weather system.
The Victory Parsed
“We won the right to continue believing in the correct thing,” said longtime Skid Row services director Marguerite Okonkwo-Vidal, 58, whose organization has operated through five mayors, three federal philosophies, and one countywide emergency declaration that is itself now old enough for preschool. “I want to be clear that this matters. The alternative philosophy, treatment-first, sobriety-first, paperwork-first, has been tried for forty years and produced forty years of this. Housing first works. The data is not close. So yes, the court protected the recipe. Now, about the ingredients. The recipe says housing. First. We have the ‘first’ fully operational. People are absolutely first in line. Some have been first in line since the Garcetti administration. What we are missing is the noun.”
Okonkwo-Vidal’s organization currently maintains what she calls “the most defended philosophy with the least inventory in America,” a housing-first program whose housing arrives at the speed of local approvals, meaning that clients are triaged into permanent supportive units “as they are built, which is to say, as they are litigated, appealed, redesigned for parking, and value-engineered down from 96 units to 41.”
The Numbers Regarded
Policy analysts note the ruling lands in a county where the per-unit cost of supportive housing has crested $700,000, a figure that has achieved its own celebrity. “At $700,000 a unit, each apartment costs more than the median home in 44 states,” said housing economist Dr. Lazlo Fontaine-Abara. “We are not building apartments. We are building apartments that have been through the process, and the process is the luxury finish. The unit itself is modest. The unit’s journey is Versailles. Every door in that building has survived more public hearings than most senators, and it shows, in the sense that it does not show, because the money went to the hearings.”
Fontaine-Abara stressed that the housing-first model itself is not the cost driver, “the model is fine, the model is the one thing everyone agrees works,” and that the expense lives in the region’s approval gauntlet, “which is philosophy-neutral. It delays shelters, it delays condos, it delays everything equally. It is the most egalitarian institution in California. It discriminates against construction itself.”
By way of demonstration, Fontaine-Abara displayed two timelines side by side: a supportive housing project approved in 2019 and still unbuilt, and the Roman aqueduct at Segovia, begun without an environmental impact report and delivering water within a decade. “The Romans had worse tools and better meetings,” he said. “Their public comment period was brief, because it was Rome, which I do not endorse. But somewhere between the empire and the design review board there is a middle ground, and it has an occupancy permit.”
The Federal Angle
The blocked federal shift would have steered money toward treatment mandates and away from permanent housing, an approach advocates warned would replace a slow solution with a fast failure. With the court’s ruling, the existing pipeline continues, meaning Los Angeles retains both its evidence-based framework and its signature implementation style, described by one weary county staffer as “the right idea, executed at the speed of an apology.”
“The feds wanted to change what we believe,” the staffer said. “The court said no. Good. Our beliefs are excellent. Our beliefs have won awards. Somewhere out there is a parallel Los Angeles that has our beliefs and Houston’s permitting timeline, and in that city the encampments are memories. We have the sermon. We need the barn raising. The sermon has never been the problem. This county could preach a house into the National Register before it could build one past a design review.”
Perspectives Abroad
The satirical desk at Bohiney Magazine marked the ruling with a commemorative headline, “Court Protects Housing First, Housing Still Checking Its Calendar,” while Britain’s The London Prat observed that the UK also embraces housing first in principle, “and in practice operates hotel-room-first, bed-and-breakfast-second, and a strongly worded select committee report third, so we watch Los Angeles the way one watches a sibling make our mistakes with better weather.”
First Continues
At press time, the ruling stood, the funding stream continued, and outside Ms. Okonkwo-Vidal’s office the line she has served for thirty years remained first, as promised, while across the county the units meant for them advanced through the process at the process’s eternal pace. Asked what the ruling changes on the ground, she answered with the precision of a woman who has answered it before.
“It changes what could have gotten worse,” she said. “That is a real thing. In this work you learn to celebrate the disasters that were cancelled. Then you go back to the waiting list, and you tell the truth, which is: the philosophy is safe, honey. Now we wait for the noun.”
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com