L.A. has now laid a real foundation to address homelessness

Los Angeles’ continuing struggle to reduce homelessness has become Exhibit Number One for a broader critique of the failure of progressive governance. Recent tensions between the city and the county over how to organize homeless services have not helped. But look a little deeper and something more promising comes into focus.

For the past nine months, a committed group of public officials, political and civic leaders from across the region have been collaborating to develop a road map for reducing homelessness — and, in so doing, to break with L.A.’s longstanding pattern of overpromising and underdelivering. Central to their endeavors has been crafting a set of ambitious and achievable goals that can guide the region’s efforts.

These efforts reached a crucial milestone in late March, when L.A. County’s Board of Supervisors endorsed three monitorable top-line goals, including specific targets for 2030. One goal aims for a 20% reduction in the number of people becoming newly homeless each year. Another aims to place 30,000 people into permanent housing — which would require an increase of more than 50% from the recent pace of placements. A third targets a reduction in the number of people living on the streets in 2030 by nearly a third.

As a practitioner building public-sector capacity in other countries and as an academic in the U.S., I have spent decades exploring ways in which participatory approaches can enhance government’s problem-solving ability. That experience shows that, far from being a pie-in-the-sky academic exercise, a focus on goals can yield enormous practical benefits.

In a fragmented governance environment like L.A.’s — and for a multifaceted problem like homelessness — goal clarification is a vital early step. Clear goals serve as a shared point of reference for setting priorities, helping multiple participants to better align their choices. They provide a platform for institutions to be held accountable by the public.

Emphasizing that goals must be monitored and visible to the public shapes their selection: The goals must be neither so modest as to provoke cynicism nor so overly ambitious that they set the stage for failure. In recent months, L.A.’s approach to collaborating and crafting top-line targets appears to hit the sweet spot between those risks. This is cause for cautious optimism that its homelessness governance system may finally be on a path to sustained gains.

To be sure, at first blush the goal of reducing L.A.’s unsheltered population by not quite a third over five years may not sound headline-worthy. Everyone would prefer if the objective could be as simple as “end homelessness” — and that would be relatively straightforward if the task were simply to find suitable housing for the approximately 50,000 people who currently live on L.A. County’s streets. L.A.’s homelessness support system already permanently rehouses about 20,000 people each year.

But the region’s homelessness crisis goes well beyond the number of people on the street at a point in time. Each year, a combination of wage stagnation, an extreme shortage of affordable housing and other personal hardships results in more than 60,000 people becoming newly homeless. Given these realities — and the likelihood that federal budget cuts will shred the existing social safety net — reaching the target of 30% fewer unsheltered homeless people by 2030 would be a major accomplishment.

Getting there will require both public officials and civil society to move beyond business-as-usual.

For public officials, clear, ambitious and achievable goals provide the requisite platform to stop endlessly cycling from one seemingly appealing initiative to another and to engage systematically with the dual challenges of improving effectiveness and efficiency.

Effectiveness calls for decisions on how to prioritize scarce resources: Which interventions are most effective in reducing the number of people falling into homelessness? Which services and supports — psychological and social support, rental subsidies or interim housing — best help homeless people get permanently housed? And, looming above all of these, how to expand the supply of affordable housing?

Efficiency raises different questions: For each prioritized intervention, what is a minimum set of acceptable standards for success? Do public, private and nonprofit providers meet these standards? What will be the mechanisms for improving performance, or clawing back resources from providers that fall short?

For civil society, an informed embrace of ambitious and achievable goals provides a basis for moving beyond exhortation and criticism and embracing new ways of providing the accountability and oversight needed to ensure meaningful results. This includes — and goes well beyond — tracking whether agreed-upon targets are being met.

All too often, insider interests that stand to lose from reforms that take effectiveness and efficiency seriously will try to protect the status quo. Civil society can bring countervailing pressure. Such pressure might come from purpose-built coalitions — such as the group of officials and civic leaders who built the roadmap over the past nine months for reducing homelessness — or from other local organizing groups, public watchdogs and journalists. Local officials will also no doubt recognize the risk that if they fail to make progress on the goals, voters may turn against them at the ballot box.

For years, the people of L.A. have identified homelessness as the region’s number one crisis. The successful recent effort to collaboratively set and adopt ambitious and achievable goals for 2030 is a major milestone. Success in meeting these goals could rebuild the public confidence in local government that has eroded over many years.

It’s still early days, but if L.A.’s effort can stay on track, this would be an opportunity to flip the narrative about our region — from being a poster child for the failure of good intentions, to being the face of a renewed and effective 21st century progressivism.

Brian Levy teaches at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. He spent more than two decades at the World Bank on initiatives to improve public sector capacity and implementation.