Speaker 0: We also have some hearings. So I want to begin today. We I believe we do have a11 hearing. We're going to go ahead and do item 19/1. If you don't mind, Mr. City Attorney, then we'll go right into we'll go right to the hearing and just give us one minute to set up and then we'll we'll begin . Can we please read the item? Madam.
Speaker 1: Item 19 report from Health and Human Services Recommendation to Receive and file a report from the Everywhere Home. Long Beach Task Force Citywide.
Speaker 0: Everyone Home. Long Beach Task Force. Thank you very much, Madam Kirk. Before we begin, I just want to just begin by saying that this past May, the city of Long Beach launched an important initiative to address our statewide homelessness crisis and it and its impacts here in Long Beach. This was the creation of the Everyone Home Long Beach Task Force. I know we have members of the task force that are here, some of which will speak during public comment. But as part of the presentation that staff is going to begin making. I do. I'm going to be asking asking to come to the front in just a minute. The president of Cal State, Long Beach, Jane Close Connelly, who is also the chairperson of of this task force. I want to note that the purpose of this task force was to really look at our homeless services from a comprehensive lens and to address all the issues that we have with this incredibly important issue that faces us as a community and as the state of California. We know that the city is already doing a lot of amazing work in the area of homelessness. We also know that many members of the council are very involved in this work, have presented items that have been adopted by this council and continue to work within their communities to address these critical needs. This final report of everyone at home, Long Beach Task Force is an important report that we will be receiving tonight, which will then really guide our work and policies over the course of the next year as different things develop across the city. I really want to thank the staff for their amazing work. This was not just a project of the task force itself, but a lot of contributions from our Homeless Service Advisory Commission, as well as numerous continuum of care partners, and our most importantly, input from members of the community across the city. The report makes a several policy and service recommendations, but it's also important to note that the report isn't also just a comprehensive, one size fits all report. There are numerous other ideas and numerous other ways of addressing and working towards solutions on this very critical issue. And so while I think the report is certainly important, it is certainly for us in Long Beach and I've heard the city manager say this, it's the most significant report on homelessness that we've probably done in over ten years. There's always other ideas and other considerations that we must take into into account. I'll have some more words later, but I want to begin by welcoming Dr. John Carlos Connolly, who is the president of Cal State Long Beach. She does have a few events tonight, so she is going to kick off with some words and then we'll turn this over to Mr. West.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much, Dr. Connelly. Thank you. And thank you, Mayor Garcia, for allowing me to be involved with the everything home. Long Beach Task Force. I wanted to say just a few words before Kelly Colby presents the outcomes of the task force work in detail. First, let me give my special thanks to co-chair Andy Kerr to the city staff and all the task force members who showed up and did the hard work of listening, contributing their substantial expertize, arguing, disagreeing and on and on. But as you can see in the report, the members came from many sectors of our community and cared deeply about the issues associated with experiencing homelessness. I also urge a careful reading of the background material because you will see that the complexities that surround are a transcendent goal to make. Homelessness in Long Beach, a rare and brief experience are all connected to the goals and the sub goals, as you said earlier. Mayor Garcia one size does not fit all. Long Beach is home to several unique populations that are affected by or on the verge of homelessness. Solutions will require bold action. They will depend on developing a coordinated governance structure that keeps everyone on the same page. These solutions come with a high price tag, but the price tag is much lower than the cost of doing nothing new measured not only in human suffering, but in the costs of police, fire, health, lost educational opportunities and other services that we are now investing in the challenge. Obviously, we need more affordable housing. Making that happen is key to the city's success. Getting this done will require we all examine our commitments to community, well-being and development. We definitely need to have a focus on prevention so that we turn off that stream of people being forced out of their homes and into shelters or onto the streets. We must look at increasing education and employment options and that creating innovative connections to health services. The report thanks to. His great analytic skills illustrates the complexity of the problem, but does set attainable and measurable goals and offers evidence based strategies that will work. Long Beach has already achieved remarkable successes in this area and can be a city where the experience of homelessness is rare and brief. Nothing short of that is really acceptable in a caring community. Thanks for this chance to address you. I can commit all of the resources at sea. Issue will be we have many faculty and many many students who are committed to partnering with the city to reach the the lofty goals set by the report. So thank you again for the chance to address you.
Speaker 0: Thank you. And President Connelly, I just want to say, just on I know on behalf of the of the city council, the amount of work that you personally and your team at the university and the task force, I know Andy Kerr, who's the vice chair here, is here and others. I just want to we just want to thank you not just for what you did here, but your work every single day at our university, which is our we're so proud of. So giving Dr. Conolly a big round of applause. Thank you, President Connelly. And thank you for your for your work.
Speaker 4: And we're willing to do more.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 0: Absolutely. Thank you. And I'm gonna turn this over to, I think first to Mr. West and then to Colby.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Council members, as you pointed out, this is a work in progress, has been going on since June on the task force is making the recommendations tonight. It's very, very exciting stuff. These are things that, as you pointed out, it's a very comprehensive report. It's things that the city has been talking about for over a decade. I remember in 2005, the redevelopment agency was talking about many of these things, as well as the former community development department within the city. So it's wonderful to see all these things coming forward now at this time to the city council's recommendations. You're going to see Kelly talk about three goals. Goal one is she's going to talk about financing and governance and how that's going to happen. Goal number two is to increase housing access and that's going to go through emergency shelter. We all know that the winter shelter opened up this past week and that'll be open through March also to get permanent supportive housing in addition to that, to have low and very low income housing. So the goal here is to expand housing opportunities. We want to do that in a short term fashion with inclusionary housing ordinance, perhaps motel conversions, nondiscrimination for vouchers, and other sources of income, shared housing models, expanding the number of units that are rent stabilized. We have about 6000 now in the city through our housing, through our housing department and bureau. In addition to that, we want to incentivize and engage landlords for pilot incentive programs and also to design and implement anti-discrimination training. Goal three finally is to reduce homelessness. That's primarily through prevention, immediate intervention and also chronic homelessness. So services and incentives to present prevent that would be tenant assistance policies, support services and prevention for homeless people falling into homelessness and things like that. So I'm going to introduce the person who's been leading the task force with Ms.. Connolly, and that's Kelly Collopy. She's the director of our Health and Human Services Department, and she also oversees our Homeless Services Bureau. We're one of the only few cities in California that has a homeless services bureau and also a health department. So that. KELLY If you could walk us through the task force recommendations.
Speaker 6: Thank you. Good evening, honorable mayor and city council members and to all of you here, here in the audience. Thank you for this opportunity to present the Everyone Home Language Task Force recommendations. The task for the Everyone Home Line, which was an initiative launched by the mayor in May of 2018. In June of 2018, the city convened the first everyone home Long Beach Task Force. The task force met five times over six months. We had sub-group meetings and opportunity for feedback throughout and we also held public comment at each meeting and those comments were taken into consideration as the recommendations were being designed. The task force. The task force was made up of 31 members chaired by Jane Close Connelly as you've just heard from Andy Kerr, who is Measure H citizens over advisory board member and a strong advocate for homeless services within the city. Everyone home. Long Beach was designed to build on the city's comprehensive homeless services and affordable housing efforts already underway, and to identify innovative approaches to provide new pathways into housing to residents from falling into homelessness. The task force has provided the context of the current homeless service gaps gaps and help bosses listen to people with lived experience , organizational infrastructure and financing. The task force membership included representatives, CEOs and directors of organizations that reflected a broad array of interests in the city. These included higher education in K-12 education or hospitals, housing, development, business and employment, mental health, faith based organizations and transit veterans. Domestic violence organizations. The Cambodian community. Latino Community. LG, LGBTQ Community. Children and Family Services. The Continuum of Care Board and the Homeless Services Advisory Committee. It was the first time in many years the City of Long Beach has engaged in this level of representation and learning and planning to address the issues of the homeless, prevention, services and housing in the city. I want to thank Jean President Connolly and Annie Kerr for their leadership in this work and the task force members for their time, their insights, their lively discussions and expertize that brought these recommendations to you. So if you're here and you were on the task force, could you please stand up? I know the task force members and the community. Great. All right. Thank you. I heard from many task force members that this is the holiday season and their kids are out doing stuff and they need to be out there with them. So here you see a list of all the different task force members. So each each task force meeting included a sharing of information, time for public comment and then working on recommendations. So in the first meeting, we talked about the city team. We heard stories from the streets. We defined success and we affirmed the statement of possibility and then then had a complete overview of homeless services. In the second meeting, there were more stories from the streets. A presentation from Patrick Geary, from the development services around affordable housing development and production policies and initiatives. And then another presentation on prevention the gaps. The third meeting included services information on services for the new and Chronically Homeless Homeless Emergency Assistance Program, the state hip funding, and then also started in conversation and policy breakout sessions. So we identified a number of policy breakouts and people moved into those committees and talked through them. The fourth meeting focused on the governance, structure, data and funding, and then also started a secondary review of recommendations and prioritization. And then in the fifth meeting, the final recommendations were presented and approved. So setting the context of homeless. I know you've been hearing a lot about the data lately, but I just want to share a little bit. So in 2017, we did the point in time count. We'll be doing another one in this upcoming year. We found that 1863 people were experiencing homelessness on the streets and in the shelters. Of these one third still illness and 21% reported a substance use condition. These numbers are a decrease. We've had a 21% decrease from the previous count. We believe that this was due to a strong, coordinated outreach system across the city, as well as our coordinated entry system that links people to services that they need. But in addition to what we found on that and in the homeless count numbers, it's also important to talk about those who are precariously housed. When we talk about precariously housed, we're looking at those who make 30% of the average media average median income, which is about $16,000 for a household. We're also look at those who pay at least 90% of their rent, their income on rent and in long waitresses over 20,000 households. We also know that while the point in time counted as a 1 to 1 day count, that we actually have at least 4000 people falling into homelessness in Long Beach every year. They fall in and out of homelessness. You may not see them on the streets, but they're engaged. They may be couch surfing. They may be entering services in other ways. We only have prevention resources available for 430 households. We have 550 housing choice voucher holders. Their rent are fully paid. Looking for units on the street. We have fewer than ten detox beds when it comes for substance use and our residential substance use treatment beds are at capacity. We are doing development. We are in the middle of building 806 homeless and low income housing units that are in the pipeline. Currently we have 275 emergency shelter beds, 339 transitional housing units, 380 rapid rehousing units, and 162 permanent supportive housing units. Those permanent supporting housing units are utilized. They're essentially full and they continue to be utilized. So when someone moves into permanent supportive housing, it is a permanent space. So we need to be creating additional unit. Our analysis demonstrates that in addition to what we currently have, we are seeking 500 emergency, 500 additional emergency shelter beds, 350 permanent supportive housing units, 2400 units that will accept rental subsidies, such as Section eight and 450 rapid rehousing units. The regional area, the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, shows the need for about 2500 additional low and very low income housing units. So that is the need. Our current structure and funding. So currently the stream, the structure for homeless services includes includes multiple governing bodies and multiple coordinating bodies. While there is some coordination across these systems not currently operating as a seamless system, homeless services governance includes the Continuum of Care Board, as required by HUD and the Mayor appointed Homeless Services Advisory Committee. Services are coordinated through the continuum of care, the Street Outreach Network and an inter-departmental team. Housing development is governed by the ALB, CIC and the Planning Commission and is managed by Development Services and Workforce Development for the city is operated by Pacific Gateway and also provided by other nonprofit organizations in the city. Our current funding is approximately $30 million for services and approximately $10 million for housing choice vouchers and voucher vouchers that are specifically carved out for homeless households. We've received $13 million to purchase and renovate 125 bed year round shelter, as well as to purchase a storage facility. So if someone is homeless and has a lot of materials, it's a safe place for them to store their belongings. We have approximately 4.5 million available in home funds to support new housing construction incentives. These funding sources. Um, you can see the. You could see through these funding sources that you could see all the different percentages and there are multiples of them. So the services we provide include a multi-service center. Street outreach and connection. Our quality of life teams through the police department, the Hart teams through our fire department, shelter beds, transitional and rapid rehousing services, permanent supportive housing and many other support services is a significant set of services and the most comprehensive provider by any city in our region. The city of Lombard has taken a strong stand to address homelessness in the city, and our continuum of care is nationally recognized for its service model. However, there are funding and service limitations. As mentioned above, its currently provides prevention funding for only 430 households, which is far lower than the need given 4000 people entering homelessness each year and over 20,000 people are precariously housed. Funding does not cover child care. It does not cover behavioral health services. Buildings planning beyond the cost partners, communications or data infrastructure. This leaves real gaps in services and coordination. To share with you a little bit about how many we see during the year. We have approximately 13,000 visits at the MSI and we make at least 2000 Street outreach contacts each year. In the past year, our call or call volume to the MSI increased by nearly 250% to over 900 calls and emails. And as we've shared, it takes an average of 17 contacts on the street before someone will engage in services. But all of these services in context.
Speaker 0: Coping is just to just to be clear that I hadn't seen this number before. So on the outreach side, the the increase. So that's a one year increase.
Speaker 6: For the reports of homelessness to that to the hotline, an email. Yes, it's a one into one year increase increase over last year.
Speaker 0: Thank you.
Speaker 6: But all of this is working. In the past year, we have permanently house 1035 individuals and families and that so far we haven't ended then. We haven't gotten through December yet, so the number will go up. So we're very excited about the fact that we are able to to move that forward. We are making progress in terms of housing. We are 361 units of low income housing has been completed. We have funding for a 125 bed emergency shelter. There are 806 homeless and low income units that are in the pipeline, which includes 235 permanent supportive housing in 571, low and very low income housing units. The city provided just under $40 million and leveraged an additional 324 million in construction to be able to build both those units and for those that are in the pipeline. So I want to talk a little bit about prevention, because this is something when you're in public health and homeless services, you talk a whole lot about. We spend a lot of time in language talking about our interventions for homelessness. So we see people on the street. We're trying to figure out how to intervene and how to really work so that we can house them from the street. But these interventions often are that are the last. They're there. It's because other things have broken down. So to understand the need for prevention, it's really important to discuss why become people who become homeless in the first place. So what we see here is that 50% of people fall into homelessness either because they've lost their job or because they have insufficient income to pay their expenses. 20% of people fall into homelessness due to substance use addiction or a disabling health or mental health condition. So while we had 50% of people on our streets during the street count and express that they had a mental illness or substance use condition, they don't often enter homelessness. Because of that, only 20% enter homelessness. And from that often mental illness or an addiction to substances takes place from being on the street. For many others, it's due to breakdown or violence in the family. So it's important to address these issues as we start to think about homelessness and really slowing the stream. We need to move upstream in our work. So I often say that people don't become homeless when things are working well for them. It's important that we look upstream to understand the breakdowns in our system. Upstream determinants of homelessness are those overarching factors that are largely outside of the control of the individual and which have a significant trickle down effects. These may include low vacancy rates, increasing cost of living and rentals, inadequate social safety nets, mental health or health conditions , untreated substance use and family violence. Right now, we're catching people after they've gone off the waterfall. We're doing the interventions when they're already on the street. Instead, what we'd like to do and what we are doing is we're working really hard to pull them back up the waterfall, and that is not easy. So our goal is to begin to address the efforts while we're still up above the bridge to create that bridge. So we think about a prevention continuum. When we look at our upstream prevention opportunities, we focus on employment and training, strengthening families, health and behavioral health services, and increasing access to housing that is affordable to low income . Downstream preventions are where we currently focus. It's more of a last minute intervention in the middle of a crisis. We receive almost no funding for upstream preventions and only slightly more funding for downstream preventions. Our goal is to stop people from falling down the waterfall slowing to a trickle, the number of people falling into homelessness in the first place. So I now like to share the everyone home Long Beach Task Force recommendations. The Task Force listened and engage in a number of presentations where we provided this information and much, much more. They were thoughtful in their dialog, bringing their different expertize and perspectives into the conversation. They asked tough questions and pushed each other's thinking, as well as ours on a number of topics. From this process, they developed seven key goal areas and over 40 recommendations. I won't go into every single recommendation in depth, but will provide an overview and foundation for the recommendations. In addition, I'm going to be starting with goal number two, as I'd like to have the funding a governance conversation. At the end of the presentation. First, I'd like to share the statement of Possibility for homelessness in Long Beach in 2017, a gathering of over 100 community providers and community members developed a statement of possibility for homelessness in our city. The task force affirmed that statement. It reads The experience of homelessness in Long Beach is rare and brief when it occurs. The recommendations that you'll be hearing tonight align with that statement. So we started with goal two increasing housing access. The task force that three goals for access. First, creating 200 new emergency shelter beds by the end of 2020. 200 new permanent supportive housing units in the pipeline by 2023. And 2000 new low and very low income housing units in the pipeline by 2023. The key areas for recommendation are expanding housing opportunities and incentivizing landlords to provide housing to low income and homeless households. The recommendations for expanding housing opportunities are broken into short term and long term opportunities. In the short term, they recommend designing and implementing a progressive inclusionary housing ordinance that creates housing opportunities throughout the city. This work is just starting now through the development services and the community. Conversations have started to provide zoning accommodations to developers who wish to convert existing motels into permanent supportive housing. Developing and adopting an ordinance that prohibits discrimination based on housing subsidy and other sources of income. Identifying properties and incentivizing property owners in Long Beach to participate in shared housing models that allows for master leasing of property and matching tenants to affordable housing, and expanding the number of rent stabilized units through production, policy and preservation. For the long term. They recommend that we establish more geographically equitable distribution of lower income housing units and supportive cities across the city. This would continue to build on an opportunity for every council district to participate and being part of the solution for homelessness. The recommendation is that every council district would commit to provide for a certain number of affordable or supportive housing units or developments, including supportive services within within each council district. These may include new development. It may include repurposed units, may include accessing increasing access to units. Utilizing subsidies, may include substance use services, mental health service services, or other support units. Anything that we can be bringing together across our city to support reducing homelessness. They also recommend increasing mobile emergency shelter beds and increasing accessibility for populations that currently have limited shelter options, such as those who are like families and couples who have children and pets who want to be together. Transition age youth, older adults, the reentry population, portable people with multiple diagnoses, and individuals experiencing homelessness that don't meet the requirements for other shelters. The final recommendation here is to utilize assets to utilize assets that are underutilized in government or privately controlled land, assets that would be redeveloped to provide affordable housing opportunities while incorporating public uses. As part of this strategy. They are also looking to incentivize and engage landlords. The purpose is to increase access within existing units for homeless and voucher holding households. The first recommendation is to finance a pilot and implement a number of different incentives similar to the housing incentive or the homeless incentive program for landlords that is currently were funded through Measure H that were utilized through the housing authority. Possible options may include funds to cover holding fees, damage mitigation feeds, move in assistance, a variety of bonus structures for landlords partnering with the Housing Authority and communities where housing choice vouchers are limited. Call maintenance to assist with fixing up buildings or 24/7. Calling available to support property owners renting to formerly homeless or housing subsidy tenants. The next recommendation is providing case management and support services to people utilizing housing choice vouchers. As often we have people who have who have a voucher and they're living in their unit. And they may fall into they may have they may engage in substance use or sometimes they may not be taking their medications. And so to be present for those to help support them in those services. So they remain housed. We also seek to design and implement an anti-discrimination training required for landlords participating in any incentive program to ensure that landlords understand how to avoid discrimination in rental practices. Goal three is reducing homelessness and really focusing on prevention. The goal here to reduce the number of people falling into homelessness to 1500 instead of 4000 or fewer annually by 2023. That 75% of people that exit into housing do so within six months of becoming homeless and that we reduce the number of chronically homeless to 350 or fewer by January of 2021. The prevention recommendations include a tenant assistance policy that provides for relocation assistance to households impacted by rising rents and displacement support to increase the state's noticing requirement for no fault termination of tenancy to a minimum of 90 days. Providing rapid rehousing services and deposit assistance for displaced very low income older adults. And setting aside housing choice vouchers for displaced or extremely low and very low income adults. The tenant assistant policies are currently under development in partnership with community advocates and landlords and will be presented at the January 8th City Council meeting. The task force also recommends providing support services and prevention to households up to 60% of area median income. Currently, our funding only serves people who are at 30% of area median income, and we seek to increase that level to help support people in their homes. The last recommendation is to proactively identify buildings who may be sold or otherwise are at risk of increased rent. Increases are evictions so that as a city and with our partners, we can proactively respond and reach out and support people. The next goal is really focused on providing employment, training and opportunities. As we discussed, 50% of people become homeless due to loss of job or inadequate income. Here, the task force seeks to provide 600 job opportunities for adults and 240 job and job opportunities for transition age youth. The task force recommends a focus on living wage jobs. The recommendations include expanding training opportunities for those at risk of experiencing homelessness, partnering with business business leaders, business organizations besides the Chamber of Commerce to provide job training and employment opportunities to reduce barriers to employment for those who have criminal histories. To promote social enterprise opportunities. To expand the city's youth internship programs, especially focused on those who are precariously housed at risk of homelessness. Or homeless. And researching. Worker co-op models. The next goal focuses on families and supporting children and families who are precariously housed or homeless. Given that our funding sources do not cover child care, the task force focused on increasing access to child care by creating at least 400 new child care sites by 2021. It's very difficult to have a job job training, participate in any sort of education if you don't have quality health care for your children. The recommendations here to increase childcare opportunities for low income and homeless families, particularly infants and toddlers, including at provider sites to support family access to services. Improving coordination between organizations to improve access. Utilization of physical and mental health care by children and families. Expanding the availability of low skills training for families. Increasing services supports and housing for families. Families experiencing domestic violence and strengthening education and coordination of services for children, youth and young adults experiencing homelessness to support their academic access and success. The next goal is focused on health and increasing the access to behavioral health and physical health services. The goals include 32 new detox beds in the city. A new sobering center, reducing emergency room visits by 25% by 2023 and implementing 30 new recuperative care beds. We also seek to reduce the number of people who are discharged from hospitals to homelessness to 0% by 2023. The recommendations to do this are to establish agreement with L.A. County's Housing for Health Program, to allow for more coordinated referral program to serve the city's most vulnerable and most frequent users of city resources. Partnering with Los Angeles County and the State to implement a substance use detox center, a sobering center, increase recuperative care beds, and a safe needle exchange program in the city. Recuperative care beds are really an opportunity for people. When someone is in the hospital and they are released, many times they can't they don't have a safe, clean space to go to recover recuperative care beds, provide a place where they can they can have care. It's not a medical facility necessarily, but it is someplace that has nursing visits, medication and places that will let people recover from various illness and wounds. The sobering center is an important aspect. As many times we see on the streets, people who are experiencing they're highly intoxicated. A sobering center allows for someone to walk in. It's a 24 hour opportunity and they can sleep and shower and also to engage in services. And then we start to build relationship over time for those who are on the street. We seek to engage nonprofit partners in hospitals to increase substance use treatment opportunities throughout the city, and to advocate for state and federal government levels to significantly increase the availability of long term mental health capacity both in the city and in our region. And finally, we seek to expand discharge planning processes that engages hospitals, institutions and community organizations to ensure that people experiencing homelessness are not to the street. We have a discharge planning group that is already working on this, working very closely with our hospitals. The goal is that when someone walks in the door, they are identified as homeless. And then we work to case manage to ensure they release to shelter. And our final goal is the task force recognizes that specific populations face additional barriers to services and that existing models may not have the current capacity to sufficiently address the range of needs presented. Therefore, it recommends that the city, its partners and the community work together to develop population specific models for older adults. Transition age, youth, LGBTQ and reentry populations. Now for the real fun. This is how we make it all happen. This. These goals. Focus on these. This goal focuses primarily on the governance and what it takes for a full system of care, the data, capabilities, communication and funding. It is the essential backbone for an effective system. For governance. There is a recommendation to redesign the Continuum of care board so that it fully engages all the partners around homeless services. Right now, the Continuum of Care Board is specific to the two HUD funding, and the members are from providers that are part of the continuum of care. We would engage and strengthen that that board and to create a position to prepare the city for future housing funding, to really engage and be paying attention to various legislation, policies and other areas to make sure that the city is ready when funding becomes available to be able to access those funds. We also there are also recommendations to expand existing data sharing agreements. Often we have people who are in many systems and each of those systems holds the data and we don't know where people are landing. And so we want to be able to really be able to coordinate services for the best service for individuals and their families and design a common client consent that allows for all partners and consent to be able to work from the same forum. And when one is signed, then it works for all. And also to implement a data system to include our partners in the homeless services system and maybe a new platform and maybe our homeless management information system . We're not sure. But what we do know is we need a stronger data system. We also seek to increase our communications, education and advocacy. So the recommendations here focus on implementing. Right now, there is a strategic plan, a communications strategic plan that was created with the city and its partners in Dolby. And we seek to implement that communications plan to reduce stigma around homelessness. There is a lot of fear around homeless and is one of the reasons why people are concerned about having services within their communities. And we seek to address the stigma around homelessness also to start to build a yes in my backyard campaign. You hear a lot about NIMBYism and not in my backyard. We're here to turn it around and turn it into a yes in my backyard campaign. So you'll be hearing more about that and then continuing to advocate and to educate at the county, state and federal levels so that people understand the importance of all the different pieces of homeless. And we policies and funding follow that. And finally, the funding to meet the goals outlined in the plan, the city would need a dedicated $220 million in capital funding and 25 million in ongoing prevention and services funding. There are many avenues for identifying funding, including state and local opportunities. But to reach the outcomes we seek, there must be additional resources. In August, the City Council directed the city manager to identify different funding options and models. This work will begin in the New Year and will be presented to you. This is our umbrella. This is what the governance structure that we're seeking. So the continuum of care board would oversee and set outcomes and hold accountability, help oversee the data and implementation, build and strengthen the communications and education of those in our communities and in our governments to strengthen our advocacy approach and to coordinate our street response. Our services, workforce development and housing opportunities. In the end, this is our. This is our goal that we have a vision for an integrated system. It's really that we pull everybody together and everybody's coordinated so that we have a fully integrated approach for our department. I was one of our staff said we would need a trampoline. So we created we created this. So what we seek is that that we have been a safety net and there have been holes in the safety net. What we want is a trampoline so that we catch people, even if they fall through the safety net and they can bounce into the services that they need. Homeless housing and other opportunities for success. We have made a lot of progress toward the trampoline addition. A lot of additional funding has come in in this year through Measure H and through the state funding. We have we have additional homeless and low income housing units that are have already been built and are in the pipeline. We have a new behavioral urgent crisis center, which is a 24 hour mental health facility that people can go to in moments of crisis. We are in the process of negotiating a year round shelter. Beacon Point has been built for the permanent housing for veterans and mental health. America is building a comprehensive health and service center for those with mental illness. I'd like to thank the mayor for his stand, for convening the task force and his stand to end homelessness. I also think the City Council for keeping homeless services in the forefront of conversation. I think the staff in the City Manager's Office, Development Services and the Homeless Services Division for all their work behind the scenes to support a successful task force process. The research on preparing the report. None of this could have happened without all of you. So Honorable Mayors, City Council and those in the audience. As I've lived and worked in Long Beach, I've been in many conversations where it's people, where I've learned that people that I work with, people they were friends and others were once homeless. They've lived in their car. They've been very poor. They've had relatives who had very difficult mental illness situations and serious drug addictions. These stories are pervasive and they're your friends. Some turn out well and others are still seeking help. It's a conversation that impacts so many and needs everyone to engage to change the conversation. I hear most people talking about street homelessness. There's so much more to the story that you've heard about those on the street who are chronically homeless, or at some point they're because the system of prevention and early opportunity failed them. This could be a family system. It could be a school system. It could be an employment system. It could be a health system or a combination of two or more. Or many people don't generally choose homelessness when all is going well. The goal of the Task Force report is not only to create better opportunities to bring those who are chronically homeless into permanent housing opportunities, but also to slow the stream. We are much more humane when we work with those who are on the brink of or newly homeless to ensure they remain housed or have access to housing and to to income that meets their need. Then when we allow for chronically homelessness, chronic homelessness, we ask all of you to work with us to end homelessness in our great city. We all have skills, knowledge, expertize, connections and heart. Let's come together and end homelessness for the city. Thank you. And that concludes my presentation and I'm available for questions.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Ms.. Collopy. And I want to thank the staff. I'm going to first go to the city council for. For some questions and comments, and then we'll open it up. I want to just say a few and then I'm going to turn this over to those that have queued up. Let me let me just begin by again by thanking the staff and everyone that served and everyone that came out to speak on this topic. And I want to repeat, I'm saying that this is the biggest issue and challenge that faces us as a city. There is no bigger issue than the issue of homelessness. And it's not an issue that just is affecting us, but it is affecting every major city in the state of California and cities that often never had a deal and never had to experience what it's like to work and see people experiencing homelessness and the tragedy that that . That is. I'll also say that one thing that's very important for us as we think about this report is that particularly when we talk about funding this issue and the issue around homelessness and more broadly, the issue around housing will be the number one issue that our incoming governor. We'll go and work on in this first year. I know that he has asked for plans and ideas and funding opportunities that could make its way through the legislature this year. And so I will say that once this council adopts an official plan, and certainly there are a lot of policies that will have to be discussed and of course, voted on separately. All of those will happen, you know, not today, but other days. This are an opportunity for us to have a document and a plan that is ready for the governor and for the legislature to begin working on right away. And I'm really proud that we will have something to share as a starting point and something to guide our work ahead. And so I'm very optimistic that on the funding. We are better positioned than most cities to really begin. I'm seeking support from the state. As a member of the governor's transition team, this certainly will be the key issue that is highlighted at the table from myself, but as well as I know from others that are part of that team as well. It is, I think, almost everyone's top issue that are members of of that team. Let me also say that there are some things that are significant about this report that we've never done before in Long Beach. The first is it's important to recognize that those that were at the table included business leaders, included providers, including folks that actually have experience homelessness and of course, those who are doing the work every single day for the first time. And this is something that I asked for early on of the task force and a staff. We have actually set targets. If you look through your report, the report is actually full of numbers and data and actual targets. As a city. We actually have not done that before. We have not. We have always said we need we know we need more emergency shelter beds. We know we need permanent supportive housing. We know that to prevent. Additional people from falling into homelessness. Which staff estimates is thousands of people a year. We know that we need additional housing opportunities and the type of supportive housing that we have. For example, at the Villages at Cabrillo, which is really the model for for the future. And this report really talks to those targets and it sets numbers that were developed by staff and the task force. Around emergency shelter beds, which they set at 200 around permanent supportive housing, which they set at 200 additional units by 2023. And of course, around low income housing that is needed for homeless veterans, for families, for for people that are trying to get off the street. And that we can have access for people to go. These are the first time that we have actual numbers as presented by staff and by the group. I will also attest, important to note that we are building already a lot of this housing, so we have 5000 units currently in production. We also know that most of those units. Are in the downtown and around the downtown. And we know that we have a need for more projects like the project that's currently under construction at Anaheim. At. I'm sorry, at. Anaheim in Long Beach Boulevard, which is the Beacon Project, which is right now under construction and is building exactly the type of units that we're talking about supportive units for seniors, supportive units for veterans who are experiencing homelessness, supportive units for families. And so we know that we can do this work. We are doing it already, but now we have some targets. And for me, I like having numbers on the board and being able to see our progress every year to ensure that we're making our targets. I'll also note that this report does something else that we found to be interesting at the task force, which is that all of these organizations. Whether it's Cal State, Long Beach, Lombard City College, the school district. And I see our superintendent who was on the task force is here as well. Our hospitals and our providers. And the city. We we're all not sharing data. And while some information is being exchanged, we are all seeing the same people in different capacities. When the hospitals bring people in and the hospitals are seeing individuals that are homeless every day. That information is not rerouting back into our service delivery model. When Lombard City College is seeing students who are experiencing homelessness in their food pantry or going signing up for their classes, we're not connecting them directly to services that might be available at the Multi-Service Center. And so this idea of creating master data sharing agreements and perhaps a platform where all of this leads is something that we need to really work on as a community. There is an opportunity for all of us to do this work, and we're already doing it. In fact, when it comes to our Long Beach College promise, and if you look at the college promise and what what we've done around that program, there is incredible data sharing that that is happening. And so I think there's an opportunity for us and these recommendations to really begin to share information and be able to identify who we are talking to, what assistance they need, and know what we can do to improve their condition and their families condition. I will also just note that in this in this report, besides the direct targets on on housing, I'm very grateful to the focus on employment. There is a goal here to ensure that we are creating at least 600 new jobs for people experiencing homelessness. There are other recommendations around restructuring our workforce development work and engaging the Chamber of Commerce. Our bids and business leaders for programs are on opportunities to bring in people that are experiencing homelessness. And the idea, of course, is that folks should have access to work. But we also knowing what those barriers to work are. And that's ensuring that people that we're working with people to help clear records within our legal framework that we have and to ensure that we are providing the resources that people need. To get work. How do we expect people to work when they have nothing to show up in to work or may not have access to a computer? I may not have access to a place where they can even get a return phone call back. We also are aware and I think this is something that's very important and one that I personally am going to take up as a personal mission of mine besides all of this and hear. Is this goal set to create at least 400 new childcare slots for our low income families? We should be proud as a city that thanks to the work of Lambert Unified, especially, I think more than anyone in the city, we have increased the number of preschool seats and early childhood ed centers. And I really learned and focus on this idea of educating the child from birth through the school system and more of our low income kids. And low income youth today are in a pre-K or early childhood program than they were a few years ago. But there is still a need. And so if we can work together with the school district and with the state, who is looking at passing a comprehensive early childhood ed plan? We might be able to get some direct funding to really come closer to achieving universal preschool and to ensure that if there is a child experiencing homelessness with their family, that they have access to child care immediately. And so this is a great target and one I think that we can also take to the state and begin to work on. I also want to add that I think it's important to note that everyone on this council has contributed to this conversation and has stepped up in a variety of ways, and I'm really proud of everyone for doing that in the last few years. We have across the city committed to opening up our new mental health center in in the center of the city. We recently opened up the county partnership and the crisis emergency center up up just north of that. We have we have moved and ensured that our winter shelter is operational and part of the community, thanks to Councilman Austin. And we have continued to grow our income units and support low income folks, especially through the development of affordable housing for. Homeless individuals, which many of these units are for. Across across the city. And everyone here is working on these challenges. You've seen numerous pieces of legislation, whether they've been around motel conversions and housing from Councilman Richardson or whether they've been in a variety of other issues from Councilwoman Susie Price on the issue of homelessness and on addressing the challenges that we have as a community. And of course, everyone on everyone up here has contributed and is willing to to work. And so I just want to thank everyone here. They feel like everyone understands that this is a huge challenge. I also will. Well we'll just say and to to conclude my my points is every no reporter plan is static and exists permanently in one form. This will evolve. This will grow. This will change as we add and learn from what's working. What's not working. But I do think it's important for us to have targets. And I do want to thank everyone that's been involved in this work. And we have to all work together to really help solve this challenge. And so I just want to, again, thank the staff for for their work. And oh, and I'm sorry. And finally, I will say the idea of. Reforming our current continuum of care board to an umbrella wide organization that would include all of our partners, including our education partners in our hospitals and the private sector. I think is also a very good recommendation, which I'm very excited about. And so thank you again to everyone. And I know we have a lot of council questions and comments and I want to begin by turning to those. So with that, Councilmember Pearce.
Speaker 2: Oh, great. Thank you so very much, Mayor. And thank you. Staff. I know that this council gives you a lot. We are not short on ideas, that's for sure. Obviously, it's just the resources to get those ideas across the finish line. But I want to thank you guys for trying to put that in a comprehensive box so we can really understand all the areas that we're working on. I want to also say thank you so much for the task force, for the group that have been doing this work. A lot of you guys are volunteers that might not be in aligned with your direct mission as your organization. And so I just really want to recognize and appreciate you guys for stepping up for the last six months and know that it is here. And we are going to take this report and really try to put teeth to it. So I have not a lot of questions. I have just a few. I know when we have talked about different items, like we just got through the first part of our short term rental, we've got through identifying some funding for transitional parking . We're talking about the inclusionary housing policy. When we talk about the funds needed, are we looking at what resources we need as staff? I mean, in my mind, looking at all this work, this is a 3 to 5 year plan to be able to get where we need and have we identified we need extra staff and development services or we need extra staff in the health department.
Speaker 5: Okay. So yes, certainly. So I'll let Kelly talk specifically about some of the estimates. And these are estimates at this time. But this all gets done with people while we have a need for capital funding and we try to spell that out in the report. That could be for things like affordable housing and shelters and buildings. A lot of this needs to have an ongoing, stable funding source, and that is funding city staff. Kelly.
Speaker 6: So we haven't narrowed it down to specific numbers. But generally as part of the the 25 million that you see includes all the funding that we would need to be able to to staff all of the different aspects of it, as well as the data and the governance and all of those different pieces. So we currently the staff, at least in homeless services, are primarily funded through the continuum of care. And so the focus there is around community of care as it would be able to expand. Beyond that, we're going to have to look at additional funding, but that is built in. That was part of the estimate in that part, yes.
Speaker 2: And one of the reasons why I bring it up, as I know I've had this conversation with city staff a couple of times and I know bureaucracy. Sometimes we move a little slow, but particularly when we're throwing everything at you guys and trying to prioritize it. But recognizing like with the inclusionary I know we've brought on consultants, that work has been started and staff is telling us it'll be a year before we have a policy in front of us. It's been three years since we've been talking about it. So just wondering for thinking outside of the box about how to get that work done on a shorter timeline. So I don't need an answer on that, but just hear that that's a concern that I have, is that we're doing a lot of work and what is it going to take to kind of bring some of that low hanging work home? That's not necessarily capital. But again, you guys have done a fantastic job, so don't let me jumping right into questions, diminish the fact of how proud I am of the work that's in front of us. One other question I had on demographics. I'm looking at the presentation that was presented today and it says 30% women and the remaining men. I'm curious what happened to the transgender number?
Speaker 6: So 33% of the of those who are identified on the street were LGBTQ. So we didn't break out transgender versus versus non transgender in this last count.
Speaker 2: Okay. And the reason why I bring that up is I think it's important that we talk about LGBT seniors, youth and today as well, but understanding that those populations each have a very different resource need and health need. I mean, you're talking about somebody that might be in the middle of, you know, some type of transition. And so leaving them out of the conversation and we've just had two or three items talking about our transgender community, I think it's a little short sighted. So I want to make sure in the future that we are pulling those numbers out.
Speaker 6: It was agreed. So one of the key pieces was in goal seven is really understanding that there are different levels of service and things that we need to address separately. So we didn't in the count ask specifically the question around transgender. And so that's why I can't call it out differently. There was it's so it's 3% overall, but that may be something we could do in the next account in January. We'll have to look and see what the survey looks like.
Speaker 2: I appreciate that. I thought I had saw the number in a previous report and then saw it left out in this one. So yeah, if we could include that in our in our homeless count.
Speaker 6: Sure. We'll look at the possibility of doing that.
Speaker 2: Thank you. I appreciate that. And then the one thing I wanted to say just for for folks listening and really trying to get my head around, we often feel like we're throwing a lot of ideas at this, this challenge that we have. And I know across the city, different parts of the cities have different beliefs on why people are homeless or what's what's happening with them. But I think the numbers that you provide, I mean, putting it together, 50% are homeless because of jobs, incomes or bills, not because of drug addiction or incarceration. And so I really appreciate you know, I was looking at the list that you put together of who was on the the task force. And it was good to see some of our business leaders on there. And thinking outside the box on that one thing that we brought up a couple of years back, but I don't think we agenda is it and I really haven't had conversations with folks until I looked at this report. One idea that was brought up to us by somebody in the apartment association was renters insurance. And the fact that renters insurance doesn't just cover if your home is burglarized, but it also covers damages done to the home by a renter. And so I'm curious if we've had any conversations around that. I think Michigan has some requirements to have renters insurance. And then there's another type of insurance called gap insurance. So wondering if we've had conversations of the biggest challenge, 50% is jobs and income. If there's a gap insurance option where you say you pay instead of $10 a month, you're paying $25 a month, and then it might provide you a cushion whenever you lose your job. Unexpectedly.
Speaker 6: Insurance was not part of the task force conversation, but it could be, you know, it would be something we could look at in the future.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I see it. I think it would go under. So. The incentive to engage landlords. There was an idea brought up by the apartment association, so I think I've got a memo I'll share with you guys, but I would love to see that in conversations moving forward and maybe that's a great thing at the state level to be talking about. Is is there a gap insurance option?
Speaker 6: Okay.
Speaker 2: Give me a second. Again, I think that the tracking I love the idea. As a mayor, I go around sharing information. I have numbers from the LGBT center on what they believe the LGBT homeless population is. I have numbers from my girls in action that say one in seven youth are homeless. And so while we have the count, I think being able to across the board, who do you have that's struggling? Are they sleeping on a couch? Therefore, they're not considering themselves homeless, even though they're looking for transitional support. So I think that those are all things that I would love to see in the future. And the biggest and the last thing is just timelines. When we talk about a strategic plan like I've done for nonprofits in the past, it's how do we prioritize and how do we say, okay, these three things work together. So here's our timeline. And working with the council officers on resources, I know this issue is really important to a lot of us. And so I've got great staff there itching to to help out. And so just thinking strategically about how we prioritize them and how we leverage the stuff that we have on on our teams. The last thing is the child care. So you mentioned co-op models. One great co-op model that I would love to work on with the mayor at the state level is a co-op child care model. Where you have co-op, you're building ownership with those that are providing child care to those that need it most. And so I'm really excited about working on that as well. I will let my colleagues speak now. And just again, congratulations to the team, to everybody that's played a role in this. And I'm really looking forward on getting some timelines and next steps. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman. Councilman Price.
Speaker 7: Thank you. I too want to echo the comments of my colleague and thank staff and the members of the task force to their excellent work on this on this endeavor. It absolutely is a much needed discussion that we need to have, and I'm grateful that we're having it together with the members of the task force, because I think that it's it's just a multifaceted issue. And although there are groups that believe there's one solution, I believe there's multiple different areas that we need to be looking at this and approaching the situation from several different vantage points. I don't believe there's one need or deficiency that if we were able to solve it would solve the problem because that's not been replicated any other place in the country or internationally. I do have a couple of questions that I that I had based on the report, which was excellent. But are the demographics that we've noted in Long Beach similar to similar sized cities within the region?
Speaker 6: Yes, there.
Speaker 7: Are in terms of gender, racial demographics, that kind of thing or.
Speaker 6: Well, the city of Long Beach is more is is more diverse in its demography than many other cities around us. And so it reflects it reflects that demography overall. But I think in terms of around substance use and mental illness and others, it it reflects what we're seeing in other locations and nationally.
Speaker 7: What about the data on the cause of homelessness? Is that data derived from the point in time count?
Speaker 6: No, it is not. It's a national study that was brought that was brought forth. And so those are national numbers.
Speaker 7: Okay. So those aren't based on in Long Beach, are we able to do any sort of data gathering when we do our next point in time count for our local homeless population to find out what some of the individual demographics and causes of homelessness might be? Is that something that's a possibility?
Speaker 6: We are working on developing the survey at this time and we're working on it. There are so many data elements we want to capture and it's just how long will someone speak to us in the middle of that, you know, early in the morning at a park. So we will be working to capture as much data as possible, and we can look at that as one of the data elements. Certainly.
Speaker 7: Great. I agree with the mayor and Councilmember Pierce regarding data sharing. And this is something we've been talking about for a long time. And I think it's that has to be the number one priority right now, because figuring out a way to connect multiple departments and multiple agencies is something that is critical, I think, to our long term success. Whatever solutions we decide to implement, if those solutions and services aren't shared among multiple agencies, then they're really not as effective as they can be. So figuring out through the use of technology how we can share data is is really important. And, you know, one of the things that I'm going to talk about when I give some of my comments is, you know, we have as a council and I agree with the mayor wholeheartedly that everyone on this council has taken a part and trying to figure out what to do with this problem, because it's affecting our residents , it's affecting everything that we see, what we read. And so if you look at the past two years on this council, I know several of my colleagues and I have brought various items to try to approach this issue in a piecemeal fashion. I, myself and Jack and I have put together a list. We've brought 15 items in the last year and a half to deal with homelessness or homeless related issues or quality of life type issues infecting residents. You know, things like requiring our police department to use to carry Narcan so that they can take advantage of the opportunity to reverse symptomology of of an overdose. Things like better enforcement mechanisms that within the law take take some of the public safety or public health threats that we've seen away, things like, you know, how we can design our environment such that they're safer, how we can you know, last week we brought an item that talked about having an audit of the number of shelter beds and service beds that are available. And so I think we've approached this issue a bit piecemeal because frankly, we're all looking for out of the box ideas that are implemented by other cities in other jurisdictions that we might be able to try here. Our homeless work program, which was an item that we brought, is one such example. And so I'm grateful that we're having this discussion. But all, every item that we've brought really can benefit from data sharing and data sharing methodologies because there's so many different departments involved with addressing the homelessness issue on a day to day basis. This the. Access to services. Opportunity for services. Availability of services. All of that can be made much more efficient with data sharing. So in my opinion, that should be a major priority. I know that we as a council have also discussed providing incentives for landlords to take vouchers. Do you know what the status of that endeavor is?
Speaker 6: Currently the measure h funds incentives for people coming through the homeless services division. So we are able to do that specifically for people who are homeless. It does not provide funding for people who are not coming through the coordinated entry system. So if someone is if someone is eligible for a housing choice voucher but does not have access, is not homeless, then the incentives do not apply. So one of the recommendations within this report is to look at various incentives to be able to do to be able to do that. At this time, we haven't had the funding to be able to provide those those incentives. And so that program has not moved forward.
Speaker 7: Okay. That's good to know. Do you have any thoughts on what accounts for the 250% increase from last year and reports of homelessness?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think so. What we've seen is while there's a decline in homelessness overall or that we saw in the 2017 count, is that that we see homeless people in different locations than we used to see them. And so, you know, as we've seen and you've seen the maps before, there's been a sort of shift as to where people are, where people are spending their time, and they've moved into neighborhoods where they didn't used to be in neighborhoods before. And so I think what is happening is that with more people are now being faced with homelessness in their communities and so that they're calling for additional supports and trying to figure out what to do . We get calls about how do we help? And then we get calls about, please come help somebody. Or sometimes it's please can move this person. So it's really a mix of different calls.
Speaker 7: I know that in for the winter shelter and looking at the stats from last year there there was routinely vacancy at the winter shelter. Yes. What what how do you. I'm just trying to educate myself. How do we. To account for that. If the housing need is great and shelter space is something that we need, why is it that we have vacancies at our winter shelter?
Speaker 6: Sleeping in a shelter. Um. But it comes with structure, it comes with rules, it comes with things that many people who live on the street are not ready to engage in. And so if unless the weather is really bad and last year it was a pretty mild winter, there was not as many needs for people to move forward. When the weather is worse, we find much higher utilization. In the past, we've oversubscribed it and we fit people wherever we could find them. But so we do market. I mean, we we get the information out there through all of our providers. And everywhere we can, there are pickup locations. So people can't just walk up. There are pick up locations. We have three this year. We had two last year because of all the construction that was growing and continues to go on. But we were able to identify a third site. I think that that will help as well.
Speaker 7: And so that that leads to a really great point. If if. Having to adjust to a structured environment if that is a hard thing, which I granted, it absolutely is for individuals who are living on the street. How would additional housing assist us in getting those folks to accept the structure and and overcome that?
Speaker 6: That's what permanent supportive housing does. So as I as we've talked about, you know, an average of 17 contacts on the street. That's relationship building. So it's ongoing relationship building either through outreach team or quality of life teams, the heart team. Everybody out there is kind of the relationship that if someone is finally ready to come in. So the winter shelter doesn't have the opportunity for those relationship building. And so once that relationship is built and there's the beginning of an engagement and service, then at that point we start to really be able to build capacity. But we know that when people move into housing, sometimes they're sleeping on their balconies, sometimes they're putting up a tent in the living room, sometimes because they're trying to recreate what was comfortable. And so it is it's a long term change process that needs a lot of support. And the winter shelter doesn't it doesn't meet the same levels of capacity.
Speaker 7: And probably a year round shelter wouldn't either. That would just be a temporary solution.
Speaker 6: The year round shelter would be something that people could stay in for longer periods of time before they get access to other kinds of other kinds of shelter.
Speaker 7: I'm sorry, Kelly. Can I ask you to repeat that? I apologize.
Speaker 6: All right. You two over there just came the the year round shelter would allow. So the winter shelters, nightly people leave, you know, so it's open at 5:00 at night and people leave at seven in the morning. The year round shelter provides for longer term access. So if people are working but need shelter until they can afford to move into them. So there is that possibility of more engagement and service.
Speaker 7: Okay, that's great. And you touched on a really great point. I mean, I think everyone here has an opinion of what they think would mitigate or potentially even solve homelessness. In my opinion, I think that outreach is there's nothing more effective than individual outreach. There's nothing more effective in changing the course of someone's life than support relationship building, providing opportunities for substance abuse or mental health counseling and assistance, providing job skills and training life skills, and really supporting people through that process. And you see it all the time when people, you know, in my day job, when you see people go through a court incentivized treatment program, which basically is a court order and they go through that collaborative process, you see amazing transformations, but that's based on outreach. And so investing in future, an additional outreach, I think is is a very important part of this puzzle. You know, one of the consequences that we've seen as a result of the increase in homelessness or the redistribution in homelessness in terms of going into neighborhoods, is impact on quality of life for residents. And I think that's something that we really have to address and talk about. And I know sometimes that comes across, as, you know, maybe off topic a little bit, but it's hard to have the conversation about preventative and supportive services for homelessness without the discussion about what do we do with the impacts that some of the residents around us might be experiencing in terms of being victims of crime, even if they may be lower level crimes? And what are we doing to responsibly, humanely and productively address those issues so that individuals have the opportunity to get help that they need? For example, our in-house jail clinician. That's not one of the topics that was highlighted tonight, but I think that has been an amazing program. And the fact that the police department has picked up that clinician's salary for the remainder of the year I think is huge and it is something that I think we should invest in more because when you have the opportunity and you get somebody at the moment where they want to take advantage of services and they want to participate in something that might be life changing, I think you want to invest as much resources as you can into that moment. The quality. The I team a few years ago did a presentation on high frequency offenders and they found that between and I, I'm going off the top of my head here. But what I believe was something like 835 individuals had committed. 12 or more offenses in a period of, I believe it was 2012 to 2016. And when they interviewed those individuals and again, those numbers may not be exact, I'm literally going off the top of my head from a presentation that was a couple of years ago. But the gist of it was that 47% of those individuals that were identified as high frequency offenders listed themselves as being homeless. Less than 5% listed their address as a P.O. Box or connected with a nonprofit provider, which which clearly indicates that we have individuals who don't have a permanent residence, who probably don't have a job and are probably committing these quality of life offenses out of necessity, whether it be, you know, urinating in public or camping illegally or, you know, theft, minor theft. And those are things that we really, I think, need to focus on in terms of as a result of the homelessness situation, the residents might be experiencing some of these quality of life impacts. And so I think that some of the programs that we've participated in and really focused on, like the jailhouse clinician, have been very valuable. And I and I hope that we're able to find those more so that we can have more of those resources for individuals who do, you know, find themselves in the criminal justice system and also our investment in diversion programs. We've done a really great job, I think, as a city in investing in diversion programs, and I think that's been really, really important. You know, the one thing I've gone on a few ride alongs with our homeless outreach team and the one thing that repeatedly comes up is the lack of detox beds. And I'm glad that that was included in this report. But what is the plan for us to increase the number of detox beds we have? Because that is such a barrier to entry for a lot of housing.
Speaker 6: It is. So funding for substance use services is L.A. County funding. And so the L.A. County subsidy, their substance abuse prevention and Control Bureau right now is actually in a needs assessment process. So you've asked for a needs assessment around that. That's not data that I have, but they are doing it. And so I'll be bringing that back to you when it becomes available. So what the what the issue is, is, one, provide finding providers who are willing to be providers around detox and then looking at the different abilities to fund it. Some of the services are available through Medicaid. So it's so it's covered detox in many cases and not a covered space. And so we have to figure out all those different things to try and bring it in. But we'll be looking very closely, working very closely with the county to identify those possibilities.
Speaker 7: Okay. And I know the city wide data on the demographics of our homeless population, but every right along that I've been on and every officer I've talked with, substance abuse and mental illness, seem to be major factors in terms of what they're seeing when they interact and try to do outreach. And so I think investing in additional training that helps to deal with those populations is also really important. You know, I'm going to finish my comments here by just sharing one thing, and I shared it with our city manager today. We have all as a council come together with different ideas that we've seen used in other cities, things that we've seen, tried and presented them as far as possible pilots in the city of Long Beach. And that's great. And while I think it's good for us to be proactive, I think this is an issue that affects multiple departments in the city. And I think we as a council should really think about prioritizing a single individual that's housed out of the city manager's office that can take charge of the homeless issues and coordinate all of the departments and address all of the different factors that are associated with homelessness. That individual should be the one that's coming up with ideas that they've seen tried in other cities that we can implement. As a pilot here, that individual would be working out of the city manager's office, so there would be no single focus, whether it's, you know, housing, enforcement, health, you know, treatment, all of those things would not be to various departments, but they would be housed within the city manager's office so that they provide a focal place for us to be able to, you know, have the fresh ideas, the out of the box ideas come because it may be that right now the health department has taken the huge burden of this topic. You absolutely have. But there are pieces of this crisis that really are outside the scope of the health department, and it's not fair to request the health department to solve those issues. So if we get a call from residents saying there's, you know, a homelessness situation and someone is afraid for their life, let's say, because someone's mentally unstable, that's really not an issue that the health department should have to carry the burden on. That might be a police issue and that kind of thing.
Speaker 6: So just there is an inter-departmental team that meets across all of this. So there so while the Health Department does lead a lot of these efforts, there is strong coordination on the ground for just those kinds of calls. So I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just like so there are there many opportunities where all of our departments are on the street in contact every day about addressing things, but there is a recommendation within their support as someone who really overseeing and coordinating like not just around identifying possible opportunities for additional funding, but what does it look like to help look at it as an overall system? So between the continuum of care board and that that's that is one of the key focus areas of the recommendations.
Speaker 7: Great. And please don't mishear me. I am so proud of the coordinated effort that the city does with multiple departments. Please don't miss hear me on that. I, I absolutely am aware of that. And I think that is a very, very positive aspect of what Long Beach offers in this area. I do think, however, that we should have a like a homeless czar type person whose number one focus is to focus on the issues of homelessness. It should not be a council office that's expending over 40 hours to put together an agenda item based on research that they've done for projects throughout the nation. And to bring that back, you know, we brought an item over a year ago. It was called Comprehensive Approach to Homelessness. You know, I will say candidly, it was not met with open arms. It took our team weeks and weeks to put that item together. And I would encourage and ask that that you go back and look at it, because what it was was us researching all these different programs that have been utilized from housing to substance abuse to mental health. Everything that we have seen done in other states to say, is this something we can try in Long Beach? What would it take for us to try this in Long Beach? We appreciate that that we had the opportunity to do that, but that we're not subject matter experts. And it would be nice to have a subject matter expert within the city who's focused on homelessness, not just the housing piece, not just the health piece, not just the criminal justice piece, but the totality. And looking at it, there are a lot of other cities that have done that. And how's that? Homeless coordinator, homeless czar, whoever, whatever you want to call it, within either the CEO's office or the city manager's office in order to give it some independence and objectivity and neutrality outside of connection with a particular department. Because this issue affects every department. It affects our development services in terms of our zoning and density. It affects our police department, it affects our public works department, it affects our health department. Every department is affected by this. So in my opinion, it should be the city manager's office that has someone in-house that that coordinates and oversees the program. But but that's not to take away from the amazing work that we've been doing. And certainly it's just me sharing candidly some of the observations in terms of what other jurisdictions have done. But I think this was an excellent report and I look forward my my hope would be that we have a plan that comes back that, as the mayor suggested, there are some specific, quantifiable goals associated with. This report. It would be great to have a plan come back. That would be the city of Long Beach's plan that has these quantifiable goals and these recommendations incorporated therein that we can really follow and track and work towards as as a council. So thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman. Councilmember Richardson.
Speaker 8: Thank you, Mayor Garcia. I have a lot of notes. I just have to say, I really love this approach. You know, it started with convening a group of stakeholders. You know, multidisciplinary, different backgrounds, different expertize, opened up a forum for people to come out and share. And in the end, you have a very clear book that frames the context, gives the data, and gives very clear recommendations. I really appreciate the support this approach, especially with an issue as complex as homelessness and housing. This makes it very much easier for us to understand our role here as city council and how we can help move this plan along. Specifically, I want to give some attention to the sit in the context page in the report. It's balanced. It's not just focused on the responsibility of the individual that's facing homelessness, but it does address systems, largely economic systems, and aligns well with the focus that the Economic Development Committee and the Economic Development Commission and Department are taking up with economic inclusion focus. I also love the context of upstream versus downstream, and the visual was very clear. I'd never seen that before, but to me it's smart. You invest in upstream, you save money downstream. The more you place in upstream, the less you have to spend downstream. And it's very similar to this this change we made around violence prevention. If we spend and make more investments into violence prevention and youth development, then on the back side, you spend a lot less. You save money on the sit to the entire system. So I think that makes sense there, you know. You know, I've heard a number of colleagues talk about, you know, all the things that the council has done is true. We've we've come up with idea after idea, and it's almost impossible to, you know, place it all together. But this this attempt I see a lot reflected here. You know, I know we talked about we had a comprehensive item where we looked at landlord incentives. I know that we've rolled out the funded portion that goes toward homelessness. And I was a part of our strategy. We had we had funding identified to sort of target those vouchers and landlord incentives to those experiencing homelessness. Homelessness. And the idea was that, you know, if there is funding to deploy, let's figure out how to deploy those as fast as those funds, as fast as we can to those who need it most. That made sense. Now we can probably it seems like they're supported here at the council to identify more more money to expand this outside of just homelessness. But people on the brink, I know that a part of that conversation was also creating the policy around establishing a nondiscrimination policy on source of income, essentially saying that you can't, you know, advertise we don't accept Section eight. You have to look at, you know, evaluate the profile of every single prospective renter. I think that makes sense. I love the focus on the conversation about, yes, we need a permanent Year-Round shelter. I've expressed support for this, but that's only a fraction of the shelter beds that we need. It's 125 of 600 beds that are needed. And so we have to really focus on what's next beyond this year round shelter house to expand shelter beds. I want I'm going to get to this later. But the dedicated revenue for housing development is very clear here. And I think that's important because it's not something we can hide from. It's something we have to deal with. And I appreciate that motel conversion is included here because, you know, it's it's low hanging fruit and other cities are engaging in this. And they could help us free two birds with one key by addressing our nuisance motels, investing into those to create real transitional housing opportunities. The context of this this report really tells me that there's two needs from the city council. One policy. There are a number of policies here. And in order for us to really understand and implement those policies, we're going to need a timeline to go along with this. So a timeline understand if there are ten different policy items associated as report and we're already talking about council meetings are running longer. And in all of that, we need to have a realistic understanding on when these are going to come to council so we can be prepared to deal with it. Are we going to dedicate one month in 2019, one month to housing and bang everything out? Are we going to space it out? You know, one major housing piece per quarter. I really want to understand a timeline so that we can really approach this with utmost seriousness. The other part that I know that we're going to need is is is funding. And I know that that, you know, we advocated for funding in this last budget, $50,000 to kick off this conversation. I have some content. I have some some feedback to give today, but I think we should kick that off immediately. Next, in terms of back to the context, you know, on this first page setting the context, there's a very interesting statement that I you know, I appreciate that how candidate is in placing this into the report because I know there have been other reports and there's been resistance with placing this in. So I want to call this out. I want to read this out. It says, African-Americans are approximately 13% of the population in Long Beach, but are one third of those experiencing homelessness. This overrepresentation in the homeless population mirrors poverty and unemployment trends within the city. Historical housing segregation practices that led to decreased homeownership and housing access nationally and in Long Beach has led to long term impacts on the financial success of the city's African-American population. I know that it took it took effort, and I know that it was a little bit of a risk to speak so clearly. But this is this is essentially the way that we have to begin to think about things and address racial equity in our city if we want to continue to if we value diversity, if we truly do, we have to acknowledge and address those populations who are having a difficult time surviving in our city if we want those communities to continue to live in our city. It's a it's a moral and social and economic essential in our in our city. We have to we have to focus on this. So I think we should dig a little bit deeper. And given the magnitude of this with the African-American community moving forward, I think that we should involve African-American leadership into this discussion to a greater degree. So there's a few, few other things I just want to kind of call out here. So on the page where he talks about recommendations. You know, I think all these recommendations are great. We've talked about the motel conversion. We've talked about the source of income prohibition policy, but where it talks about identifying properties and incentivize property owners to look at shared housing models. That was also a recommendation from the EC in the economic development work around the everyone in initiative. And since then, you know, the city has been given a grant to focus to bring in an organization called Project Equity that focuses on establishing worker owned co-ops. Since we're looking at co-op models for housing and co-op models for for workers, I think there's a synergy there to unite those two conversations. So I would I would certainly say whoever elevated this co-op piece to be represented here, we have to connect the dots there. Also on long term 2fi highlighted this says establish more geographic geographically equitable distribution of lower income housing units and supportive services across the city. Elicit commitments from every council district to provide for a certain number of affordable, affordable housing units. I think we have to expand that to say not just the affordable housing units, but also shelter beds. And the reality is we you know, north lobbies between districts eight and nine have hosted the winter shelter eight of the last ten years. And so unless we talk about that very publicly, that there needs to be I don't know what the barriers are, but there's more geography, the north Long Beach to address homelessness. And so we should we should get very serious about that. Next. I really love the fact that we have some some goals here, some tangible goals with some timelines, you know, reduce the number of people fall in the homelessness to 1500 or fewer by 2023. That seems like, you know, that seems like a very clear attainable goal. That's so I truly support that. Also, see, when we talk about reducing barriers to employment, to those with criminal histories or systems impacted by the criminal justice system, it raises a question. I see that we reference the RISE initiative and we've talked about expanding our employment opportunities. But the question I have is do we have a local ban, the box policy that applies to jobs and or housing?
Speaker 5: I think we'd have to follow up with you on the on that specific one.
Speaker 8: I know that we've talked about implementing statewide ballot box policies, but if we don't have one locally, I would love to see that called out here. It's a best practice in cities to start changing the culture from the culture to say when people reintegrate into the communities, they have to have a job and they have to live . And so the man the box policy is something we should you know, we should revisit. If we haven't, we haven't already. But again, this is this is.
Speaker 5: And Councilmember on that, I do recall that there was that state legislation about ban the box. I believe you mean that you can't ask whether or not somebody has been incarcerated. Unemployment, you know, unemployment. So, yes, and we do with the city of Long Beach, we do adhere to state law. We don't ask that question anymore until after you go through the lifespan process.
Speaker 8: Now, that's the city, but having a local policy would apply to two businesses.
Speaker 5: We'd have to do more research on what this law required and whether that was just for public agencies or for.
Speaker 8: Okay. Well, look for I look forward to hearing back the context. I want to know if this is something that the business community would be open to, if this is something that's feasible, because if so, then we should pursue it, something we should pursue. There's a lot here and I, I truly plan to engage here, but I want to close out with two things. One, when we talk about the funding, the estimate to need the estimated funding that we need to meet our goals. I appreciate Councilwoman Pearce acknowledge, you know, requesting that staff is included. So that's good that this level of funding will deliver the non policy elements of this plan that I'm clear on how we get to that number. It's a big number, 25 million ongoing. 217 one time. Few questions that I have. Number one, we California just passed a new bond, housing bond. Has that been factored into this? The new California housing bond. It has that source of revenue been factored into this? 17, 217 million. The.
Speaker 6: The the bond is not. I don't believe in Patrick. Where's Patrick? You know, as Patrick, you're from Development Services. Much more aware of how the funding works through that. Sure. I don't believe that we can directly apply for that, but it has to go through non-profits. Is that a true?
Speaker 8: Yes, that's correct. None of that funding is directly available to the city. But does it will it help us close the gap? Because we have partners like century villages, Cabrillo and, you know, link housing and others. Will it help us close this gap? Yes, sir. Yes, Councilmember, it will. It'll be part of the funding that's leveraged with the with the funding that we contribute to the project will still need local sources of revenue, but we may need not need as much if.
Speaker 6: We actually the so that the 217 there is the funding the city would have to generate to leverage the rest of the funding necessary for the unit. So that actually doesn't buy you that many units. It's what the city would need to capitalize to be able to pull down and address the state funding and other resources that
Speaker 5: . Councilmember, I think your point is, is is what color of money are we going to be looking for? We're looking for every color. So we would look for that bond money. We'd look for county money, there'd be other state money. There could be local money. We're not specific on where the funding source would come from.
Speaker 8: Okay, great. And then secondly, I know that we used to have the 20% set aside redevelopment from tax increment. We didn't have to raise our taxes. We knew it generated 2022 million a year dedicated to affordable housing. And that's been gone for five years now. And we do know that there are models now that to restore tax increment finance, one is the new affordable housing district and second is the Korea Community Redevelopment Investment Act. Whatever it is, they both allow for us to do a few things. We can establish a tax increment finance district specifically for affordable housing. And two, you can bond against it. You can bond against it without raising any taxes. You bond against that future increment. Now, I'm you know, Tom, I'm on the SAG board and we do have funding available to do a preliminary study. I would like for us to engage with that funding to have a top line study on a citywide, affordable housing district if we're not able to restore the 20 million a year from redevelopment. But what if we were able to restore ten by looking at this model 2 million a year that significantly would drop what we need , cut what we need without raising taxes. So have we have we have evaluated this or have we met with SAG about this?
Speaker 5: So we haven't met directly with SAG on this, but we are very interested in that conversation. One of the things that staff are recommending is when that 50,000 becomes available that you appropriated in the F18 budget, I'm sorry, 19 budget, we expect that to become available in February, that we would use a portion we estimated to be about $10,000 to do a high level study of those revenue options so that we can fully understand them and see if we get some estimates. If there's SAG money available to do that, I'd be very there.
Speaker 8: Is that. Well, I know that it's available and they're looking for cities to to engage them to leverage that funding to do the top level, at least the initial analysis. So that's the final thing. I'll say that the governance structure I appreciate the fact that we put some attention to the governance structure moving forward. I think it's it's it's great that we have a long, broad coalition here, private sector, public sector, nonprofit developers, everyone at the table, community groups at the table, but also understand the value of having an entire department that is dedicated to this to this work and the value that it brings. Given that we're we're one of three cities, an entire state with a health department, I think our city managers department has deputy city managers, assistant city managers that have made sure that they've lent that city wide support from the city manager's office. I like that model. I like that the governance structure has been endorsed by the Everyone Home Task Force. And I think as a City Council, we should just acknowledge that this very important department has the only department head in the city that is not supported or funded through general fund revenue. So our health department director, her salary, her position is not funded from our general fund. And frankly, you know, if we're serious about the health department, we need to get more serious about making it a permanently funded department of our city as we're taking on these issues that impact all of us. And so I'll I'll close with that. Thank you all for your comments. And I look forward to continue this conversation.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Councilmember Councilwoman Gonzalez.
Speaker 1: Thanks to all the task force, first and foremost, for your hard work. I know many of you come from different angles and experiences, and I really appreciate the work as well as our health department and the mayor for pushing this forward and getting us to a plan. So first and foremost, I would say similar to what Councilmember Price mentioned, I think a lot of our council colleagues have had we've put together policies. I remember when I first started, I had one, and it seems like there's a lot that, you know, was included in here, but it would have been nice to maybe have a an aggregate policy sort of tracker of what we've done on the city council, because I know a lot of us have done that. That work in that sense? That's first and foremost. I agree with that because I think all of us have done a bit of everything relative to this subject. So first, on the issue of affordable housing. I love the fact that we are implementing we're saying it very clearly that it is a city wide approach and we had our short term rental rental discussion and I certainly, you know, made mention specifically about Adus and the ADU should be used for affordable housing. And that was the state intention. And I think that that is something that we I will continue to reiterate, and I know that other areas like L.A. and L.A. work to incentivize. And I was part of those discussions in my in my other career about how to connect people who have to use with the health department or with, you know, perhaps if we have the data system to be able to get the most vulnerable populations and get them into to rentals and adus. I will also say, as a committee member on the L.A. River Master Plan Committee, we are absolutely discussing affordable housing along the river, which I think is absolutely needed. And that is from the whole 51 mile stretch along the 710. So data sharing, absolutely important. But I will add to that is we also need a data aggregation system and I and I see this and I'll explain I see this a lot with a lot of the faith based organizations in downtown. We have multiple meetings monthly my staff to talk about. You know, First Congregational Church, and I'm just picking people. But First Congregational Church has no idea what, you know, Christian Outreach is doing. And Grace Church on Atlantic has no idea what first friend's church is doing. And I sit down with ten of these faith based and social service providers, and a lot of them don't even know what each other is doing. I've had Elsa at these meetings, and I don't know what could be done on a micro level to assist in that. Aggregating data to see who who has lunch at a certain hour, maybe we can supplement that. I know we've we've talked about that, but I think it's very important just to, you know, because I have downtown and a lot of the social services are in downtown. And I think a lot of times they just need help in that sense. It could also be in the form of a best practices guide as well. Not to influence their models because we never want to do that overtly. But I think just being able to provide them with some sort of best practices guide in the city of what a good neighbor policy could be. Because, you know, we've had issues in front of some of these establishments where, you know, people are lining up. There's encampments out front. There's a lot going on. And I know it's a lot for businesses and neighbors. So something to share there. And then access to services city wide as well. I think we just had a discussion, I know many of my colleagues have regarding our with our veterans commissioners about, you know, services for veterans in different areas. You know, I don't even know. Like the VA provides services in terms of health care that MSK has services, but where else can we have services that maybe, you know, mothers and children? I don't know if there's another idea on that. Have we discussed additional health.
Speaker 7: Care.
Speaker 6: For, you know, for people for individuals experiencing homelessness or families? So the children's clinic is loco, is co-located, multi-service center. They also have a van. And so they the they will they locate at various points throughout the city to provide service. There will be an additional clinic as part of the new Mental Health America Center. So they'll have an additional clinic there. So there are there are multiple opportunities through the children's clinic, as well as the comprehensive the county's comprehensive care system as a clinic space there.
Speaker 1: Okay, great. And I'm certainly aware of those. I just think maybe there's other vulnerable populations that we can look at. And, you know, like I said, just talking to the veterans commissioners, I think there were other areas and ideas that they had so that I'm sure will come to fruition once they provide additional information on their strategic plan and then in terms of child care. Are there any grants currently for expanding services? I know like for instance, the Long Beach Day Nursery wanted to expand to infant care. A lot of the resident residents leave their three year olds there, but unfortunately can't leave their one month old. So they're still in the same situation.
Speaker 6: I'm not aware of grants right now for that opportunity, but through our early childhood education plan, that's one of the areas is to look at the expansion of opportunity. So we will be through that plan, also engaging and looking for different opportunities. So it's a nice coordinated model, but at this moment I'm not aware of any.
Speaker 1: Okay, great. Thank you. And then moving on to transition to aged youth, I know our housing authority does a wonderful job. Just another thought here is in reducing in that prevention piece of reducing the cycle of recidivism and homelessness. I know there are a lot of L.A. County programs that provide you know, once you're in housing authority and you have a voucher, if you have children, you know, being able to get them to understand like a career pathway so they don't continue the cycle of homelessness. There is a great group called Teens Exploring Tech, and they actually work with housing authority, the housing authority, if they're in foster care or housing, that they help them get into careers in tech or at least think about it. And they're in a program throughout, you know, their their school years, basically. So just something to think about there and then in terms of record clearing. Supervisor Hilda Solis just put out a press release regarding a mobile outreach program she's working on, which I think would be great. And in addition, quote, America, they have a site called Clear My Record, Dawg. You can actually clear your record online. It's like a ten minute process. And they've cleared about 500,000 records, if you can believe that. And, you know, maybe it's something that our team can coordinate with, but I think it's certainly a value to connect with them. They connect with ten other counties in California. And then lastly, digital inclusion. I know that's a plan I'm certainly very passionate about. I know I hope that we can overlay this. And I'll just say that, you know, in January we're reconvening discussions and I would hope that we can overlay that plan with this plan. And then very last thing is, I know I've talked about this and it's very low hanging fruit, but a lot of residents still don't understand services. And as much as like we, I feel like I tell them over and over and over again. I'm wondering, it's something very easy, but perhaps thinking about fake news on our website and or just a one sheet that tells them exactly what to do that we can just share around in social media. I feel like that's half the battle with downtown residents is they have no idea all the great work that we're doing.
Speaker 6: So that is that we're working on that right now as a city therapy office and others. And we do have a sort of a communication strategy plan that that we're getting ready to implement that part of the recommendations. But we are we are moving forward on that as well. But we do have through the everyone on the Everyone Home Language Task Force, there are places like, you know, how do you help all those different things. Those are are on the website right now, but we are looking to expand that.
Speaker 1: Okay, great. I know the city of Portland has additional like a lot of FAQs, but just something to think about. I just want to say thank you again, Patrick and Kelly and your team Theresa. You all do an amazing, amazing job. And I thank you every time I'm in meetings because people oftentimes don't get it right and they don't understand all the great work that you're doing. So I really appreciate it. And again, thanks to the task force.
Speaker 6: Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman Vice Mayor Andrews.
Speaker 3: Yes, thank you, Mayor. First of all, I'd like to thank my colleagues for the questions that they ask and some of the suggestions that they brought forward. I don't want to go too long, you know, overlay of what we've talked about, because the fact that I know this has been a long, drawn out conversation, because the fact we all know that homeless is real and in in everything we all can do and become a part of, we're going to have to go out and be very humble and let everyone know that we are here with you and we're going to try to work and get something done. Because the fact that if we don't, we're going to see more of this. So I want to thank, first of all, the task force who's been serving with this with that committee. And recently because recently I've heard our state and legislators, you know, and our new governor spoke on it. You know, they spoke on, you know, deserve to create a program to find housing in California. And I'm hopeful that they will craft some solutions that will enable the city to create new housing opportunities. You know, I'm hoping that we also can move forward on this crafting plan, that we can work with the state and California to ensure our plans, you know, that are complementary and not detrimental to a city of Long Beach. And this is why I think it's so important that we all get involved in this. And thank you, Kelly, and your group, because, in fact, I know it's been a long six months, but those six might seem like we're very worthy of what we're trying to do because these things will come to fruition. And thank you very much for being a part of that.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Vice Mayor Councilmember Ringo.
Speaker 9: Thank you, Mayor, for putting this task force together. And of course, I want to thank all the task force members for your participation in this. And it's long overdue. I think we've we've needed needed something like this for a very long time because of as we know, homelessness has been affecting our communities for many, many years. And we always talk about the balloon effect of homelessness, where we might clear a homeless encampment here or or address some homeless issues there and alleys and coming into the neighborhoods. And then all we do is see them moving somewhere else and not really addressing the whole aspect of what the causes and some of the effects and as well as some of the solutions that we could come up with with homelessness. I see this report as a holistic approach to dealing with with this issue, you know, because it brings in all all stakeholders into this conversation. And it was something that was very brought up a lot within the last two years especially. But there's there's a one very, I think, ambitious part of this report that that stood out to me because as I go around the state and talking to other council members in other cities, you know, we're always talking about the NIMBYism . When you brought it up here about the using a yes in my backyard education model, I'd like to see what that is because I mean, obviously in my district when I brought forward a a the star behavioral health center to my district to address the these these issues of, of, of individuals who needed immediate services and needed maybe a 24 hour stay. There were individuals that were protesting that center that lived a mile or two away from it that were really not immediately affected by it. And it's a continuing issue where we're going to be, you know, let's put it out there that NIMBYism is real and it comes in and we need to address that. And this yes, in my backyard education model, I think I'm really looking forward to that. I mean, I like to see what what that entails and how you go about changing people's minds about that. It's that it's okay to all of us. You take a step to take a moment to make a commitment to address this issue? I mean, you can't always be decrying that the the the impacts of homelessness and and then say we need more services, we need more behavioral health centers, we need more beds. We need more affordable housing. But not in my backyard. You can't have it both ways. We have to be more open minded about where some of these establishments are going to be. And it's going to be everywhere. It can be all over the city. One of the things that I really am not pleased with in terms of some of these affordable housing models that are coming up, it's always in the West or part of Long Beach is a long 710 corridor. It's the first district. It's the seventh. It's the eighth. It's the ninth. It's always those districts that we talk about when we talk about getting affordable housing and addressing more beds and more homelessness services. You know, it's a it's a whole city commitment. We have to look at it that way. And I'm glad that this report is out to be cut because it is a one that is comprehensive. And I'm really pleased, again, that we have all the stakeholders involved in this, and it's something that we need we need to really address. The other item that stood out to me and I've had it before because I had a few. Homeless discussions in my district because it was becoming an issue where more people were were getting angry at my district office, where why am I letting more encampments grow? And in my community, where am I letting more homeless people in our in our alleys and in my backyards? And and why are there more homeless appearing in front of liquor stores and markets where they're in camping there? So I brought up a I brought the the homeless services people to come to one of our community meetings to talk about what it is that we're dealing with here. And one of the biggest issues they came up with is, of course, the the the the bubble, the balloon, where you squeeze one and go, they go somewhere else. But one of the most important things that came out of those discussions was and it was brought out earlier by a by Kelly in terms of, you know, there's 17 points of contact sometimes with these homeless individuals that it takes 17 points to convince them to get some kind of service. And why does it take 17 points of contact? Kelly mentioned about why it's establishing and building relationships with these people. And but why does it take 17 points? I mean, if if we see in this model here that it says 35% of the homeless people getting into homelessness is because of lack of or a loss of a job. Then why did it take 17 points of contact to get them a job? I mean, that does not make sense to me. So there's there's a lot more going on here than just the loss of a job or or loss of family status or or divorce or substance abuse drugs or or domestic violence. There's something else going on here. And that's why I'm very much supportive of of getting those services out there that would provide people with mental health issues much more support, much more help in addressing those points. They should not take 17 points of contact to get to convince someone to get out of homelessness and accept services. So we're not doing something right. We need to do. We need to look at that much more seriously. As far as what are those points that what is at one point, maybe that 17th or that 18th point that says, okay, I want to go get help. So we need to seriously look at that much more closely and determine what did that what is is there data on that even? I mean, what is it that they're refusing? Why now? Now we know it's trust and we know that there's a lot of mistrust out there. It's a perhaps a bohemian lifestyle of the people. Like it doesn't matter. Point is that there are 17 points of contact before someone finally decides. I need I need help. And what what is that? We need to get there. And then finally, it's obviously funding. We've talked about it today. And I look at the funding, some of the funding sources that we have here. And a lot of them are just grants. A lot of them are just temporary. Some of them are three or four or five years in length. And then you have to reapply and look at it again. And we have to look at our our models and evaluations. Are we being effective and do we deserve to be funded at the same level as we were before? We need something more sustainable. We need some funding that is going to be permanent, that is going to be addressing these issues in a consistent, holistic manner all the way through. And I agree with you. Councilmember Richardson, our health department, that needs to be institutionalized. It needs to be sustained. It needs to be part of our general funding and not totally reliant on outside grants as it has been for the last 110 years or whatever length of time it's been in existence. It's part of it's part of our city, our city family. And it's always being funded by outside funding and reliable and great grant writers, which I know they have. So I'll end with that that we need to address it holistically. Thank you again to the task force for all the work they've done. It was very comprehensive. I mean, it was holistic as it can possibly be. And now we need to get into the minutia and get our hands dirty and get in there and try to really make an impact in our community. Thank you very much.
Speaker 3: Thank you. Councilman. Awesome.
Speaker 8: Thanks. And Councilmember Iraq, I do agree with all of your points and most of the points raised by most of my colleagues here. But I'll just say on that last point, if it's been here for 108 years, it's sustained. OC comes to Health Department funding. I want to thank the task force for their work. I want to thank the Council and the mayor for for bringing it forward. And obviously, the Health Department is down for the great work. And in presenting this. I'm encouraged that we as a city are are committed to focusing on fixing this crisis that plagues our city, but also plays out our entire region and state. I think this this report has done a great job of identifying the problem, the needs, as the mayor said, laying out some goals and targets. And I hope to get to a point where we have a have a plan with some some specifics. Clearly, it's going to be the responsibility of this council to try to get there with with some policy direction. There's there's some. I do have some questions, but I do do have a couple of points that I'd like to raise that I don't think were necessarily identified in this this this report or the recommendations. But I'd like to see considered as well, because as I mentioned, this whole issue of homelessness is not just Long Beach is problem. It's a it's a problem that that that impacts in our neighboring cities. And I'd like to know what what our neighboring cities are doing to contribute to this to this issue, to the solutions and what they're doing to help address the issue of homelessness in terms of supporting our our shared communities with shelter. And affordable housing as well. It seems to me that this conversation around homelessness is really focused on the larger cities in the in the throughout the state of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Long Beach, Oakland. But there are a lot of suburbs that that or I'll say suburbs, cities that that connect to those cities that that could be helping to share in the burden and responsibility to to help eliminate that the crisis as well. And so that's a that's a challenge that I would issue to staff, but also to our neighboring cities to to help support our efforts. I do appreciate Councilmember Richardson for bringing out that that point. As I was reading this this report, it jumped out at me. You know, the fact that there are housing segregation practices over many years and those policies over many years have contributed to where we are today. That is a reality. But I also would like to say that we also have a homelessness segregation practice that needs to be addressed in this city, because the entire city recognizes that it's a party. It's a problem. Right. But the not the entire city is really a party to the problem. But the entire city needs to be a part of the solution as well. And so and I would extend that to turn to that, to say that we need to really address that as well. I think many of the recommendations are gloss over some of the realities. Council members, we talked about NIMBYism being a major challenge and that is a challenge in our city. People want good quality of life. They want to to ensure that that, you know, their their their neighborhoods are strong and vibrant and and not interrupted. I share with that data that concern and desire as well. But recognizing that that this is a problem that's not going away. And to me, this is a recognizes or represents a snapshot today. And if we don't act. Right now, act immediately, act with with with deliberate aggression on this issue. This these numbers will grow and they are growing. I've watched the number in L.A. County just in the last few years grow from, you know, I seem like in two years from 42 to close to 60,000. These numbers are real and this crisis is not going to go away with us talking about it for too long. So we have to to act. I did have some questions for staff, particularly regarding one of the recommendations. I mean, obviously, a lot of this is going to be on funding and how we arrived at the numbers in terms of funding. Recommendation one J it it, it states that for us to build 202,000 low income housing units, it will cost this $170 million. And how did we come about quantifying that? And also is a one 200 permanent supportive housing units. What kind of cost will cost this $17 million? Can you explain? How do we arrive at those numbers? Sure. Yes. Councilmember So we took a look at all the projects that we've done over the past decade and the cost that it was that was required, the city contribution that was required. And we compared them and average them and came up with an estimate on what it would cost to produce those units going forward. Okay. So in the second part of that question is in terms of, you know, we've we went through a very, very exhaustive land use element in that land use element where I think it was very clear that that we have a a built out city, the city that doesn't have a lot of capacity for for new housing. And so I think part of the conversation, when we talk about adding 2000 new units of affordable housing, I guess the big question is where do we do that and where is the capacity for that? Well, I think we have a lot of opportunities along our corridors, certainly along Long Beach Boulevard from downtown, all the way up through the ninth District and along Atlantic Avenue and some of the other corridors around the city. We have a downtown plan. We have a midtown specific plan. We're working on an uptown plan. There's certainly other large sites where we have uses that are.
Speaker 9: Become becoming no longer useful.
Speaker 8: That could be reused and redeveloped for housing. Okay. I think thank you for for that response. I think we still need to really work on developing a real plan around, you know, where we would identify those that that type of new housing, which is so sorely needed in our city. I'd just like to also just say one point that wasn't any I don't think I saw it in here. And this is pretty voluminous. I haven't had an opportunity to to read the entire thing in detail. But the new economic development tools that are coming into fruition like opportunity zones that we're giving consideration to to that, because I think that would help identify some of where some of these new housing units can be developed. And then to one of my other colleagues points, I'd like to see a lot more coordination with faith based organizations in the city who are already doing a lot of this work around homeless support because it's their mission anyway. And I think I think funding relationships with some of these faith based organizations would represent real partnerships. It's been an exhaustive issue. I'm looking forward to, again, engaging on this over the next several months and really doing some good work with my colleagues here. And I look forward to hearing from the public today. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilman and Councilman Mongo.
Speaker 2: Thank you. I would like to thank the task force. This is excellent work. I also want to thank everyone who provided input at all of the task force meetings. I think that this report is a great start and very comprehensive. Many of you know that something that I've championed and continued to champion is a plan and standardization of receiving input and from the community. Because I think that one of the things that's really important is for each and every one of you who wants to provide additional input, whether it's through a report like this or after a report is written or before an implementation, is to have clear expectations of what that timeline looks like. And so one of the things that I was fortunate enough to have a dialog with City Manager Pat West this afternoon about was what that next step looks like. So I know that some of the pieces of this are coming back in January, and I know council members have each kind of talked about what comes next and when it's not all being decided tonight. Tonight is a receiving file and we have lots of opportunity for additional dialog. When we talk about the opportunities to advertise what we're doing in the city, I know that that came up with a lot of council members. I would also encourage us to utilize some of the blank billboard space available. They donate that to charities and opportunities in the city and governments and nonprofits. And I think that we can really share the story of what we've done. And I think that that gives a lot of hope. And hopefully through that hope and through additional education of residents, we can really reduce the. Number of contacts necessary to get help because of the contrast in the way that the community is being supportive of that effort. Data. Data. Data. I think that one of our biggest barriers continues to be data sharing across agencies. If someone is homeless in Lakewood and crosses across to Long Beach, we don't know what services the sheriff's department has already provided or L.A. County Health Services. I think that we do need our data available and online, but we also need to get those memorandums of understanding in place with L.A. County, because so many of our borders are touching cities that are serviced by L.A. County health. And I think that that's a continued opportunity. And then I'd also like to just say a quick statement. I've talked with a lot of people over the last several weeks, one of which has been homed through the Section eight program, but was homeless and and the plight he went through to get services and his medical care and all of those. But I think that one of the things that really rang true to me about what he said was the reason he was able to survive as long as he was before he became homeless was because the landlord he had had market had rent below market , but the landlord didn't know it. And so when the landlord sold the property and the new landlord came on and evicted them and raised their rent. I don't think that the original landlord would have sold had they known they were a part of that solution. And I don't think we say thank you enough and inform people of the impact for them. It might just be a property, but they don't necessarily realize that the impact that that happens when that property transitions over and in an ownership. And we talk a little bit about a property that was sold for.
Speaker 4: $200,000.12.
Speaker 2: Years ago, is now selling for $600,000. And just to cover the costs on that is a variance of $7,000 in rent I'm sorry, $7,000 in taxes a year. And that often gets burdened by the new renter or the current renter who gets a rent hike. And so it's not that anyone's trying to be greedy or any of that, but I don't think that the initial owners, no one, understand that impact of that sale and what it can do to a family. And I think that on the flip side, too, it's it's a dialog and an understanding that everyone is in this together and that landlords are providing those opportunities and just making those ends meet. So I really appreciated that, that dialog with one of our residents, it was really touching to hear the relationships he's built and the real the real fear of moving back into housing once he was not housed.
Speaker 4: I know that, Councilmember.
Speaker 2: Your anger talked a little bit about why it takes so many contacts. But again, they have a a community they're a part of out there when they're homeless and they lose that community when they become homes and and getting them into a new community and or linking them up with their family and the work that the health department and the police department have already been doing to make that a reality has been really moving. And I really appreciate both Kelly and our police commander and our homeless task force for coming out to our community meetings and sharing that story. So I appreciate that. I know it's been a long night already. It is 7:00 and I know we have a time certain, so I'm going to keep it brief. But thank you again to all of you who have provided that input.
Speaker 0: Thank you. We're just so that we know I'm going to call public comment in just a minute. Not yet. A couple of things. The first is too important to just as a note, because I know we have our time certain that's passed. We are going to do our AR that item next. And so as soon as we're done here, we will get to our time certain and then continue with the rest of the. We're on our first item on the agenda still tonight and it's a very long agenda. So I just ask us to to please in our comments to just be brief and and to give our input. I also want to be clear, because if someone had asked me this question before the meeting started, the motion that's on the floor and there's a motion and a second is to receive and file the report that we have in front of us. This is not no one is passing or creating new policies tonight. I think I had two questions. One are is there being decisions being made tonight on the tenant protection laws? And that's not the case that's happening in January. And the other at another meeting, another conversation I had another question about are we deciding on funding? Again, that is happening that'll be an ongoing conversation tonight is just receiving this report. Any major policy decisions on any of the items will all come back to the City Council for discussion and for adoption and for community input. And so I just think that's important to note because I want to make sure people know what is actually in front of us. This is a receiving file of the committee's report. If you're here for one of the other larger policy items, please, there will be plenty of opportunity to comment on those when they're in front of us and in front of the city council. So with that, I'm going to begin by asking the vice chair of the Everyone Home Task Force to make public comments and everyone please line up. It's good to speak behind Ms. occur and and then we'll go from there. Thank you. And Mr. Kerr, before you start, I am going to be closing the speakers list. I'm. I'm going to be closing the speakers list. So if you're one before you start, I want to close it. Hold on. Okay. Okay. I will. I will be closing the speakers list. I am dealer right now.
Speaker 9: One one.
Speaker 0: Okay? Yeah. Okay. Seeing that we have a couple of hours of public comment right now, we are going to look at the direction. We're going to go down to 90 seconds like we did at the last meeting. We'll let Mr. Kerr, who's a vice chair, speak. And we're going to go down to 90 seconds unless there's objection from the council. Seeing none. Mr. KERR.
Speaker 9: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and members of the Council. I won't take long. Kelly Colby did a wonderful job today presenting the recommendations or presenting to you as well as President Connelly. Thank you for the opportunity to serve on this very important issue that's been really important to me and close to my heart for for many years. And so I thank you for my trust in me. It was also wonderful to get to work with the professionals of the health department that work with with Ms.. Collopy, Shannon Parker, Teresa Chandler and and their entire team. We really have, as a city, put together a wonderful group of people that have an amazing understanding of this issue. And so I commend the health department on that. Mr. Mayor, you mentioned at the beginning in your remarks that that we do have the housing crisis right now. And you mentioned that we have a new governor coming in, and that has recognized that as a very important issue. And I just wanted to to underline that a little bit. I think that was the biggest challenge in going into this work is is in it's not something that we've done well in the homelessness homeless services sector is understanding that upstream upstream visual that councilman Richmond Richardson talked about that we've always been good at addressing the downstream and Canada bandaid approach to addressing this issue. But it really is a challenging issue to look at this issue as a whole, especially the upstream version, because at the end of the day, I think what we're talking about is we're talking about an issue of poverty. And for every one person that we we see that's either living in an encampment or is on the street, that I think it'd be really easy to focus completely on that and not see for every one of those people. I think we have perhaps dozens, maybe hundreds of people that are living in extreme poverty. There's been some really interesting reports lately about the poverty level in California and especially in Los Angeles County. And it's I think we can work harder and making sure that we there's been a lot of effort done on making sure that people are paid a livable wage of a livable wage. But one of the things we haven't done enough of is addressing the housing crisis. And that's that that bigger context that I think is the bigger challenge. So I think it'd be really easy to completely focus on just the Band-Aid solutions and and keep working it on that level . But I think we also have an opportunity to make sure that that we also address the bigger picture. The bigger picture. One of the issues that in my work with the county is the homeless services folks are trying to figure out. We know that for every family that's in poverty and living in poverty and at the risk of homelessness, that only one out of ten of those people are actually going to fall into homelessness because those folks are resilient. And so the focus has been, okay, how do we better think you figure out which one is going to going to fall into homelessness? But let's focus on how do we get everybody out of poverty. Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 5: Council members, Mayor Kelly Coakley. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. This is something that I feel that I have addressed many issues and various council members or community meetings. I'm just concerned that when I attend a community meeting on Measure H that I don't see anybody from city council or from our own city participating. But I do have the notes that I'm more than willing to share with Kelly from the county event.
Speaker 9: That I went to in October at Torrance.
Speaker 5: And also regarding discrimination, the LGBT, there's parallels to LGBT and the black community. So I think there needs to be more discussions there, as well as cultural competency for our staff and training and held accountable and for capacity. Mr. Austin. Sears is closing and Kmart is closing. And I hope you know that wraparound services doesn't need to be revised. I'm making this quick. But Kelly, I will be in contact with you. I know you received my past information very well because it's been researched across national platforms. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Next speaker.
Speaker 5: Please. Yeah. Hi, I'm Dave Freeman. I've lived in Long Beach for 77 years and the last two years I've spent as an advocate in Orange County and Los Angeles, Skid Row, and also in here in Long Beach. I want to I'm going to cut this short. But in April of this year, I came to the city hall. I couldn't see the mayor, but I did see Mark Taylor. And I said, Are any new villages at Cabrillo in the works since that time, you've wasted almost seven months to to try to come to the understanding of what to do. You need affordable housing. The shelters you put up there, 2000. That needs to be reversed. And until you do and address affordable housing, all this other stuff is just going to continue to get worse and worse. And you're going to have to have a huge trampoline. A huge trampoline. Okay.
Speaker 0: Thank you, sir. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 5: John Toya, resident of the eighth District with rental property in the second and third district. Marion City Council members thank you for the opportunity to speak as a resident, born and raised in the city of Long Beach. I am proud of and think the task force and the staff for the comprehensive work done to address homelessness in the city as seen in the report. I agree that setting targets and addressing housing, employment and pay are a good starting point moving forward. I also want to make sure that we don't get restrictive on small property owners by adding any form of rent freeze, rent control or just cause eviction. None of these will help address homelessness or housing will likely hurt housing in Long Beach. I appreciate the inclusion of all parties involved and look forward to continue helping address this issue.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Everyone's comments are great on the timing, by the way. Thank you.
Speaker 5: Next speaker good will be brief in your research. I think it would be helpful to find out how many of the homeless are products of the de facto DNC policy of encouraging people to pop out a kid every 18 to every 12 to 18 months. And number two, and we know who some of those are there. Number two, in terms of the funding. That should be relatively easy. We tripled the cost of marijuana. Period. No ifs. No answer. No buts. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 4: Karen replied. I'm a resident of District.
Speaker 7: One and I.
Speaker 4: Was homeless for five months. I want to thank everybody that contributed to this report. What I appreciate most about it is it reflects a caring attitude. That's a shift, a change in the way we looked at homeless. I actually went to one of the inclusionary housing meeting and I got so upset because people kept talking about those other people. It's time we have to realize that the homeless are part of our community. There are people like me.
Speaker 2: Whose boyfriend locks them.
Speaker 4: Out at midnight on a Saturday night and has no place to go, so goes to sit in a Denny's all night. It's not people that get counted necessarily in the homeless counts, and it happens to our families, our friends and our neighbors. So. You're right about the NIMBYism. We all have to help our neighbors so that we can all be wholly house because this program is about homelessness. Not going to go away. And we have all these people that are going to be reassigned because they had low level marijuana offenses. What's going to happen to them when they're released with their very minimal funds to try and find housing? So I didn't hear that mentioned anywhere. So thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you so much. Next speaker, please. And before the next speaker. I think that I think the person in the last who's got the black and gold will be our last speaker who I think is in line. Right. Okay. Thank you.
Speaker 5: Good evening, mayor councilmembers. My name is Mike Murchison and I'm here tonight on behalf of the rental property owner community. I want to commend, Mayor, your appointment of the task force. The voluntary time. It's been commended. Five or six meetings, a busy day of their schedules is wonderful. I really appreciate that. One of the stakeholder groups that was missing, mayor, though, however, from that task force was the rental property owner community. We have five major organizations in Long Beach. I would encourage the mayor and the council prior to January 8th to do some outreach because those groups, there's five of them, are very interested in these issues, specifically in the city manager's report that was provided to the mayor in the Council page 19 through 21 two, way through to II and three through three C were tenant and property owner issues. That's something that needs to be addressed with the rental property owner community at the table. So I would encourage you all to try to see if you can find the time to do that prior to January 8th. Finally, and probably the biggest issue for me from an affordable housing standpoint, we can build all the affordable housing, low income housing in Long Beach. But when we bring in funding from the state and the federal government, I find that the individuals that live in those units are outside of Long Beach. We need to find a way to ensure that Long Beach residents, homeless and others, seniors and others are given first opportunity, not second and third opportunity. First opportunity for housing in the low income and senior housing developments that we build in Long Beach. It's Long Beach that we need to take care of. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Next speaker, please. I was Mr. Motor Commander. I was under the impression that there's been a handful of sub meetings that actually included many property owners and other housing advocates. And there've been multiple meetings and including some of which I know many folks here attended. Isn't that correct?
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's correct. And I can have Patrick talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 0: Okay. Listen, that's all right. I just wanted to make sure that I know there have been some meetings that are clearly ECB needs to be more and we'll make sure that those happen. Next.
Speaker 9: Speaker Good evening, Mayor and councilmembers. My name is Brock Carter with downtown Long Beach Alliance and I wanted to start off by thanking the mayor for inviting Delbert to be part of the task force and also for including such a broad group with engaging them in the conversation about this most important topic deal, which of course is very proud of our commitment to the issue of homelessness in the form of a of a few elements. Of course, our advocacy at council council meetings and other meetings with city staff, but we also have a dedicated position as a homeless outreach specialist. We have an alley busters job training program, and we have we've hired formerly homeless individuals on our clean and safe team. So we're proud of those elements. And we think that that's part of a testament of why we're invited to participate in some of these conversations. I also want to take a moment to thank Kelly Colby and her her team for being so responsive to our comments and our questions during this process. It's been very helpful and just I'll be submitting some written testimony on behalf of the LBA. But real quickly, I just wanted to cover a few things that will be in that written testimony. Making sure that we have that comprehensive communications plan that Kelly talked about for reaching out to residents and to businesses, developing matrix of short, mid and long term goals so that we can track them and timelines, ownership of each recommendation by departments or organizations to make sure that we know who's responsible. And finally making sure that there's one entity that's responsible for ensuring consistency of program formation and measuring progress and efficacy.
Speaker 0: Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 10: Good evening. My name is Porter Dahlberg. I'm the executive director at the LGBTQ center of Long Beach, and I also served on the Everyone Home Task Force. I'm incredibly grateful to the Mayor's office for the opportunity to serve on this task force and am incredibly pleased with many of the recommendations. However, I do find it incredibly concerning that the city and in particular the Health and Human Services Department is reporting two different data sets as it relates to gender identity. The city manager was provided with one data set in June of 2017, noting that 1% of our population experiencing homelessness identifies as transgender through a graphic that looks very similar to the PowerPoint provided and very similar to the graphic that is provided in the Everyone Home report. However, that one does not include transgender people. The same issue was brought up by me in an email communication to the Department of Health and Human Services after the first everyone home meeting and the data still was not corrected. So as a city that has begun prioritizing the needs of the transgender community, especially in a national climate that is working to address our. Munity. I think it's very important that we continue to report out accurate and accurate data that we are collecting. And just in all, honestly, stop providing two different data sets for gender when one is clearly inaccurate. So thank you very much.
Speaker 0: And no, absolutely, I'm not aware of this exact issue, but Mr. West, we've got to fix that. So thank you. Next speaker.
Speaker 9: Good evening, Mr. Mayor. Members of the council, thank you so much for this opportunity to speak. My name is Rene Castro. I'm the director for Community Engagement at Century Villages at Cabrillo, located in the seventh District. I'm also a resident of the third District and Susie Price's area. I'm here on behalf of Brian D'Andrea, our president at Century Villages, that Cabrillo. As all of you know, we provide housing for 1500 formerly homeless people in any given night, 2200 in any given year. That includes 600 children and over a thousand veterans. So I know. I appreciate. I also want to thank the task force that, of course, the leadership of our councilmembers to really lean into this issue. I actually facilitated the plan to end homelessness over ten years ago. And it's a different conversation today. And it's a different conversation for many of the reasons you all pointed out. Our councilmembers, the metrics, the courage, the risk taking. In particular, at the villages at Cabrillo, we're very excited to be a part of that effort to build 2000 low income, extremely low income housing units. I just want to point out one thing. Know the mayor brought up Beacon at the corner of Long Beach in Anaheim. And one thing, you know, Long Beach Community Investment Corporation committed over $12.2 million to that effort. We could not have built those 160 units without your support. So thank you so much. We look forward to a long term partnership.
Speaker 0: Thank you. And the villages, that is the model. There is no better model anywhere than what you guys are doing. So thank you. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 5: Good evening. My name is Paul Babcock. I'm a resident of the fifth District. My wife and I have a rental unit in the third district. And we've been providing that unit to renters in the area for about the last 20 years. Uh, we're retired, we're seniors, we're on a fixed income. And I'm a Vietnam vet. In 2008, as a result of the recession, we lowered rents by 300 per month per unit. We have not increased rents. We have never terminated tenancy, nor have we ever initiated a eviction. Our costs continue to rise. We pay $735 a month in property taxes, and that's just part of our expense. We urge you that the that any that you not increase our costs any further with relocation allowances. We have renovated our property and continue to upgrade and modernize our building in order to continue to improve our property and contribute to this stabilization of the neighborhood and the well-being of our tenants. We must have a reasonable return on our investment and we thank you for giving it consideration in your going forward.
Speaker 0: Thank you for your service, sir. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 5: Thank you, counsel. My name is Jordan Wynn, lifelong Long Beach resident. Currently, I'm serving as the Long Beach coordinator for the Everyone in campaign not to be confused with everyone home. And it's not exactly a homeless czar kind of organization, but we do do kind of what you were alluding to. We've been working across L.A. County to try and create united strategies around ending homelessness for good. And these are comprehensive resources that work multi departmental and look at different resources around the city. As the representative, I'm really excited about these objectives and goals that have been set by the study and I'm excited that hopefully you guys will be receiving and filing this tonight. I wanted to just bring up a story from one of the events that we've had recently the around the tables that have been taking place for the past week in the city that were hosted by the Long Beach Community Foundation. I was fortunate enough to have a homeless resident at my table and we got to the portion where we talked about what are the policy solutions that we want to see in the city? And the three things that this person identified were the following. Number one was a rent control policy to catch us up with the past 40 years that we've been missing with L.A. County and the rest of California and, frankly, the rest of the United States. Number two is an inclusionary housing policy. And I was fortunate enough also to be at the inclusionary housing presentation. I'm excited to see what manifests from that. And number three was supportive housing. Supportive housing has a 90% success rate of keeping people off the streets and in housing. It's success you don't see in any other sorts of developments. So I'm excited to work with the rest of you guys and get to know you guys a little bit better as we move forward. And finally, solutions for homelessness. Thank you very much.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Everyone in L.A. program is a fantastic program. Let me just also add, I think I'm not sure if I had heard those hissing or what I heard in the audience, but please, let's let's let everyone have a chance to speak. And everyone deserves a respect to speak. So if that was hissing, please stop whatever that was. Next, next, next. Speaker And then. And just making sure that the speaker's list is closed. So that lady in the back that I had identified in the black and gold was the last speaker. Speaker's list is close. Yes.
Speaker 9: Josh Butler, executive director for housing Long Beach. And I want to thank the task force for taking the time and putting the energy in to come up with the recommendations. And now the impetus is on this body to implement the recommendations. As you will recall, the mayor convened a task force, a study group in 2017, the middle of the year that convened. It came up with 30 recommendations, 29 of what you all approved. A scant number of them have have moved forward and some of them that are scheduled to move forward are still a year away. So when you all talk about there being a housing crisis from where I'm standing, I don't see crisis level responses. And so at some point you have to stop saying it's a housing crisis, unless that's how you respond to a crisis, not how I respond to a crisis. And someone's coming to me in their arms dangling off that. That was a different level response than a Band-Aid or a cut. Right now we have a gaping wound here in Long Beach. We have people who are barely hanging on. We have landlords who are raising rents at exorbitant rates and driving people into homelessness. So we want them to be at the table as well as part of the solution. Right now they're not. And so it is important that they be part of the solution. So I want to thank the Council and Task Force, and we look forward to the actual implementation of this. The one thing that we haven't talked about is the $25 million and the $215 million gorilla in the room, which none of these recommend interested in any of those conversations goes anywhere unless this body figures out how to come up with the money so that we can implement them and make an impact on our homelessness.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 9: Good evening, Georgia Rivera with Libra. I want to thank also the taxpayers for their time investment in this process. But I do want to scrutinize the process because I hear from some of the city council members that you really want to hear our input. Yet Libra wasn't invited to be a part of the task force. And then when we came out to speak, I was told that I couldn't speak at one of the meetings because I spoke at the previous one. So if we really want to invite community input, really scrutinize the process there. Also, we had suggested to the task force that they adopt the regional housing need assessment goals, which is one a much smaller timeline and a much more robust goals as far as housing production. But that wasn't taken into consideration. And so their goals are actually less than the regional housing needs assessment. We appreciate that there is a commitment for every council district to create affordable housing and also when it comes to employment, do the math, $15 an hour, even with two house, two people working there is still going to put them in a precariously housed situation according to that task force definition. And also.
Speaker 5: If if 35%.
Speaker 9: Is due to job loss, yet the city funded construction projects are not hiring local Long Beach residents. We need a local hire policy to try to close that gap. And instead of a trampoline, let's just close the holes. And and Mr.. Mr. Pryce, if when you start talking about criminalization and homelessness in the same same sentence, we are not removing the stigma by doing that. Thank you very.
Speaker 0: Much. Next speaker.
Speaker 3: Please excuse me. Excuse me 1/2. I was hoping you can legally.
Speaker 9: Be at those meetings.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 3: Speaker, please.
Speaker 4: Hi.
Speaker 10: My name is Tiffany Davey, a resident of the second district. I just wanted to lift a couple of points. Thank you for the report and your time from each department of the city. Timeline is important. This is a crisis. Numbers are important. I think I looked at a rental just the other day for something that's not even quite physically up yet, and it's 4000 for a two bedroom. I think the quick math on that is 48,000 per year, $200,000. Just wondering who those citizens are that will be renting the 4000.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Next speaker, please. Please come down. We can have everyone else kind of come down the stairs. Thank you.
Speaker 9: Dave Shukla file. I'd just like to thank the homeless and this task force for all the time and effort they put in. And I very much look forward to the operational details for how to implement this.
Speaker 8: Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 9: Jonathan said I work for various service providers in the downtown, east and southeast regions of L.A. and I also volunteer with a local faith based organization that provides social services to the homeless community in Los Angeles. Um, and I'm truly looking forward to. It's implementation that that some of the initiatives look a lot like the, you know, Los Angeles County chief executive office, homeless unit, homeless and Homeless Initiative initiatives. And so I'm looking forward to that very much. Thank you very much.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 4: I am Jacqueline Case, a local realtor, and I also had the privilege to work with Rex Richardson and others and everyone in I know you guys have talked a little bit about people living in their cars, but I just wanted to know, like, how do you really identify that I currently have a parent living in a car and so I've been learning quite a bit about how they maneuver and and how they kind of keep discreet in living in their car. And so and there's a bunch and they're with a group of seniors. So I just want to know and have an understanding that we're really identifying those individuals that are living in their car or do we haven't talked about folks, you know, that is their dwelling. Do we have a place for them that they can park to feel comfortable? We haven't really discussed that and I just would like to put that on the table.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Nick Speaker, please.
Speaker 9: My name is and I can say I'm a resident of the sixth district, also a member of the Teamsters Local 397. Just got here I'm you know came to be a representative of the working class just finished the ten hour shift over at UPS, you know, sending your holiday cheers and presents to your family. So you got anything locally? I probably throw it on to the conveyor belt. That being.
Speaker 5: Said, you know, I mentioned being a.
Speaker 9: Working class member as well as a union member because these are I'm building towards the future. You know, I'm a 30 year old man and I'm going to be here for the next couple of decades. So it's great to see these kinds of reports coming in because what you're detailing is the future that I'm going to live through and what eventually my children are going to live through. That being said, city staff mentioned a couple economic corridors that they would like to position this low income housing and affordable housing. And I would also like to mention a couple of myself. You know, there's a Willow Street going east. There is spring. You know, believe it or not, there's other places in the city that build affordable housing and local and local low income housing. That's not just west of Cherry. You know, this is a citywide issue and it should be dealt with citywide.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 9: Mayor Garcetti in Los Angeles is dealing with it. And I just want to thank the mayor and the task force for dealing with it in our own way. Just let's let's spread it. You know, let's redistribute poverty. Doesn't have to just be in a certain part of the city, doesn't have to be in the sixth, seventh or eighth.
Speaker 0: Thank you so much.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you so much. Next speaker, please.
Speaker 5: Hello. Honorable Mayor and City Council. My name is Fred Sutton. I am here on behalf of the California Apartment Association. We represent housing providers throughout the city of Long Beach and the state of California. We want to thank the mayor for convening the task force to address this crisis that is homelessness. There are so many recommendations within this report that we enthusiastically support, particularly as it relates to the incentives. That is what's been working in the county, and they're all our models for the flexible subsidy pool. So it's great to see programs like the Hip being looked at closer here. On a local level, there are few recommended items which should be further vetted, as there are nuances that require more discussion with private rental housing providers. There are ways forward on these issues, but further discussion with housing, housing providers and community operators to achieve effective and productive policy is appropriate. We applaud the task force on all their work and respectfully request these items pertaining to private rental housing be discussed in the appropriate format and with housing providers. So thank you so much. Greatly appreciate it. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Next speaker.
Speaker 9: Mr. Mayor. Rex you know me. I'm one of those private housing providers. I live in the ninth district. I've been a housing provider for 20 years. My properties are my retirement. I never had a job going to pay me any retirement benefit. So this is something I've spent the majority of my life saving up for and some of these proposed ideas for funding this a quarter million dollars worth of money for these for your proposals is probably going to land on the backs of some of these private housing providers, namely me. But the additional taxes on property is going to raise rents. This is very basic, you know, that we just had a tax bond issue for a parcel tax it, which is voted in this November. You know, they got new taxes and new regulations. Let's see how this new parcel tax works before.
Speaker 5: We add more.
Speaker 9: Costs onto the back of it. I'm a property owner and, you know, I just spent close to a quarter million dollars improving my property. So they're making a first class dwelling unit. And if these policies are loaded onto the back of the landlords, I'm not going to be able to survive. And then there's going to be an adverse action, not just against me, but against the people who are living in the houses. I love the people who live in there and they're great tenants. I want them to stay. But costs are a major factor in keeping the property. Thank you.
Speaker 0: Thank you, sir. And a speaker, please.
Speaker 5: I'm Steve Warshaw. I've been a resident of the third district since 1969, and I'm also a housing provider. That was quite a report we got tonight. And we I don't think there's anyone in the room that would disagree. We have a housing crisis. A couple of things in the report, though, did kind of. Caught my attention. Changes in policy and rent stabilization sound like maybe tenant relocation fees and just cause eviction. There are major aspects of rent control, and rent control hasn't worked. New York's had rent controls for 76 years. It is the second most expensive place to rent in the nation. They got beat out by San Francisco, who is number one? They've had rent control for 45 years. So if we are going to implement rent control and any aspect of that, we are going to be caught trying the same old chore and expecting different results. And that's kind of the definition of insanity. I don't think it would be a good idea.
Speaker 0: Thank you, alex. Speaker, please. Next speaker.
Speaker 7: Good evening, mayor robert garcia and all the honorable dignitaries of the city board and council persons and the beautiful, extraordinary people of Long Beach. My name is Brandy Alexander, and I'm here on a variety of representations. A mother of a high schooler at Long Beach Poly and an independent contractor as a realtor for the state of California and resident of Long Beach.
Speaker 4: Go Beach.
Speaker 7: I'm here to shed light on a topic that has been misrepresented to the public. Please excuse me as my intention is not to generalize everyone present this topic. This topic is homeless prevention and the call to place on the voting ballot a possible rent freeze. I'm here to dispel the myth about residential income owners being greedy. These people, everyday working people, are my clients in attacking or placing the focal point of this issue on them does not solve the homeless problem. It actually creates more homelessness. I'm committed to working with my clients in the spirit of excellence, and it's also my fiduciary responsibility to alert them to any issue which may potentially threaten their rights as property owners. This isn't about the rent strike. Rent control or saddling property owners with any potential increases. This is about helping the homeless by not destroying the industry designed to house them. Thank you very much.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Speaker, please. These are last two speakers.
Speaker 4: Inclusionary right is inclusionary. It's designed or intended to accommodate diversity in age, income, race, or some other category. When it comes to housing, landlords are also impacted and not always in positive ways. Inclusionary should include all people being impacted by proposed changes, including landlords. Honestly, there are some housing providers who are one or two vacancies away from being homeless themselves. And where are the resources for them? There. There is so much inaccurate information disseminated about housing providers and there's a lack of protections for landlords for unpaid rents, damage to property and criminal activity. Homelessness is usually the symptom of larger issues, such as drug addiction and mental illness. As a single woman who's also a provider of housing, this has me very concerned, especially if you implement just cause evictions. Protections need to be provided for landlords and housing providers need to be part of the conversation.
Speaker 0: Last speaker.
Speaker 2: Good evening. Mayor Garcia and Long Beach City Council members. My name is Johnny Weir and I'm a resident in Long Beach and I have a.
Speaker 4: Rental property in the first, second, third and fourth districts. I'm the president of Better Housing for Long Beach, and I'm also here.
Speaker 2: Representing AOA, the largest membership in California.
Speaker 4: And I'm a member of the apartment association Southern Cities.
Speaker 2: We believe in inclusionary.
Speaker 4: Housing, but not the exclusion of personal property rights and over taxation. We are opposed to rent freezes, rent strikes and more taxes.
Speaker 2: For the community to pay. We had many tax increases in California towards the homeless. Let's give them these increases a chance to work before adding more taxes on the Long Beach community.
Speaker 4: For all the tenants here, is there any tenants here tonight? Okay. I want you to listen to what I'm going to say.
Speaker 2: Stop voting for bonds.
Speaker 4: And tax increases.
Speaker 2: If you don't if you want to.
Speaker 4: Have affordable housing because it raises your.
Speaker 2: Rent. When you when you increase.
Speaker 4: Taxes, the rents go up. Stop listening to the advocates who tell you to support rent strikes, rent freezes or rent control because rank and file cities have the highest rent.
Speaker 2: And the highest homeless population in the country. So housing providers did not create.
Speaker 4: The homeless problem. Housing providers house people. So I just want to say that.
Speaker 2: We brought a lot of people out here tonight. I'm just happy to be here. And thank you very much.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. That concludes public comment. We have a motion and a second on the floor. Members, please cast your votes on the Everyone Home Report and Task Force. And again, as we vote, I just really want to thank the staff and the team for for their work. So please cast your votes. Great motion carrier. And I went, thank you to the council and everyone that came out to speak tonight. We're going to transition into the time certain. And so I think if you're not if you're here for next the item that's coming up which which is the parking study report that's what's next.
Recommendation to receive and file a report from the Everyone Home Long Beach Taskforce. (Citywide)