Editorial: Hey, Beverly Hills, homelessness is a regional issue

It is weirdly funny but mostly appalling that Beverly Hills Human Services Administrator James Latta actually said at a public meeting last spring: “I can’t tell you what a joy it was to hear that West Hollywood — well, not a joy — that West Hollywood’s homeless went from 42 to 88 people and our homeless count went from 29 to 14.”

Why funny? Because he said something so obviously wrongheaded out loud, in a public setting no less. Why appalling? Because it reflects a real, too-common attitude on the part of local leaders who see homelessness not as a regional problem to be addressed cooperatively, but as a zero-sum game in which one city may achieve success by pushing its problems across the city line. Even as he spoke, Latta tried to correct himself — but the “joy” he took in the doubling of West Hollywood’s homeless rate was already on the record.

This year, officials in Sacramento, the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration and elsewhere in the region have finally begun to take the highly visible and growing homelessness problem seriously, and The Times (among others) has repeatedly cautioned them that they need to work together on an integrated, coordinated plan — rather than at cross-purposes or in silos. The same, we should add, is true for the 88 cities in L.A. County: If they seek to address the situation by pushing their homeless people across into other peoples’ neighborhoods, they’ve solved nothing.

To be fair to Beverly Hills, the city has made significant efforts in the last several years to help its homeless population. The city contracts with the nonprofit organization Step Up on Second for two case managers who, over the years, have made contact with all of the city’s homeless people and connected many of them to health services, benefits and housing. (Of course, all that housing is located outside the city.)

But Beverly Hills has also been criticized for hiring a private security firm that sends so-called “ambassadors” out across the commercial district to patrol city parking garages and roust panhandlers. If their goal is merely to move homeless people on to the next place, it won’t do much good.

Homelessness is not a Skid Row problem or a Venice problem or a Santa Monica problem, but a problem in every part of the county, including residential neighborhoods, outside schools, near freeways and beneath underpasses. Without all levels of government working together to provide housing and services to the county’s 47,000 homeless people, the county doesn’t stand a chance of solving this difficult problem.

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UPDATES:

4:25 p.m.: This article was updated with a rewritten version of the piece.