Unused Trailers for LA’s Homeless Sit Empty
By Jamie Joseph May 15, 2021 Updated: May 18, 2021
When the state of California gifted 1,300 travel trailers throughout the state last year to temporarily house the homeless during the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak, there was hope that some of the 66,000 people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County would have shelter.
But a year later, many of the trailers in Los Angeles sit empty and unused in parking lots next to the Los Angeles Zoo and Dodger Stadium, according to a local news report.
“It’s upsetting to see all of those trailers sitting there in parking lots empty, when you know you have a humanitarian crisis playing out on the streets,” Daniel Conway, an adviser for the LA Alliance for Human Rights, told The Epoch Times. “It’s just hard to kind of make sense of it.”
The trailers were bought from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—and cost taxpayers $50 million—to provide temporary shelter for the homeless in cities that need them the most. More than 100 parked and unused trailers were confirmed in an investigative report by CBS Los Angeles earlier this month, which said they cost more than $40,000 each.
According to Conway, L.A. city officials said the trailers failed due to their expensive nature: They require connection to sewage lines and need constant maintenance.
But he added that the officials “seem to kind of be inconsistent about that—because at the same time, they build affordable housing projects where they can cost $700,000 a unit,” referring to how the city’s Proposition HHH funds are being spent to build permanent supportive housing units.
Conway said L.A. County is “not good at producing housing” because it’s done “very slowly and very expensively.”
“So for a decade plus now, we’ve had this commitment to permanent supportive housing as kind of the answer to homelessness. But we’ve never actually been able to figure out how to turn that into like an actual operational scalable model,” he said.
Soledad Ursua is chairwoman of the Venice Beach Neighborhood Council, a community organization dealing with a significant homeless problem on its residential streets. She said she took a wrong turn while driving in L.A. recently and saw the trailers locked up in a yard next to the Griffith Park Observatory.
“It’s just very frustrating to see that there’s trailers empty and we have, you know, thousands of unhoused homeless people on the streets,” she said.
Conway said he thinks the city should give the trailers back to the state so they can be used in other communities. However, it’s not clear if anyone would want them.
The state’s trailer program also suffered setbacks in Northern California. In San Jose, local news reported that some trailers sat unused in the city, costing $1.3 million. Only 37 trailers were used—with each unit costing $54,000 per person—before the city rescinded the program, citing increasingly high costs for upkeep.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/unused-trailers-for-homeless-sit-empty-in-la