Skip to content
Advertisement

‘Project Roomkey’ moving more homeless off street, into housing

Advertisement

Los Angeles County officials this week said they have helped 3,000 homeless people move off the street and into hotels and motels over the past seven weeks and are now assessing what’s required to keep them sheltered post-pandemic.

Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas said he’s particularly concerned about finding longer-term solutions for individuals 65 and over.

“Project Roomkey is a staggering achievement that would have been inconceivable under different circumstances and it’s critical that we not lose momentum,’’ Ridley-Thomas said.

“With homelessness and COVID-19, we have a crisis within a crisis that will require us to use all of our might, all of our imagination and all of our available resources to address.’’

The program dubbed Program Roomkey uses vacant hotel and motel rooms for homeless individuals, many of whom are elderly, without symptoms of COVID-19 but deemed to be most at-risk if they contract the virus.

The goal is to shelter 15,000 people under the program. Los Angeles’s homeless population based on last year’s point-in-time count was 58,936 people.

The results of this year’s count have not been released. The data is typically made public in late May or early June and is sometimes tied to federal deadlines for submission, which have been extended to June 30 this year due to the pandemic.

Phil Ansell, who leads the county’s Homeless Initiative, shared statistics with the Board of Supervisors that made clear that the vast majority of people of all ages in the program suffer from chronic health issues.

Most also struggle with mental health issues, though the incidence of self-reported mental health problems declines with age.

Heidi Marston, the interim executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), said the support system for the county’s homeless population was working more rapidly than ever before during the crisis.

“We are prioritizing people who will likely die if they contract COVID-19,’’ Marston said. “It’s going to take a big investment of resources and alignment, but this crisis has seen many parts of our system come together and operate at unprecedented speed. We have every reason to continue to hold ourselves to that standard.’’

The county’s Homeless Initiative and LAHSA are working together with other nonprofit partners to provide support services to Project Roomkey participants.

Advertisement

Latest