The Pathway Home program brought 25 people experiencing homelessness off the streets of Santa Monica and into safe interim housing this week, where they will receive supportive services and other resources to help them transition out of homelessness and into permanent housing.
"The scale of the crisis is much larger than the scale of our resources, but the good thing about the pathway home program is that the county has secured a motel-based interim housing site for two years," Carter Hewgley, Senior Manager with the Los Angeles County Homeless Initiative told the Daily Press.
Pathway Home is an encampment resolution program orchestrated by the LA County Homeless Initiative. It’s a critical component of the County’s comprehensive response to the local emergency on homelessness adopted by the Board of Supervisors in 2023.
By leveraging emergency powers and partnerships with local jurisdictions, Pathway Home aims to be a full-circle solution that brings people off the streets into immediately available interim housing accompanied by a comprehensive suite of supportive services and eventually into safe, permanent homes.
"These 25 people are not just being offered an interim housing stay, they're also being given a pathway home, which means we're funding housing, navigation and housing subsidies for them. So we already have an exit pathway to permanent housing for all of them, which means we'll be able to reuse the rooms at the hotel to run future operations in Santa Monica, for people experiencing homelessness in Santa Monica," Hewgley said.
"So, it's 25 people today, but we'll be able to come back and do more as people exit to permanent housing, which we've already been able to do in partnership with the City of Hawthorne. We run the same program there and we've already gone back to Hawthorne and run a second operation because so many people have exited to permanent housing," said Hewgley.
"For this particular project we started to notice as we were working with the outreach teams that many of the individuals they were engaging with were either elderly or medically frail," said Kim Barnette, Operations Lead for the Program, adding, "We were able to leverage a lot of our county departments and bring services to the hotel, we felt that this was a great opportunity to really take care of our homeless neighbors here in Santa Monica, especially those that were elderly and medically frail."
Events unfolding this year, at city, county, state and even national level could significantly affect how the homeless crisis is tackled. Here in Santa Monica, it’s impossible to not see evidence of it and while external factors like the weather and the volume of tourists undoubtedly have an effect, retail outlet occupation and the perception of public safety have unquestionably suffered, while crime and vandalism have increased, or at the very least, not decreased.
Consequently, the results of this year’s homeless count, which will be made available in approximately three month’s time, are going to carry more weight than ever before. Results released by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority for the 2023 count showed that homelessness increased by about 9% countywide and by 45% in the Santa Monica area, a region as defined by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
"Pathway Home is proving that you don't have to criminalize homelessness to solve it … You have to diversify what you're offering and you have to make what you're offering attractive to the unique needs of the people you're offering it to, we all want choices. And so do people who are unhoused," Hewgley said.
"Let's offer something we typically can't offer because we don't normally have it, which is a non-congregate setting, where you're going to have your own room, you're going to have privacy, you're going to be able to control the temperature and you can watch TV. You can have dignity, more so than you might be able to in a congregate setting," said Hewgley, adding, "It also proves we should never wait this long to resolve people's homelessness, we should prevent it from ever getting this far."
Mayor Phil Brock was at the motel and greeted the incoming guests. "All of us want the same thing: to help those living outdoors in our city find a safe place to go and get them on a pathway out of homelessness for good," Brock said. "In Santa Monica, we know that we can’t address the homelessness crisis on our own and this partnership with L.A. County allows us to break the cycle of homelessness, ensuring folks are not languishing on our streets and also restoring public spaces to their intended uses."
