There are more than 46,000 people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles and every day volunteers hit the streets with mutual aid groups to provide them with whatever is needed — no strings attached.
Some give out bottles of water, others provide glass pipes, clean needles and antiseptic wipes to help drug users avoid infection and death. They also offer necessities like food in the shape of burritos, tents and socks to Narcan, batteries and phone charging stations.
These groups try to fill gaps in immediate-term services, while people wait for the promise of a long-term solution in the form of housing.
The philosophy behind mutual aid is the idea of community supporting community, but there’s a big question: Why is this work of providing life saving services often left to volunteers?
Of the city’s 2023-24 budget, $1.3 billion has been allocated to the homelessness crisis and getting people off the street. However, basic needs like water and overdose prevention aren’t being sufficiently met.
“Some of these services are like air, like oxygen,” said Ndindi Kitonga, founder of volunteer group Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid (PUMA), which provides harm reduction services like clean needles and Narcan to unhoused people in L.A. “Everyone should just have it. And so we very much push back and critique our local governments for not doing what they have to do.”
Mayor Karen Bass told LAist that she recognizes the homelessness crisis is multifaceted and sometimes unhoused folks aren’t accessing services they need.
"If I have learned anything this year, it’s how the ability to provide services of every type is woefully inadequate," she said. "People need water, they need the ability to have basic hygiene, they need food. They need all of that."
We know the city is taking action to help people living on the streets. Same for Los Angeles County. Same for LAHSA, the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, and same for other agencies. But it’s clear, based on LAist’s earlier reporting, that unhoused people have some very basic and immediate needs that are not being met by government services.
Volunteers are applying the Band-Aids, but the answer to that “why?” is complicated.
“Part of it gets into the philosophy of the role of government,” said LAist unhoused communities reporter Nick Gerda. “Does government have responsibility, and do taxpayers have a responsibility, to provide life-saving support for people living on the streets?”
When it comes to government structure, L.A. is a unique place. We have a lot of different government offices and agencies, each with different budgets.
“Unlike New York City where it's all one big entity under a giant city government, L.A. is really a total mishmash,” Gerda said.
There’s L.A. city, which includes the mayor’s office and 15 different city council districts; there’s L.A. County, which includes the Board of Supervisors and other county agencies, such as the Department of Mental Health; and there’s the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, whose outreach straddles both the city and the county.
This, said Gerda, can make it challenging to track who is responsible for what.
“There's a lot of overlap in responsibility, and the idea behind that, about a century ago, was to decentralize power,” he said. "The flip side is that you have all these different government entities, and it can get really confusing. And in the past, what we've seen is a lot of finger pointing."
There is a big need for water in unhoused communities, but there isn’t one government entity that’s in charge of providing it, which is where mutual aid groups like WaterDrop LA come in.
The nonprofit was founded during the pandemic when volunteers on Skid Row realized there wasn’t a consistent supply of water available to people who live there. A recent study backs that up, finding that 30% of Skid Row residents had limited daytime access to drinking water — that number jumps to nearly 70% at night.
Every Sunday, WaterDrop brings several U-Hauls worth of bottled water to Skid Row and distributes the bottles to residents.
One of those residents is a former military veteran who goes by the name of Hawk. He operates a one-man barbershop from the sidewalk.
“With them bringing out water, it assists us in a way that you just can't explain,” Hawk said. “You need water for everything.”
One recent, positive development in the neighborhood is something called a Refresh Spot. It’s provided by the city in Skid Row and offers water 24/7 for all sorts of uses.
“They have showers and bathrooms and a water box,” said WaterDrop volunteer Sade Kammen. “That's probably one of the best resources that the city has installed.”
But the service is not available everywhere and it’s sometimes not accessible — because of physical or mental needs — even to those who do live nearby.
“Some of these people are like me. I don't do groups of people well, and that mental thing can hold them back from many benefits,” explained Hawk, who lives across the street from Refresh.
Once a week, WaterDrop LA brings him two gallons of bottled water.
“And I'm fortunate enough and blessed enough to have a fire hydrant,” he said, pointing to a hydrant across the street that he cracks open with a utility wrench. "I'm fortunate enough and blessed enough to have a fire hydrant. That's how I survive."
“Skid Row is a very unique situation,” said Councilmember Kevin de León. “It was intentionally zoned to be the epicenter of homelessness, to be the catch-all of unhoused folks, from all over the city, from all over the county, from the state of California, and quite frankly other parts of the nation.”
De León represents Council District 14, which includes Skid Row. His office has been pressured by advocates to do more to help ease the immediate-term needs of those experiencing homelessness.
Since our first conversation with WaterDrop, one of the co-founders, Aria Cataño, said the group has had meetings with de Leon’s office to talk about water distribution.
“I will say that any organization or any entity or any group of individuals who are willing to go down to Skid Row or anywhere else … and provide bottles of water, is something that I've always welcomed,” De Leon said. “I would say, don't stop, you know, keep doing it until we get every person off the streets.”
The history of Skid Row is a long and complicated one. This 4-square-mile neighborhood — just southeast of downtown — goes back to the 1800s.
In the 1970s, as De León alluded to, city officials established an unofficial "containment" zone for homelessness that would allow shelters and other services.
These days, Skid Row is viewed as the national epicenter of the homelessness crisis.
Black and brown people are disproportionately represented in the neighborhood, accounting for about 80% of the total population. And many say they have been living on these streets for a long time without adequate services.
People say they get used to feeling forgotten.
Kevin Call, a volunteer with WaterDrop LA and a former unhoused Skid Row resident, says he volunteers because he wants to help people like him. However, he wishes it weren’t necessary.
“We shouldn't have to have a truck pull up here to get them water,” Call said. “The city should already had that in place.”
De León added that people using fire hydrants for drinking or bathing is a reflection of a broken system that’s afflicted the city historically.
Think about that “mishmash” that Gerda referred to earlier, where many government offices are responsible for different, sometimes overlapping, pieces of the problem.
De León said he’s been public about his “deep frustration” with L.A. County and the Department of Mental Health, which has traditionally overseen services for the unhoused while cities have been responsible for housing.
“We need intervention immediately to help folks who are suffering from clinical depression to bipolar [disorder] to schizophrenia,” de León said. “When you have someone who is screaming and yelling at the top of his or her lungs, running down the street naked with feces caked onto his or her skin … we know that's not normal, but what we've done in L.A. is we've normalized it. But it is abnormal and that's one of my biggest frustrations, because it's especially acute in Skid Row.”
When we shared de León’s statement with the L.A. County Department of Mental Health, they agreed that they are responsible for mental health services for vulnerable populations, including people experiencing homelessness.
“These services include intensive outreach and engagement, street psychiatry, mobile medication dispensation, and other innovative field-based services, as well as funding supportive housing at every level throughout the County,” the department added.
The department also said they're currently working to expand staffing for “the ever-growing demand” in response to the county’s homelessness emergency declaration.
Since taking office last December, the primary goal for Bass as mayor has been to get people off the streets and into housing.
The Inside Safe program is at the center of this effort and, as of Oct. 27, 1,682 people have been moved into temporary housing, like hotels and motels. Of that group, 190 people have moved into permanent housing, according to LAist’s analysis of data provided by LAHSA.
But at least 153 other people have left the hotels and motels and returned to homelessness, and another 90 people left the program but are working with providers to find other options. Bass said her administration is focused on long term solutions but, she acknowledged, “housing without services, without food, without all of the things that people need is insufficient.”
But Bass said it’s also important to remember that L.A.’s homelessness crisis took decades to develop, and that it can’t be fixed overnight.
“I could have spent the first few months or the first year of my administration developing the world's best program, meeting with everybody under the sun and getting everybody's feedback and building a program,” she said. “But I thought that was inappropriate considering people die on these streets every single day.”
Much like Bass, housing is the main priority for many of L.A.’s city councilmembers.
Councilmember Nithya Raman said the limited availability of basic services like water is a “real indictment of the city,” but noted there are a lot of difficult choices a council district has to make based on its allotted budget.
“I also have a limited staff,” Raman said. “We had to choose between providing those services, and actually looking for housing for people where they could access those services … in the context of a motel or a hotel room or shelter site of some kind.”
Earlier this year, the mayor signed the L.A. City Council-approved budget for $13 billion. Of that, about $37 million has been allotted to all 15 city council members (roughly $2.5 million each), much of which is dedicated to salaries. Raman, who represents Council District 4 and founded SELAH Homeless Coalition, said she’s also faced headwinds in the past from her colleagues on the council when it comes to getting support for services like sanitation near homeless encampments.
She said she hopes to work with other council districts and the mayor’s office to create a citywide response to provide interim services to unhoused communities as they continue to work on housing.
“We need a citywide response so that we can provide some of these interim services … to people so that they're not suffering when they are on the streets,” Raman said.
