Los Angeles City Councilmember Traci Park is asking the City to abandon one of the central ideas that has shaped modern homelessness policy.
In a motion introduced last month, Park directs several City agencies to study whether publicly funded supportive housing should screen people before placement, running criminal background checks and behavioral health and violence risk assessments. Anyone flagged for a violent history or significant behavioral health needs would get routed into separate, higher acuity programs with expanded security, rather than the standard placement pipeline. The proposal mirrors President Trump’s effort to move federal funds away from permanent housing and into more restrictive temporary housing. Several of those changes have already been blocked in federal court after judges found HUD’s implementation unlawful.
Park introduced the motion after a resident of the Rose Avenue Apartments severely injured someone with a sword and a teen resident of The Journey Apartments on Lincoln stole donuts and cash from a nearby church. Both locations are Venice Community Housing permanent supportive housing developments for formerly unhoused residents. The broader question is whether incidents like these show that LA should make supportive housing harder to access. Decades of research say otherwise.
Housing First grew out of earlier homelessness policy that treated housing as something people had to earn, not the foundation recovery could start from. Instead of requiring sobriety, employment, or other proof of “housing readiness” before someone was admitted, Housing First bet that stable housing itself creates the conditions for long term stability. It became federal policy not because it reflected a particular ideology, but because the evidence kept showing that people stay housed at dramatically higher rates once the barriers to entry come down.
Retention rates approached or exceeded ninety percent among populations earlier systems had written off as too unstable to house. ER visits dropped, and police contact dropped too. In study after study, it became clear that people stabilize after they’re housed, not before. That matters here because Park’s proposal is aimed almost entirely at keeping people out rather than making supportive housing work better once they’re in.
Violence inside supportive housing is real and it shouldn’t be discounted–after all, residents and staff deserve to be safe. But the research on how to improve safety points toward stronger operations, not broader exclusion. This distinction gets lost because supportive housing in LA is being asked to do a job it was never designed to do alone. Housing First was never intended to mean supportive housing alone. It envisioned a broader continuum of care that included accessible behavioral health treatment, residential treatment programs, psychiatric care, affordable housing, and permanent supportive housing working together.
Los Angeles has expanded supportive housing over the past two decades, but it has never built the broader system of care Housing First needs to thrive. The City and County continue to face severe shortages of psychiatric care, residential treatment, substance use treatment, affordable housing, and supportive housing itself. As a result, developments like the Rose Avenue Apartments are often asked to meet needs that extend well beyond what even a well-run supportive housing program was designed to provide.
Yet Park’s motion doesn’t grapple with any of that. It leans heavily on the sword and donut incidents, together with a slew of complaints from neighbors without doing much to connect them to the policies it proposes. Aside from the two incidents in question, Park doesn’t say whether the people involved were residents, visitors, or had no connection to the buildings at all, and it doesn’t say whether background checks or intake assessments would have stopped any of it. That gap matters because supportive housing sits inside neighborhoods where plenty of unhoused people already live, and council offices routinely get complaints blaming nearby supportive housing for disorder that proximity alone doesn’t actually explain.
The proposal also leans on criminal background checks, despite the fact that criminal history is never a neutral measure of risk – especially in the U.S., which has the highest incarceration rate of any independent democracy on earth. Criminal records reflect decades of choices about who gets policed, what gets criminalized, and which communities get repeated contact with the justice system. For a lot of people experiencing homelessness, a criminal record is the direct result of being unhoused.
The Westside is a good illustration. Park has spent her tenure expanding enforcement against behaviors that are basically inseparable from living without housing, sleeping in public, storing belongings, sitting or lying in places covered by LAMC 41.18. Those policies generate more police contact, more citations, more arrests, more of exactly the criminal records that can later block someone from housing.
The stronger predictor of stability isn’t whether someone has a record, it’s whether they have a home. People living indoors stay connected to case managers, behavioral health providers, and medical care, and spend less time cycling through ERs, jails, and encampments. Broad exclusionary screening doesn’t make anyone safer overall, it just shifts the risk onto whoever gets screened out and left unsheltered.