Guest Opinion | Gavi Istrin: Homeless Crisis Is More Solvable Than You Think

This past March marked the two year anniversary of COVID-19’s arrival in Los Angeles—and the stay-at-home order that soon followed. In a matter of days, we moved our public lives into our homes. We set up home offices, home classrooms, and home gyms. This great reshuffling of everyday life was captured by the motto “safer at home,” the idea that by hunkering down in our houses and apartments, we could protect ourselves and our families from the virus.

Yet not everyone could stay safer at home. Many lacked one in which to stay.

For the more than 65,000 unhoused individuals living in Los Angeles County, staying safe from the coronavirus in the early months of the pandemic proved particularly challenging. Knowing, however, that our unhoused neighbors deserved to be treated with dignity and compassion and needed a place to safely weather the pandemic, state and local agencies partnered with local hotels and motels in Los Angeles to found Project Roomkey. The trailblazing program provides hotel room vouchers, enabling the unhoused to access needed shelter. The innovative initiative made a significant dent in Los Angeles’ seemingly intractable homelessness crisis.

Homelessness isn’t a choice and should never be viewed as one. Working and speaking with the homeless every day, it has become abundantly clear to me that homelessness really can happen to anyone. In my current role as an Intensive Case Management Services provider, I recently worked with a woman to find stable housing. She was working a stable job, raising kids, and paying rent for an apartment. She became very ill and lost her job, costing her the health insurance she needed for treatment. As a result, she fell deep into debt and lost her home. Her journey from housed to unhoused is more common than one might think. We’ve met countless people just like her at Project RoomKey, so our aim is to bridge those gaps in social services to give people with health issues the support they need.

For too long, society has seen homelessness as a moral failing—singlehandedly the result of “bad” personal decisions. Through my work, I met an 82-year-old unhoused man who was a dock worker in Long Beach for 30 years. He did it “right” — played by the book, but a social security check alone is not enough to survive. As someone who spends time with the unhoused on a daily basis, I recognize the complexity of the challenge facing the homeless population. To address this challenge, it is essential to recognize the significant obstacles people face to overcome homelessness. For example, the unhoused are often told to “get a job”—not recognizing, of course, that to land a job without a mailing address is quite difficult. Or how discouraging it can be to attend or prepare for an interview without access to a shower or a safe place to sleep. Adding to the barriers, homelessness is closely linked to health issues, and health issues can be time consuming in a way that makes full time employment difficult. Homelessness comes down to one thing: the lack of a home. That’s why the solution to homelessness must start with providing temporary housing.

Housing activists have for decades tried to emphasize that the unhoused just need homes, but their concerns often fell on deaf ears. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on the hotel industry and hotel rooms sat empty as most people sheltered in place, the city of LA realized that these hotels could provide a perfect opportunity: not only could they provide housing and social services to the homeless, but they could allow ill and vulnerable unhoused people to quarantine and stay safe from the pandemic. Thus, Project Roomkey was born.

Homelessness is like navigating a labyrinth. For years, Libertana has worked with Pasadena Adult Living and other local facilities through the Assisted Living Waiver (ALW) to facilitate safe transitions of Medi-Cal eligible seniors and persons with disabilities from nursing facilities to a community home settings. The program helped transition many previously unhoused individuals into semi-permanent housing.

Today, Libertana also uses its partnership with Project Roomkey to eliminate the complexity and confusion that comes with being unhoused by providing people with social services, housing services, and care. We provide in-home health services to individuals with complex medical issues and connect Project Roomkey members to additional government services. We also assist them with job searching.

The results speak for themselves: outreach and access to homelessness services have improved more than eight-fold. Project Roomkey allows individuals to receive all the services they need in one place, preventing them from falling through the cracks of the system. People do not have to worry about losing contact with a social worker, which allows providers to build trust. Although not all participants are fully housed in the hotels, simply having access to a case manager and supportive, holistic care in one place makes all the difference.

One of the biggest obstacles to overcoming homelessness is that society fundamentally misunderstands the issue. I spend a lot of time with elderly participants of the program, and they share with me their personal stories – their hopes, fears and challenges and how enduring homelessness has impacted their lives. We share a moment, have a chat, and just get to know each other. It’s easy to turn a blind eye to the issue of homelessness if you don’t know any unhoused people; but when you get to know your unhoused neighbors, it becomes clear how much they want what all of us want: friendship, connection, support. Providing those gifts can make all the difference. If everyone could meet and get to know unhoused people, I’m confident that we would all work together to end homelessness.

Gavi Istrin is The Homeless Services Program Coordinator at Libertana Home Health.