Los Angeles’ head of homelessness is throwing in the towel after five years on the job, an era marked by a drastic increase in homeless residents despite $1 billion spent to address the problem.
Peter Lynn, head of the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority, announced on Monday that he will resign effective Dec. 31. The city’s homeless population swelled by 33% since Lynn took over to nearly 60,000 people sleeping on the streets, in vehicles or makeshift shelters this summer, Reuters reports.
“Over these five years of explosive growth, LAHSA deployed more than $780 million in new funding to address homelessness,” Lynn wrote in a prepared statement. “We doubled our staff and then doubled it again.”
“We built and rebuilt our internal infrastructure, and worked with our community-based providers to expand theirs,” he said.
Despite those efforts, Lynn told local officials this year the homeless population in the LA area jumped by 12% from 2018, mostly because successful efforts to find thousands of folks permanent homes was outpaced by the numbers of those losing their homes, the Los Angeles Times reports. – READ MORE