When we first met “Nono” last summer she was living in an encampment under the 405 Freeway, straddling the Los Angeles neighborhood of Palms and Culver City. She’d been living there for several years in a tent, relying on volunteers and people in her community for resources like food, water and harm reduction.
The group that provided these resources to Nono — and dozens of other unhoused people at the encampment — is called PUMA, or Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid. It’s not a formal nonprofit but a group of volunteers who come together every week to provide things like clean needles, antiseptic wipes and Narcan — not to mention homemade burritos.
“They save lives and that's a big deal,” Nono told us in August. “That's really hard to say in, like, homeless communities.”
The idea of harm reduction is not to encourage use. Providing these tools is proven to prevent death or infection among the users, keeping people alive until they can maybe get some more permanent help in the way of housing or substance abuse treatment.
Months after we first met Nono, the encampment where she’d been living was cleared out. As part of that October sweep, Nono was given a voucher for a motel, a key element in L.A. Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program. Here’s Nono in a video produced by the mayor’s office where she’s referred to as “Noelia.”
Noelia was one of the more than 50 Angelenos who voluntarily came inside from one of the largest encampments under the 405.
— Mayor Karen Bass (@MayorOfLA) October 31, 2023
Inside Safe is bringing Angelenos relief and dismantling the myth that people are living on the streets because they WANT to be there. It’s just not true. pic.twitter.com/5IQy5bwFj7
“I walked in and literally that was the first time I felt safety and peace and a sense of 'this is the beginning of the rest of my life,'” she tells the camera.
The How to LA team recently caught up with her and others near the motel, which is south of Palms on Sepulveda, to talk about life in the Inside Safe program.
-
What candidates can — and can't — say they do
-
Nonprofit's launching fundraiser to keep it afloat
-
USC study documents what residents want from trees
Living in a motel
The Inside Safe motels are independent contractors and people's experiences can vary depending on the location. So one person's experiences won't paint a complete picture of the program, which includes dozens of motels across the city and hundreds of people living inside of them.
On the evening we spent with Nono, at this motel, PUMA volunteers are supplying people with harm reduction tools like glass pipes and needle tips in different lengths — also toothbrushes.
“What brought us here is people are letting us know that they don't have adequate food, that they don't have harm reduction services,” says Ndindi Kitonga, cofounder of PUMA, “and that they are reviving each other, using the Narcan that they have.”
Nono agrees to talk to us, but she asks us to stop recording after a few minutes. She’s lost a lot of weight and says she isn’t feeling great.
“I'm under so much stress because of the security situation over here. It's just ridiculous,” she says. “They kicked my parents out.”
There’s a no visitors rule at this motel.
Nono says she hadn’t seen her parents “in ages.” “What if they’re all I had?” she asks. “Well, I don't even have them, and that was like the one time I’d seen them.”
Kitonga explains: “You cannot have visitors, even if that visitor is your motel mate, meaning someone who lives next door to you.”
Kitonga and her fellow PUMA volunteers have worked with people placed in Inside Safe motels before and says the “no visitor policy” is not always enforced. But it is at this motel.
High hopes
Nono wants the Inside Safe program to work for her.
As you hear in the video from Mayor Bass’s office, she is optimistic about its promise. “This is finally the catapult that I've been waiting for, believing in, dreaming of and it's, it's all because, because of this project,” Nono said in that video.
So far, she says she hasn’t felt that safe.
Nono told us her doctor is concerned by her extreme weight loss, and that she got beat up on the sidewalk in front of the motel as someone stole her bike and wallet. And the “no visitors” rule makes her feel like she doesn't have any autonomy over her life anymore.
A man who says his name is Ivory Michaels joins the conversation with Nono.
“Your family can't visit. You know, you can't have people that may be your therapist,” he says. “They're not felons. These are grown people. What are you trying to do, isolate them?”
Michaels is not staying at the hotel. He lives in a tent across the street. He told us he used to be in the Inside Safe program but had his motel voucher revoked because, he says, he was labeled “defiant” after asking for clean linens and being told he could not have them.
“You're right, I am defiant,” he says. “I'm a grown man. I'm 53 years old. I shouldn't have limitations brought on me. You know? It's angersome.”
The rules being enforced at these places — from no visitors to limits on how many belongings one can bring in — have long been a sore point for some of the folks living in these interim housing programs, whether its through Inside Safe or something like a Tiny Homes project. The criticisms go at least as far back as the height of the pandemic, when unhoused people were moved into hotels and motels to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
“Let me say this, it's not perfect, it's not meant to be the panacea. But it's one huge, proactive, step forward for those who've been suffering greatly,” says L.A. City Councilman Kevin de León who has a Tiny Home village in his district. “There's criticism that's abundant on Tiny Homes, don't let the perfect get in the way of the good.”
It's the imperfect part of these programs — the lack of autonomy, the services and the feelings of isolation — that drive mutual aid volunteers like Kitonga to do what they do.
After the encampment where Nono was living in Palms was cleared out by city officials, Kitonga says, “People ended up in three motels. One is off of the 90, so still far away if you consider if you don't have a car, and then a bunch of other people were moved to South L.A.”
So, she adds: “You just have people who've just been in a limbo in motel rooms with very few services, loss of their community and what have you,” she says.
About 1 in 6 people choose to leave the Inside Safe program.
An imperfect solution
The primary goal for officials in L.A. City and L.A. County is to get unhoused people off the streets and, first, into interim housing. The idea being that those much needed services — water, food, a sense of security — will be satisfied once people can get inside.
In theory, that’s when the Band-Aids provided by mutual aid volunteers, like Kitonga, can come off.
“We had to choose between providing those services and organizing those efforts… and actually looking for housing for people,” says L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, “where they could access those services in the context of a motel or a hotel room or a shelter site of some kind.”
Inside Safe is the mayor's flagship interim housing program and, by far, the largest. It's also the city's biggest response in terms of dollars spent. About 8,000 people have obtained a voucher for a room in one of the 38 available motels or hotels in the city.
According to our analysis of data released by the city, these vouchers cost about $8,000 per unit, per month, including additional costs like insurance. Since the program began last December, Inside Safe has incurred a total of $93.8 million in expenses.
People are promised three meals per day in addition to things like hygiene services and the overdose prevention resource Narcan. But so far, these needs are not being fully met.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass acknowledges the drawbacks. “We are building the plane while we fly it,” she says. “Mistakes are made along the way. We're learning about gaps and things that are woefully inadequate.”
Lack of permanent housing
The goal of the program is to offer an alternative to the street while people wait for permanent housing.
That transition has been slow.
The mayor “seemed to really expect that there would be a lot more available [places] for people to transition from the motels and Inside Safe spots to this longer-term housing,” says Nick Gerda, who covers unhoused communities for LAist. But “she’s running into this structural issue of a lack of affordable housing options for people.”
He notes that only “a couple hundred people” have been able to move on to a permanent place to live.
That means, he says, “The motels are largely full. There's much less capacity for people to move off the streets into the motels.”
“I wish we had a much better situation,” says Mayor Bass. “I don't think that moving people into motels, number one, is financially sustainable. But I was not going to accept the idea that while we're doing this stuff that people have to die on the streets. I think a motel room is better than somebody being in the street and possibly raped or killed.”
The Band-Aid remains
The city is not the only player when it comes to housing. Los Angeles County is responsible for providing mental health services, as well as other public health resources. But they spend a lot of money and time on housing, too.
Then there's LAHSA, the Los Angeles Homelessness Authority, the joint agency that sits between L.A. City and L.A. County.
“The bulk of what LAHSA does is refunding non profit groups, that provide the bulk of the homeless services in our system, especially the outreach work,” says Paul Rubenstein, LAHSA's deputy chief external relations officer, “the work that helps people find apartments, the work that helps people stay in apartments.”
Still, there are tens of thousands of Angelenos experiencing unsheltered homelessness. Less than half of them currently have access to one of these temporary housing programs.
“I always compare us to New York City,” says Raman, who was elected to the city council in 2020 and is up for reelection next year. “There are more unhoused people in New York than the county of Los Angeles, but only a couple of thousand … are living on the streets.”
That’s due to a court-mandated effort in the 1980s to have as many available shelter beds as unhoused people in the city.
“We don't have those shelter beds,” says Raman, “and as a result we have the astounding statistic that more people succumb to extreme weather conditions on the streets of Los Angeles than they do in the city of New York.”
And so — to come full circle — it's these gaps that require the mutual aid groups to step in.
That is, until a more permanent fix can be found.
“I understand that no one individual or no one program or no one approach is actually at the heart or the problem of what's going on here because the social problems really are poverty, gendered violence, structural racism, gentrification,” says PUMA’s Kitonga. “They are the big ‘isms’ so, yes, I understand how and why the mayor is overwhelmed. They underestimated the scale and undertheorized what's going on here.”
