It’s election season and, no matter what office a candidate is running for, homelessness is the number one issue for voters in L.A. Voters agree on little these days. But when it comes to homelessness, they’re united. They think it’s a major problem, they want solutions now, and they don’t trust politicians to fix it.
The Committee for Greater L.A. conducted a focus group in December to gauge public opinion on the issue. The results were recently shared with the Los Angeles Times.
Across the board, the 39 participants expressed anger at the situation on the streets and a lack of faith in city leaders. The sentiment was the same regardless of race, gender, or socioeconomic status.
“I’ve probably sat through, I don’t know, a couple hundred focus groups ... and never in my entire career, which is many decades, have I ever seen this kind of result,” political strategist Darry Sragow, who led the focus group, told the Times.
“You go to the store, you go to school, you go to work, and there [the homeless] are, they’re everywhere. They’re just everywhere. And the measure of success will be when they’re not everywhere.”
The results of the focus group are similar to a Los Angeles Business Council Institute poll from last year, which showed Angelenos souring on permanent housing goals in favor of immediate shelter. The recent focus group differed from that poll in its opinion on taxation. Focus group participants were less inclined to support new tax measures because of a distrust of city leaders, buoyed by recent corruption scandals and the failure to see results after Measure HHH.
“The hard thing is that we all hear that the government is spending, but we don’t see it. Like, we, the residents of L.A. County, cannot see it,” one voter said. “They always say, like, ‘Oh, we’re building these,’ or ‘We’re going to build these,’ or ‘We have this project’ and it’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’”