L.A. County voters to decide sales tax hike for homeless services

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously on Tuesday to let voters decide on a potential sales tax hike to fund affordable housing and homeless services.

According to the Affordable Housing, Homelessness Solutions & Prevention Now initiative put forward by the Our Future Los Angeles Coalition, the proposed tax increase would fund a “comprehensive homelessness response program” and invest in new strategies to address encampments and create affordable housing.

The measure would terminate and replace the existing quarter-cent sales tax that currently funds the homelessness response system with a half-cent countywide sales tax. The current sales tax measure expires in 2027.

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Officials said the proposed sales tax hike would mean a net increase of a quarter-cent for all but five cities in L.A. County: Compton, Lynwood, Pico Rivera, Santa Monica and South Gate. Those cities do not currently contribute to the Homeless and Housing Measure H Special Revenue Fund.

Supporters of the initiative, who submitted more than 400,000 signatures to the county Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk last month, held a rally Tuesday before the Board’s vote.

“We can no longer turn a blind eye to what we see on the streets,” one demonstrator told KTLA 5’s Kimberly Cheng. “[The initiative] will…make housing more affordable and it will create a pathway out of poverty for those who are unhoused.”

Officials who brought the plan forward cited low housing production as the main reason the homeless problem has gotten so bad across the county, so it is one of the program’s main target areas, according to the plan outlined by the Our Future L.A. County Coalition.

“We do not have a dedicated countywide revenue stream for affordable housing production and preservation or technical assistance to small cities to update their land use and housing policies,” the coalition’s presentation stated. “Less housing is being built now than at any point in the last 80 years…and we are losing the affordable housing we have [as] between 2009 and 2019, Los Angeles lost nearly 200,000 units that rent for less than $1,000 a month in the L.A. metro area.”

Opponents of the measure say that there is “no real accountability and data” to show that spending billions on homeless prevention has worked.

“Not only have we spent over 24 billion taxpayer dollars on this crisis and seen worse results, but we actually have no idea where any of this money has gone,” California Assemblyman Josh Hoover (R-Sacramento County) told KNX News 97.1., citing audits at the state level. “We should be wary of any more dollars that we’re spending on homelessness until we have metrics in place to actually track where the money is going.”

L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger issued a statement calling the passage of the vote “purely ministerial in nature” but also noted that Tuesday’s action by the board does not unilaterally approve and impose the initiative.

“The power to enact this new tax rests in the hands of the voters in the coming general election,” Barger’s statement read in part.

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