Los Angeles took thousands of homeless people off the streets. Then their nightmare began
Michael Flores had been living in a homeless encampment near a Van Nuys bus station for at least three years when he was offered a place in a high-profile Los Angeles initiative to get people off the streets.
The pitch from Inside Safe, LA mayor Karen Bass’s signature programme, sounded humane enough: if Flores agreed to leave the encampment, he wouldn’t face any punishment, and a hotel room and social supports were ready and waiting. Mayor Bass proclaims this approach, leading with immediate social services over police sweeps, had “shaken up the entire system.”
In September, Flores moved into the Palm Tree Inn, a rundown motel on a stretch of Van Nuys filled with auto body shops and storage facilities. By late November, he was dead of a drug overdose.
The death of "Mike Flo," as he was known to friends, exposed the pitfalls of the mayor’s much-touted effort to end homelessness in Los Angeles. At the Palm Tree Inn, Inside Safe residents weren’t allowed to spend time with each other or have guests, friends of Flores said. They believe if they had been able to check in on him, he might still be alive.
Thousands have found temporary accommodation as part of Inside Safe and the mayor’s larger homelessness agenda, but this achievement has come at great cost, subjecting people to segregation, police harassment and property destruction for little apparent long-term benefit. Flores’s story is one of many.
Carla Orendorff, who lives in an RV and has spent years researching and advocating on behalf of the area’s unhoused, knew Flores well. She told The Independent that his death is indicative of the wider problems with the Inside Safe approach, which often isolates unhoused people from their neighbours, friends, and social service providers.
“This confirmed some of the worst fears people had,” she said. “You had a policy where we’re not allowed to check on each other. People are going to overdose. People are going to die alone.”
“There’s such
