Los Angeles is one of the world’s great cities. The ingenuity, creativity and energy of our community has made LA synonymous with being the land of opportunity that fuels the imagination. Yet, ask any Angeleno what is the biggest issue facing our community and they’ll tell you the same thing: the homelessness crisis. It is a problem that seems intractable. I get it. During the pandemic, after my company, Cornerstone, was taken private, I started focusing on homelessness. I spent several months volunteering with executives at LAHSA, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, to try to help improve the organization’s efficacy, only to then be told that the timing wasn’t right for a transformation. I too became frustrated and despondent that the epidemic of homelessness would be a permanent fixture in LA.
About two months later, as I was driving my youngest son home from school, I noticed that when we passed each of three encampments on the way home, he had no reaction. They had become invisible to him. What, I thought, are we teaching our children?
Passivity was no longer an option. We had to act. Los Angeles cannot and will not achieve its full potential until we effectively address homelessness. We can solve this problem, together. This is why my wife, Staci Miller, and I created Better Angels.
There is no doubt about the scale and complexity of the challenge. Consider the following:
- The most recent homelessness count that was published at the end of June estimated that there are 75,312 unhoused people across the county, down 0.3% compared with the previous year. While we should be pleased to see a modest drop, it is certainly no reason to congratulate ourselves for a job well done. In fact, over the past eight years, our local government has spent $10 billion on the issue of homelessness, and the aggregate number of unhoused people in our county has risen by 72%. LA has, by far, the largest unsheltered homeless population in the United States and it is clear that what we are doing has not been working.
- Also at the end of June, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a new ruling that allows cities to ban people from sleeping on their streets or in their cars. In essence, the justices rendered unsheltered homelessness illegal.
Beyond these recent developments are the underlying causes that have led to LA’s huge unhoused population:
- There is a massive housing shortage. LA has 1.3 million housing units today, of which 40% are single-family homes and 60% are multi-family. The Regional Housing Needs Allocation identified the need for 456,643 more units by 2029, which is an increase of 33%.
- We also do not have enough affordable housing. 750,000 families in LA are just one financial shock away from homelessness. Our own study shows that as little as $2,000 can make the difference between remaining housed and becoming homeless. Yet for the majority of these families, this level of funding is out of reach.
- LA is fortunate to have a tremendous ecosystem of homeless service providers, non-profit organizations and highly committed public sector leaders and administrators, all of whom are trying to address the homelessness crisis. However, our system is antiquated and the bureaucracy is byzantine. From a technology and data standpoint, we are currently using the equivalent of a string connecting two soup cans to manage complex processes and large amounts of data.
- The patchwork of disconnected systems and obsolete tools that are used to serve the unhoused population also contributes to the failure of our community to help individuals who are homeless get into temporary shelter. On any given night, there are many empty shelter beds across the county. That’s because there is no centralized shelter network or even a comprehensive directory of shelters and no automated way for a case manager or client to reserve a bed.
- And while the members of our community readily identify homelessness as our most pressing issue, the majority of us are not doing anything to help address it. The issue seems overwhelming and it is hard to effectively engage as a volunteer. But we can’t and won’t solve the crisis if we simply ignore it or hope someone else will take care of it. The cavalry ain’t coming. We must recognize that all of us own part of this problem and that we can all be part of the solution.
This is where Better Angels comes in. Our mission is to solve LA’s homelessness epidemic by harnessing the power of the entire Los Angeles community. We launched Better Angels in 2023 to bring hope to the unhoused and hope to our city.
We must recognize that LA’s epidemic of homelessness is a multi-dimensional problem that requires a comprehensive strategy to solve it. Every unhoused person needs services while living on the streets, shelter to get them off the streets, and ultimately, permanent housing. And even if all of this occurs, there must be prevention programs, at scale, so that more people do not become unhoused in the first place.
Better Angels is taking a bold, holistic approach to tackle the homelessness crisis by activating new models of intervention, community engagement, advocacy, and world-class technology, along with a strong dose of pragmatism, across five critical areas of need:
- Prevention: Leveraging the success of micro-finance programs worldwide, Better Angels created the Short Term Eviction Prevention (STEP) Fund to bridge the gap for Angelenos who have faced a financial shock and are now at risk of imminent homelessness. The STEP Fund provides rapid-response, easy-to-access, no-interest micro loans of up to $2,500. Each loan has a 3-year repayment period, and is zero interest with no expenses or fees for borrowers. STEP Fund loans are also non-punitive with no required collateral or guarantees. To-date, we have made close to 500 loans, totaling nearly $1M.
The efficacy of the STEP Fund program is being evaluated in a large-scale scientific study by the University of Notre Dame. Anecdotally, we have found that for approximately $2,000, if we are able to intervene relatively quickly after a financial shock, we can keep low income families housed when they are facing eviction. By comparison, the average cost to LA for supporting that same family once they are homeless is almost 100x as much.
- Services: I once heard the LA homelessness ecosystem described as “over resourced and under serviced.” It is an apt description. We have enormous resources - people, programs, organizations and funding - available to fight homelessness, but they are not getting to the people who need them, when they need them, and importantly, when they are willing to accept them.
Better Angels is addressing this "last mile problem" in two ways: through technology (detailed below) and Resource Days. In collaboration with nonprofit and governmental partners, Better Angels organizes Resource Days in various LA neighborhoods, bringing essential services directly to unhoused neighbors. These events offer an array of services, including access to showers, mobile phones, medical and dental care, mental health services, device charging, housing navigation support, clothing, shoes, hygiene supplies and entertainment, in an inclusive, welcoming environment. Rather than expecting unhoused individuals to seek out and travel to these services, we bring the resources to them. To date, we have organized 48 service events across LA County, serving over 3,500 people experiencing homelessness with the support of more than 500 volunteers. And this is just the beginning.
- Shelter: Part of the reason that LA’s homeless problem is so visible is that LA has a disproportionate number of people experiencing homelessness that are unsheltered. Some of that can be attributed to our good weather, but not all. Not only are there not enough shelter beds for the magnitude of our unhoused population, but believe it or not, there is no centralized, comprehensive database of all existing shelters in LA. We are fixing that first (think Hotels.com or AirBnB for shelter), then we will work on optimizing the shelter network that already exists. Better Angels is building a Shelter Management System that will benefit facility operators, case managers, and unhoused individuals in search of a safe place to stay. Once it is operational, the Shelter Management System will also assist homeless service providers and funders track their data, benchmark their performance, and measure the success of their programs.
- Technology: Virtually every industry and every aspect of our lives has been impacted by modern technology. But tech enablement has not reached every sector: the outdated, poorly designed tech tools in LA’s homeless ecosystem have been costing Angelenos years of time on the street. Better Angels is leveraging our software expertise from the private sector to change that and bring world-class technology to better enable the thousands of workers and many nonprofits trying to solve LA’s homelessness crisis.
We are building a series of tech solutions that will help solve the last mile problem, enable real-time data visualization and analytics for government officials, nonprofit leaders and our housing authorities, and will dramatically improve process efficiency through automation.
The Better Angels Outreach App is being deployed to outreach workers to streamline their engagement with members of the unhoused population, connect the population with services they need, provide up to date information about each individual being served and enable key members of the homeless services provider community to access data in a networked system. Our Shelter Management System will dramatically improve the efficacy of existing shelters and enable real-time shelter bed reservations. And our analytics tools will enable aggregated data to be sliced, diced and visualized for better decision making.
- Housing: Any reasonable plan to reduce homelessness must include more housing. The housing shortage has pushed up housing and rental prices in every neighborhood, making thousands of working Angelenos vulnerable to homelessness. And the problem, as we have clearly seen, is that the public sector and nonprofits are just not very good at real estate development. We have been paying upwards of $750,000 a unit, with those units taking many years to develop, and the taxpayers are tired of footing the bill.
We need to change the game. We need to entice the private sector to fund affordable housing development, and we need experienced real estate companies to do the work, profitably. Enter the Better Angels Affordable Housing Fund, a for-profit real estate investment partnership (where the Better Angels 501c3 owns the general partnership) which will provide investors with diversification across developers, project types and project sizes, construction oversight, and market rate returns. The $250M fund will be levered up to invest in over $1 billion worth of development projects, focused on delivering net new affordable housing units with an approach that is better, faster and cheaper.
Better Angels is still less than two years old. Since our founding we have established relationships with numerous incredible organizations and local government authorities. We have enormous respect for the tireless efforts being made by many deeply committed people. And we have humility to know we also do not have all the answers and understand that the challenges ahead can be daunting.
You can help. One thing I learned from Team Rubicon is that volunteerism can be an incredibly powerful force for good -- for the volunteer, for the organization, and most importantly, for the mission. We need digital marketers, designers, product managers, front-end (React Native) and back-end (Python) engineers, QA analysts, lawyers, social workers, researchers, location scouts, event planners, production managers, photographers, video editors, real estate analysts and others (including people across LA County to research existing shelters and support our Resource Days). Get your friends and family involved too. We also need corporate, foundation and nonprofit partners to maximize impact.
Something that often holds people back from taking action is a feeling that they don’t understand enough about the issue. To fill that gap, we just went live with a first-of-its-kind digital resource center built into our website called HALO (Homeless Answers & Learning Online), which provides training, news and online resources to understand the homelessness epidemic in our community. Learn more about the issue and volunteer.
Homelessness is a complex problem in the largest county in our nation. But we have an opportunity to create the Los Angeles that we all want and deserve. We can enable transformational change that helps tens of thousands of Angelenos become housed, and build a legacy for our children and generations to come.
Visit betterangels.la to learn more about our work.
Join us.
Adam Miller
