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Conway Collis, President and CEO of the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles, issued the following statement in response to the homelessness  portion of Mayor Karen Bass’s budget proposal. For nearly a year, the Mayor’s Fund has operated We Are Los Angeles, which is focused on eviction prevention and housing stabilization.

“We applaud Mayor Bass’s continued emphasis on responding to the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles in her budget proposal. She is doing everything possible to maximize the impact of government funding and ensure the cost effectiveness of related programs.

“The situation is that in the last two weeks alone, nearly 3,000 households received eviction notices for nonpayment of rent. That is why an increased focus on homelessness prevention is so crucial to support the Mayor’s work, both to prevent human trauma and to save taxpayer dollars.

“Over the last 11 months, at a cost of less than $4 million in privately donated funds, the We Are LA program has provided services to more than 33,000 Angelenos and successfully helped stabilize housing for more than 16,000 individuals and families. Each person who becomes homeless in Los Angeles costs taxpayers at least $7,500 per year, and the chronically homeless cost taxpayers approximately $60,000 per year.

“Preventing those 16,000 people from becoming homeless saved more than 100 million taxpayer dollars.

“As Mayor Bass stated in her State of the City remarks, the Mayor’s Fund, working with the city, ‘is creating a prevention model for Los Angeles and beyond.’ Especially with the state and local budget deficits, it is crucial that we follow the mayor’s lead and ‘lock arms’ with the private sector to address this crisis.”