(CNSNews.com) – Former Rep. Karen Bass (D-California) is now the mayor of Los Angeles. She was sworn in by Vice President Kamala Harris on Sunday, telling a crowd of supporters, many of them politicians, that her mission as mayor is to “save our city.”
Bass announced her intention to bring new housing to “every neighborhood” to reduce overcrowding.
And she said her first act as mayor on Monday morning will be to visit the city’s emergency operations center and “declare a state of emergency on homelessness.”
“My emergency declaration will recognize the severity of our crisis and break new ground to maximize our ability to urgently move people inside and to do so for good,” Bass said.
“It will create the structure necessary for us to have a true unified and city-wide strategy to set us on the path to solve homelessness.”
But Bass made it clear she can’t solve homelessness without a lot of help:
“If we are going to bring Angelinos inside and move our city in a new direction, we must have a single strategy to unite our city and county and engage the state, the federal government, the private sector and every other stakeholder,” she said.
She called on city and county leaders to “lock arms with me” in tackling homelessness. She joked that Vice President Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and her former congressional colleagues should “look for me on your caller ID, because I will be calling.”
Bass said the focus should be on “bringing people inside and comprehensively addressing their needs, and moving them to permanent housing with a way to pay their bills.” That, she said, will “save lives, and we will save our city, and this is my mission as your mayor.”
‘We must build housing in every neighborhood’
Bass also addressed overcrowding in already overcrowded Los Angeles neighborhoods:
“Today, too many Angelinos have no choice but to crowd multiple families into one home and work multiple jobs just to barely pay rent. Tragically, our city has earned the shameful crown of being home to the most crowded neighborhoods in the nation…And Angelinos, we know our mission. We must build housing in every neighborhood — in every neighborhood,” she emphasized.
Bass said the best way for that to happen is for neighbors to work together to decide “where the housing will go in their neighborhoods — where it should be built.”
Left unsaid was the fact that the more affluent neighborhoods are likely to be the only ones with room to build new (subsidized) housing.
The roots of the policy to “affirmatively further fair housing” go back at least to the Obama administration.
More recently, the Biden administration this past May announced “new actions to ease the burden of housing costs.”
Under that plan, the administration said it would “reward jurisdictions that have reformed zoning and land-use policies” — getting rid of single-family zoning, for example.
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Author: Susan Jones