When Mayor Eric Garcetti was first elected, he promised a brighter future for Angelenos and a transparent government dedicated to alleviating the city’s homelessness crisis and bringing true progress to the city. He sold the city on a forward-looking vision that would set Los Angeles on a path toward a more prosperous future. The grim reality, however, is that his time in office has been exactly the opposite.
Instead of living up to the city’s progressive values, Mayor Garcetti has continuously favored the Democratic Party’s pro-corporate stances that foster gentrification and amplify the already deep- seated financial and socioeconomic inequality in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, things will only get worse until real change is put into motion.
Homelessness, which is one of the city’s most urgent crises, is just one example of a problem that has gotten far worse under Mayor Garcetti’s purview. Between 2013 — the year he took office — and 2018, the number of deaths among the city’s homeless population doubled. Meanwhile, a report last summer showed homelessness in the city had jumped 16 percent in the prior year alone. Of course, rather than take serious action to help, Mayor Garcetti has stood idly by as the city experiences increased calls for affordable housing amid ceaselessly rising rent prices.
Even in this time of crisis, Mayor Garcetti has miserably failed to help the city’s most vulnerable citizens. “Project Roomkey,” which was an ambitious statewide project aimed at providing hotel rooms for high-risk homeless individuals, has fallen woefully short in the City of Angels. As of late June, Project Roomkey had only secured slightly more than 3,601 rooms in Los Angeles, well short of what was needed to meet its goal of housing 15,000 homeless residents. Well- intentioned as the initiative may be, it has been an abject failure in Los Angeles, no doubt in large part due to Mayor Garcetti’s failed leadership. Garcetti’s failures associated with the homelessness crisis in LA have actually led activists to start a petition to recall him, an effort that is gaining steam.
The city’s homelessness crisis is not helped by the fact that income inequality has only grown during Mayor Garcetti’s tenure. In fact, data provided by the Federal Reserve shows that income inequality has been on the rise in Los Angeles ever since he took office in 2013. With the COVID-19 pandemic ongoing and more than one in five Angelenos struggling to find work, inequality is sure to rise further in the coming weeks and months.
Beyond this, Mayor Garcetti’s policies have only worsened widespread racial inequity. At a time when people across the United States have been reevaluating policing, both police brutality and exorbitant police negligence settlements have been ongoing in Los Angeles. While Mayor Garcetti has in recent months embraced some proposed cuts to the Los Angeles Police Department, that cannot undo the fact that increasing the police budget had long been the norm, with Garcetti himself proposing a seven percent spending increase for the department as recently as April.
To make matters even worse, Los Angeles has dedicated hundreds of millions in public resources to settle legal disputes over police misconduct. In just the 2018-19 fiscal year, the city budgeted just shy of $150 million to resolve lawsuits filed against the police department. These are valuable funds that could be dedicated to addressing our city’s most pressing problems.
Instead, we are using them to quietly settle these cases and in turn enable the problem to persist.
What this amounts to is the simple fact that Mayor Garcetti has failed the working-class people of Los Angeles. He made lofty promises of progress and has nothing to show for it seven years later. Instead, the city’s most vulnerable residents are reeling from the failures his policies have wrought, and it is past time for change. Los Angeles both needs and deserves leadership that reflects its values and sees its potential. That is leadership Eric Garcetti cannot provide.
Maria Estrada is the Council President of LULAC de Los Angeles and former chair of Compton for Bernie Sanders.