At last week’s Commission Meeting, Heidi Wiersma gave an update on the A Bridge Home program.
In April 2018, the Mayor and the Los Angeles City Council declared an emergency shelter crisis and began planning to build bridge housing on any land owned or leased by the City, with the goal of placing a shelter in each Council District.
A Bridge Home beds are available to Los Angeles’ unsheltered homeless population living near the sites. Each site is currently scheduled to operate for three years. LAHSA outreach teams in cooperation with other teams in the area work hard to identify these focus areas and build trust with individuals in the months leading up to the site opening to ensure the beds all get filled. Most of the sites are full within a week of opening, a testament to the phenomenal work of outreach teams.
Generally, City Council offices select a service provider from a pre-qualified list of providers. The list consists of the LAHSA’s highest-scoring applicants in other interim housing procurements. For a few A Bridge Home sites, LAHSA used a competitive procurement process to select the service provider.
The City of Los Angeles covers the costs of building A Bridge Home sites, while the County agreed to fund 600 beds using Measure H E8 Strategy funding at $50 per bed, per night. The City is providing an additional $10 per bed, per night to provide enhanced services. LAHSA provides the funding to providers to provide services at each A Bridge Home site.
Currently, there are six A Bridge Home sites in operation providing 339 interim housing beds for Los Angeles’ homeless residents. An additional nine sites—adding 799 beds—have funding, and seven other sites are planned but unfunded.