"Karen Bass's Big Lie" by Daniel Guss
Mayor, Krekorian-led City Council order City employees to lie about who is housed in community centers. Is Inside Safe a bigger fraud than many already suspect?
Are LA Mayor Karen Bass and the Paul Krekorian-led LA City Council defrauding the public and the media about Inside Safe, their program to help get homeless people off the streets of Los Angeles?
While they soaked up as much publicity as they could in the weeks leading up to the recent — and already questionable — count of homeless people in the city, employees much further down on the city’s payroll roster have independently confirmed for me that they were told to lie about who is being housed in recreation centers in city parks and, possibly, hotels used for Inside Safe.
“We were told to say that the people living here are homeless, but they are migrant (border) crossers,” one city employee stationed at a recreation center told me a few seconds after originally telling me that the park where he worked (one of several which I personally visited) housed homeless people. The facility was loaded with people who didn’t at all appear to be homeless.
When I spoke with several of them outside, they confirmed for me that they recently arrived from Venezuela, Haiti and Cuba, and confirmed but didn’t state from where others in the facility came.
Another city employee confirmed for me, “the usual meetings here (have been canceled) because they have been using it as a shelter.” When I asked whether those sheltered there are homeless, the other staffer stammered and said yes, encouraging my follow-up question.
“The people here don’t look homeless. Are they migrants from the border?”
“YES,” the city employee excitedly told me, “we were told to lie.”
When asked who told them to lie, he said, “the mayor’s people.”
But the lie is worse than just that.
IRONY: Bass displacing the homeless, 12-step meetings and civic groups
One such facility is the senior center at North Hollywood Park, located in LA City Council president Paul Krekorian’s district.
Locals have confirmed for me that a slate of regularly held events at the center have been canceled, including a twice-weekly 12-step program, because the center has been unavailable.
On Friday, those seeking to attend the long-standing Narcotics Anonymous meeting there said, “our Wednesday and Friday night meetings at the North Hollywood Park senior center, which usually has 100 recovering addicts who attend, including dozens who are bused in from treatment centers, has been shut down for over a month because the city is using it to house illegal immigrants. But nobody knows this because they lied and told us it was to give shelter to the homeless during the cold.”
Sources say that the preschool next door also cannot be accessed because the migrants’ possessions are being stored there, along with items belonging to the 12-step group and the North Hollywood Neighborhood Council.
When asked what some of those seeking to attend the Narcotics Anonymous meeting did instead, my tipster said that people in need of help and support from one another weren’t told where other meetings were taking place. “There was no sign posted about where we should go, so we looked online and carpooled to another meeting in Hollywood, which is not exactly around the corner and not as safe,” she said, adding that while some of those in the recovery meeting have been clean for months and years, others seeking the meeting have only tenuously been so for 24 hours.
Homeless people near one of the centers said that they had been lied to, as well.
Some confirmed for me that while the community center near where they live on the sidewalk was filled to capacity, it was occupied not by fellow homeless people, rather by migrants.
“Everyone deserves to be indoors, but the thing is that the city isn’t being honest about it,” one homeless person told me.
Is Inside Safe counting migrants as homeless in order to deceptively get millions more in funding?
It appears that Bass and Krekorian, who is more focused on delicately nibbling Doritos and censoring my questions (and those of many others) in City Council meetings, may be inflating the homeless population count for Inside Safe by keeping actual homeless people on the sidewalk and counting recent migrant arrivals as homeless, too.
I reached out over the weekend to Bass, her media deputy Zach Seidl and her legal advisors, but have not yet received a response.
Same re: Krekorian, his chief of staff Karo Torossian and media guy Hugh Esten.
And same re: embattled Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is up for re-election and chairs the city’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, her chief of staff Andrea Conant and media gal Stella Stahl.
Take a bow, folks.
I will submit public records requests to try and determine how many city facilities or other locations, like costly hotels, are being used to deceptively house migrants as part of homeless program Inside Safe, while kicking LA’s neediest, e.g. the homeless and those in recovery, and civic groups to the curb during the freezing January rain.
You can anticipate that the city’s likely response will be that they need to keep those addresses sealed “due to unusual circumstances.”
Like bad publicity that might expose them to federal government scrutiny for alleged perjury and misuse of grant funds.
Looking forward to the embattled LA Times properly citing and linking to this column, this time.
(Daniel Guss, MBA, is a multi-award-winning journalist. In June ‘23, he won the LA Press Club’s “Online Journalist of the Year” and “Best Activism Journalism” awards. He has been City Editor for the Mayor Sam network, and a featured contributor for CityWatchLA, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW 89.9 FM, KRLA 870 AM, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star-News, Los Angeles Downtown News and the Los Angeles Times in its sports, opinion, entertainment and Sunday Magazine sections among other publishers.)