Interview - Greg Spiegel
Greg Spiegel
Noé Montes
If we can start with your name, your title and description of your work. Tell me a little bit about what it is that you do.
Greg Spiegel
Greg Spiegel, I'm with the Los Angeles Housing Department in the policy unit. So that's the team that tries to explore new programs, new funding sources, new ideas for the housing department to address the housing crisis. But it's also the team where, when City Council directs the housing department to do a new thing or find new funding or implement a new law, we help work with the teams that ultimately implement it. We help them think about how to implement that new thing. So, we're like the housing department’s advance guard, thinking about where we ought to go or where we're going and how to get there.
Noé Montes
Through data analysis and planning.
Greg Spiegel
Yeah, there's a data analysis group, who are really good. That's not me so much, I'm more like, I had lots of experience in housing, so I help connect dots, break down silos, build relationships across jurisdictions to try to create new opportunities.
Noé Montes
So, on a daily or weekly, what are the kinds of things that you do? More specifically, it sounds like you, because of your experience, you're the one who's making some connections, facilitating some of the things that need to be done.
Greg Spiegel
Everybody does, but I think my added value is thinking about what it's like from somebody else's perspective, and what they might need and how we might meet them where they're at so that we can work together, because like any big change, and to solve anything in housing, it’s going to take a huge change of the status quo. No one entity has enough resources or influence. You have to build bridges across jurisdictions and departments. So, it's a lot of silo bridging, but it's also day to day stuff like the council office has asked the housing department to do report on something about homelessness or about tenant’s rights or whatever. And so, our team might write the report, it could be a very narrow report about a specific issue. But also, we're all trying to think, more broadly about where do we need to be in 50 years. Typically, the City Council doesn’t ask us to report on that long a timeline. The department doesn't ask us to do that either. But we as people who come to this work with a mission, a north star of where we need to get to to solve the housing crisis, we try to look at all these little narrow opportunities and think about how this can get us closer to a world where we don't have people living on the street or people living in terrible conditions.
Noé Montes
So, I know, the department that you work in, which is the City of Los Angeles Housing Department, I was looking at the website and you do a number of different things, all around housing. How big a part of that work is addressing homelessness. I know some of that is code enforcement for example.
Greg Spiegel
Yeah, that's right. So, most of it is around existing housing, or building housing. The big part of the department is the housing development bureau, which is taking the funding that the city has from the state or federal government or locally and getting it out into housing development so that new affordable housing is built in the city. But then there's also another bureau that does the enforcement stuff, inspecting the existing rental housing to make sure it's of a certain quality, and if it's not, to order repairs and things like that, or where there's tenants whose rights are being violated and they make a complaint to the department. That enforcement bureau investigates where it's merited and orders the landlord to comply with the law, those kind of things. So, its development, its enforcement of existing laws, those kinds of things. As for homelessness, at least right now, the housing department’s work is indirect. The city has dollars in the budget that are used for homelessness, and it's the housing department's role right now to pay LAHSA, the Los Angeles Housing Services Authority, to pay the homeless service providers to do the work that the city has contracted them to do, like outreach, or provide shelter, or whatever. The housing department is just essentially the contract manager. So, we're only addressing the needs of the people on the street through trying to build more housing. The department itself is only managing the contracts for shelter or services. We're not doing anything to negotiate the contracts or manage or evaluate the services. We're just kind of passing through city money.
Noé Montes
Because they have, I think the 2022 -2023 year budget for LHASA was, like $845 million total. So you are helping administer that.
Greg Spiegel
Yeah, just for some of the contracts. And it's not me, there's a team of three people who are making sure that the money gets to LAHSA in time for LAHSA to pay the homeless service providers. So we are just passing the money through, we are not directly serving people living on the street.
Noé Montes
Yeah, that's interesting. One of the things that I've seen in conversation with folks is that so much of the work is just addressing the needs of the existing homeless population. Would you say a lot of the budget goes to that.
Greg Spiegel
The city budget you're talking about?
Noé Montes
I guess less the budget, more generally the money that is being applied to address and reduce homelessness.
Greg Spiegel
I think it's complicated and it comes out of a context. So, as a legal aid housing attorney, 15 years ago, maybe longer, housing attorneys would not describe themselves as working on homelessness issues. Even though the only thing that makes somebody homeless is that they don't have housing we didn’t consider housing work as homelessness work. Our thinking was very siloed. We saw homelessness work as providing people with socks, a bed, food, just addressing the basic needs for a population that was treated as if they were always going to be homeless. In the last 15 years I think we’re very much approaching homelessness as “This person is broken, let's help fix them and get them back on track.” But increasingly, I think people are starting to see that we have a system that breaks people, and so we still need to help fix the people, but we also have to change the system to stop breaking people. With this increasing understanding, I think it's much more connected up between housing and homelessness, than we realize. They are connected, the same. The city's structure does not yet reflect that progress though, it's still very siloed. The housing department is often seen as the one that builds the housing. But for homelessness part, we're only paying LAHSA to implement services and shelter. And there's also division between the county and the city. The city, we would say we do the land use regulation so that housing can be built. We do the financing for affordable housing construction. We don't do any of the supportive services. Those are the county’s role.
Noé Montes
I'm glad you mentioned that because, as I said, a lot of people I’ve talked to are in direct services. So their perspective is so much related to the fact that they're dealing with people who are in crisis every day and I've been trying to talk to someone who can speak more to these bigger policy and systemic efforts to reduce and address homelessness. One of them, my understanding is, is just a general lack of housing stock, and especially affordable housing. Would you say that is a really big underlying factor in the amount of homeless people that we have?
Greg Spiegel
Absolutely yes. And how one frames that serves different ideologies and different agendas. To unpack it, bottom line, for ratio of households to the number of housing units in California, I don't know what the latest number is, but we are something like 45th out of 50 states in the country. Meaning, we don’t have enough housing for the number of households in California. So that is just a fundamental fact. An infrastructure reality. That means that a certain amount Californians, and it's even worse in Los Angeles, are going to be homeless, it's inevitable, given we don't have enough housing for people.
Then the question is “Who becomes homeless?” And if one were to guess, well, it's going to be the people who will most likely be discriminated against, that the system serves the least, or makes it most challenging, and that is exactly what we see. And what's really troubling is that the group of people who are becoming homeless is getting broader and broader. It's not just people who don't have a job now, it's people who have multiple jobs. We're seeing that group of the most vulnerable, who are most likely to become homeless, because we have this biased system, it's actually increasing.
So, at the root is the housing-to-household ratio problem. What does that mean? Some will say, like the Yes In My Backyard people would say, the whole issue is we just need more housing of any type. So they support whatever policies increase housing. But that has all kinds of impacts because it matters where you put the housing. I don't need to tell you, we have historically segregated communities. And those aren't accidental, they were enforced by the law, legal racial segregation. And that goes back decades, centuries. When legal segregation started to break down, when the courts found it unconstitutional to racially segregate geography, that's when we start to see white communities resist funding housing for poor people. If rich white people can’t be assured where the housing for low-income people of color will go, rich white people start to oppose affordable housing. So segregation of schools was made unconstitutional in Brown versus Board of Education in 1954, something like that. After that, you start to see resistance to multifamily housing, which was associated with people of color. For example, in1960, the City of Los Angeles' general plan contemplated a city of 10 million. This is a plan for how we're going to grow, including what housing we'd have, and what zoning is required. So, we contemplated a city of 10 million people. From 1960 until when I started working the mayor's office in 2014, that General Plan was whittled down over time, by different advocacy efforts in addressing different constituencies to plan for 4 million people.
Noé Montes
They were reducing the number of people in the plan?
Greg Spiegel
Yeah, so the number of people that that city would need to accommodate. And so why that change from 10 million people, which made sense as we go out 50 years, you know that's totally foreseeable, to a city with fewer and fewer people? And you see the transition from 1960 to 2015, or to now, with different arguments being made. If a rich white community can no longer dictate the race of the people who are going to live in their community, they need different metrics to accomplish the same thing. So, they start to say things like protecting “the character of the community.” Well, what does that mean? Well, they say they are protecting the single-family homes and large lawns that make the character of the community. But those are surrogates for wealth, which has been a good substitute, especially in 1960, for race. They talk about not wanting traffic but they really want to keep out multifamily housing and the people of color they fear will come with it. So, there's that effort going on about, "oh, we want to reduce density to preserve our communities." Preserve it from what?
At the same time, you see as schools are desegregating, you get White people advocating for property tax reform, right? Property tax is the big funder of schools. So, we're going to reduce property taxes, because I'm not going to pay for my white kid to go into school with a kid of color. So, I'm gonna withdraw from the system. And I'll just take that money with me. And so we have, like in Pasadena, so many private schools that happened in 1970, at the same time that court enforce desegregation there. And you have the Reagan administration in the 80s cutting funding for low-income housing. Until Reagan, the federal government was still funding public housing, housing for the lowest income people. The Reagan administration changed that to "We're not going to do public housing anymore, instead we’re going to subsidize median income people and home ownership." While technically it’s a change in what income levels are helped, it really about which races are being helped.
Noé Montes
I'm glad you're talking about this, because I thought that was something that you might have some insight into, the decades of disinvestment in low-income communities in all these different ways. But also, it's been different codings of racism. Right?
Greg Spiegel
Yeah, It's a way to ensure that the barriers to people of color living in high resource white communities are still in place, but we're just gonna call those barriers something different.
Noé Montes
So decades of policy change to disinvest from those communities and, at the same time, hoard the resources in specific places.
Greg Spiegel
Yeah, use zoning to erect barriers around these white rich communities. Redondo Beach doesn't zone hardly any land for multifamily housing. So, they say "Oh, we're zoned out, were built out.” What they mean is they have zoned 98% of their land for single family homes. So, they never get required to provide multifamily housing because they zone in such a way that it won't accommodate multifamily housing. They zone to prevent an apartment building that could include poor people and poor people of color, it's just not going to happen. They intentionally zone to make that the outcome. They erect walls around their communities. There's all kinds of ways they are allowed to do that.
Noé Montes
And even though there's a recognition today of the inequality, there's a lot of talk about a racial reckoning, etc.
Greg Spiegel
Yeah, which is pretty new, in the last five years, with those articulations being made. I mean not new, but where it's becoming commonly understood.
Noé Montes
And we've seen the reaction to that in Republican and right-wing politics.
Greg Spiegel
Yeah. Blowback.
Noé Montes
But even with all that talk and recognition, acknowledgement of these racist policies of the past that have shaped housing to what it is now, those people are still holding on to that power and those policies.
Greg Spiegel
Yeah, the progress I see is that they're being labeled for what they are, a lot more than they used to. It used to be, there'd be some legal aid attorneys and some tenant advocates who would talk about redlining and talk about this history of segregation, how it's driven all this inequity. Now, planning schools are teaching their students about the history of redlining and segregation. And so, these younger people coming out these schools, they already know this racist land use history better than I do. They're being taught this, and it being broadly discussed in all kinds of places. Which is different. And there are now conversations about entitlement. I think that's real progress where we are more commonly calling it what it is. It confronts that person who is hiding their racism behind the “character of the community,”. People are now holding up the mirror to them. And the cover that “character of the community” used to provide doesn’t work anymore. Like NIMBYs is a bad word now. Right? Not In My Backyard.
Noé Montes
It used to be a good word?
Greg Spiegel
Well, it used to not be "I'm a racist". And now it's much more suspected that you very well might be a racist if you're a white affluent community opposing housing. And the question is "Well, what do you support, if not this thing?” and it turns out they don’t support very much affordable housing in their community.
But then on the reverse side, the YIMBYs, Yes In My Backyard, say any housing is great. But this tends to be mostly white middleclass movement who've been squeezed in the housing crisis. I've learned from people who work for low income communities, that they don't have any illusions that the housing market and housing developers, market developers, are going to keep producing housing so that they will house low income people. The market has never housed low income people adequately, and never will. Because why would they? There's not a profit, there's no profit in it. Right? Why would Mercedes make enough Mercedes for everyone to have a Mercedes? It's not what they do, right? It's not a developer's job to house everybody. Its job is to maximize profit. So the market isn’t going to build enough housing for low income people. There's going to have to be a huge role in the public sector, if we're ever going to solve the housing crisis for low income people,
Noé Montes
Meaning the government has to become a developer of low income housing?
Greg Spiegel
Well, how do we do that? I mean the public sector needs to be a major player in the land use, so that we're allocating enough land for housing and that shares of it be affordable housing. We need mixed-income communities so low income people are not segregated or concentrated in one community. We need public sector to stand up more in the land use area. Right now, my perspective is, the market kind of dictates how the land is used. They get their entitlements, they get their land, and then and the public sector deals with whatever is left over. Whereas a different model is the public sector defines how much land is need for housing, and especially affordable housing and then takes bids from the developer world on specific properties. And the public sector chooses the developers that propose the best projects which provide the required amount of affordable housing, and amenities, etc. And the public sector needs more resources to finance the acquisition of land and development of the affordable housing we need.
We need to ask the market to provide what it can but it's never going to address the huge shortcomings for people who have incomes of $70,000 and below. And the lower income you get, the less housing there is affordable to those people. There's a great chart that I saw and went "Oh my god!" It’s a chart that the California Housing Partnership does. It’s an annual assessment of LA County that shows how many how renter households are at different income levels, 15% of area median income, 30%, 50%, 80%, 120%, and people over 120% of area median income. And area median income now, I think it's like $90,000. Okay, so how many renter households are there at each income level, and then how many housing units are there that are affordable to the renter households at each income level. And, obviously, at 15% of area median income and below, there is like 1 affordable unit for every 10 households. In LA County, we need like an additional150,000 rental housing units affordable for people under 15% of area median income. And then as you go up from zero income, to 80% of Area Median Income, maybe something like $72,000/year income, something like that, there's a shortage of about 500,000 units of rental housing affordable to people in these income levels. When you get to households earning between 80% to 120% of area median income, their needs are mostly met, meaning there are about the same number of households as there are rental units affordable to them However, as you get to renter households with incomes over 120% of area median income, there's a surplus of housing available to them, about 25% more housing units than there are households at that income level. But that totally makes sense if you think about where the profit margins are, right? Market developers are going to develop housing units for those people able to pay the most for it and not for people who can’t afford to pay for it. And because hardly any of our housing is being provided by the public sector, we have an extreme shortfall in housing units affordable to the lowest income households. And public sector funding for the lowest income households really started going down with Reagan in the 80s, and then in the 2010s, the state of California wiped out redevelopment, which provided a lot of money for affordable housing. So considering the huge cuts in funding, this is totally predictable that there is an extreme shortage of low-income housing. Given the decisions we've made, you know, we've created this crisis, to serve, to perpetuate the status quo. So we're gonna have to change that. And that's why it's so hard, because power is not going to give up these resources.
Noé Montes
So that is a little bit about how we got here, to this crisis of severe lack of housing, and especially for low income people. When you say highest income people have a surplus, it's because some of them have multiple homes?
Greg Spiegel
Well, I mean, the number of households that are at that income level, and the number of housing units that are priced for them, there's more units than is actually needed by that population. Because if you're a developer, you want to develop for those populations, because they pay the most. There's the biggest profit margins for those, and you're not going to develop for people at 15% of area median income who are earning $15,000 or $20,000 a year, because you're not going to make any money, you're going to lose money building for them. So you don't build for them, you build for the rich people. So, for the rich people, there's plenty of housing for them to choose from, and everybody else gets squeezed.
Noé Montes
You're saying a way to address this is that the public sector develops affordable housing?
Greg Spiegel
Yeah. Zones the land for affordable housing and funds the development. Not so much actually develop the housing as facilitate the development, because I don't know that the public sector is the best choice to build housing or even run housing, but to regulate so that it be built.
Noé Montes
But how does that work for the housing market? Why would commercial developers, for example, partake in that?
Greg Spiegel
They won't, they would only if they're required to. So, we have concepts like inclusionary zoning where if a developer is going to build housing, a certain percentage of the units have to be affordable. And we should do that. But because of their political power, the current idea for inclusionary zoning requires such a small percentage of affordable housing, that it is only going to make a small contribution to filling the need for affordable housing. It's such few units in that building, that we're never going to catch up to the 500,000. So, we should require developers to do as much as we can, but that alone is not going to close that gap. For the part that the private developers will not do, the public sector has to step in.
And to pay for it, the public will have to extract more resources from the really rich entities who have more wealth than they've ever had before and a higher concentration of wealth and that needs to be redistributed. They're taking too much out from everybody else. Much of that should be redirected to the public sector and reinvested in housing to level the playing field for the 500,000 households that cannot afford their housing. So, you gotta extract resources and you need to have a societal buy-in that this is the role the public sector should play – extract some of the extreme concentration of wealth and reinvest it. And we need to better regulate the market so that the market works in the gaps rather than the public sector trying to work in the gaps. There are places that do this. Vienna, for instance. They acquire property, they zone it, and then they put it out to bid. And developers apply to develop the properties. Vienna regulates the profit margin, how the development happens, and what affordable housing they produce. And developers have come up with nonprofit and for-profit equivalent arms to apply for the affordable and for the market projects. So, depending upon what's being put out for bid, they respond with that arm.
Noé Montes
It seems such a different model, so far from what we have here. Do you see us moving that way a little bit? Are there some efforts? Are there things happening?
Greg Spiegel
So, a lot more people are talking about this now, but it's ...... it doesn't help to think about how hard something is. The question is "Is this what solves it?". And then, what does it take to do that. Then that's what we need to do. And if you come up with a better idea, that's faster, solves it, then let's do that. I just feel like given the decades and decades of the markets failure to adequately house low income people, a more robust public sector is something we have to do. Otherwise, all we're doing is small stuff that is like giving people a painkiller, so it doesn't hurt as bad or helping a few more people. I'm all for whatever solution will get us there the fastest, but it needs to be solution. Otherwise, what are we doing? Making things slightly better?
Noé Montes
Otherwise, we have what we have now, which is like, we're in a morass, we're mired in this situation.
Greg Spiegel
Yeah, but having been in this for close to 30 years now, I see a big difference between now, not on the street, although maybe a little bit, but in the rights that tenants now have. There has been a real move towards an acknowledgement that tenants’ rights need to be protected more, and they need access to more resources. There’s an acknowledgement that this developer, landlord driven world is leading to people living on the street, and there's all kinds of externalities from that, and so we can't just defer to the developers and landlords anymore. LA has moved from being very deferential to the real estate industry, to being very skeptical of their sole focus on their profit-making. And it shows up in things like public comments in city council where it used to be a realtor or a lobbyist for the landlords would speak and I knew that if they testified on something it'd be very hard to ever overcome that. Because they're major donors to city council they would have a huge influence on what the council’s position would be. But because in the last 10 years there has been a real tenant organizing movement, and there has been electoral organizing that has caused some progressive electeds to be on Council, they see tenants as their constituency, not just the developers or owners. There has been an effort to describe the negative impact caused by some developer’s activity. Even the landlord lobbyists distinguish big landlords from little, what they call Mom and Pop landlords, a sympathetic small landlord who's not exploiting the system. So now all the landlord lobbying really has to be framed as about the small operators, because almost everybody sees the big operators as not caring. Even the more conservative members see it this way. Very few, if any, Council members speak in the explicit service of these big real estate interests. If they ever advocate for a landlord's issue, it's always around the issues of the small mom and pop landlords. That is a huge change.
Noé Montes
That's progress.
Greg Spiegel
Yeah, and that was intention of a lot of people's work to distinguish between the big and small landlords. So that, to me, is a reflection that the power dynamics are changing, the perceptions are changing. And that is the trajectory it needs to go. We need to keep going in that direction. And you don't get to Vienna one year. You have to know where you need to get. What's our solution? And then with each opportunity that comes in the door you know what direction you need to move in. It's one or two steps at a time. It's not 15 steps, but if you know where you're going, then you know when this thing comes in, “Okay, why don't we add that to it, that gets us a little closer.” And that builds on that and that builds on that. Yeah. And that is happening.
Noé Montes
I like to hear that. That makes me feel hopeful. To know that there is progress is great.
Greg Spiegel
But nothing's inevitable, right? It takes it takes lots of people working with lots of people.
Noé Montes
You held two positions in Mayor Garcetti's office. One was Director of Housing Security. Was that related to homelessness?
Greg Spiegel
It was about tenant's rights. So that was the one I just did. It was for seven months.
Noé Montes
And before that you were Director of Homeless Policy. What was the work in that position?
Greg Spiegel
It was in fall 2014 and that was really when there'd been a few years of starting to wrap our heads around "What is homelessness? And what would it take to solve it?" In 2008 or 09, United Way had a new leader and some of the staff had convinced her to convene some conversations about what would it mean to end homelessness? And the question itself got smirks from other people. “End homelessness? You can't do that.” There was even a question about whether that question could even really be asked. So, what we could do to address it and work to solve it. I was part of a convening. I was invited to attend one of these convenings I was a housing advocate in a public interest, legal aid, type place and we had to have a meeting to figure out “What do we do? We don't do homelessness.” But when we started talking, all our advocacy was about government benefits, or health care, or housing development, or whatever. So, although of our work related to homelessness, we were so siloed we didn’t realize it until the United Way asked us about it. So part of these United Way convenings helped to raise up that people are thinking of homelessness as a separate population, rather than an outcome of a broken system that creates homelessness. So that process, it was like 2008, 2009started some conversations across silos with staff from different city and county departments. But also, nonprofits, legal aid, advocates, Steve Diaz and his group. Groups like that. Sieglende [Von Deffner] was part of these conversations, Mark Casanova, who is Stephany's [Campos] boss. Having these kinds of conversations about “What do we need? What needs to be in place? What rules need to be changed?” In 2010, we started looking at Section Eight vouchers, the rental subsidies for people to afford their housing. At the time the housing authorities that administered the vouchers said "These are not for homeless people, these are for working families, to help them make it" and we were like, "You've got all these people who don't have housing and you're not giving them the subsidy that could be their solution". They had eligibility barriers that made anybody who is homeless essentially ineligible for them, because if you've been arrested, if you had any criminal background, all this kind of stuff. That was 2010. Then we started talking about permanent supportive housing as a solution. I remember meeting with the County Board Office and explaining what permanent supportive housing is, for what's now broadly seen as the model for resolving chronic homelessness. So progress has been made.
United Way did lots of convenings around this coalition called Home for Good. The Home for Good Coalition, and Michelle Obama, the Obama administration, started talking about veteran's homelessness. “Let's end veteran's homelessness.” So, we have this local infrastructure being built outside of government to address homelessness as a housing solution. And then the Obama administration wants to focus on veteran's homelessness, which was politically more palatable because people can imagine a sympathetic narrative for a veteran homeless that many people can't imagine for other homeless people. The United Way got Mayor Garcetti to agree to try to get veterans homelessness to zero. To do that, they would need to do something big to address homelessness, and for me, who'd never been in government before, it's like "Oh, well, they're gonna have to do something and anything they do for veterans would be a system that would help everybody. This is an opportunity to actually do something here". At the time, there were a bunch of groups working, coming up with best practices for resolving people's homelessness. At the same time, the Mayor's office made this commitment to end veterans’ homelessness, which they probably shouldn't have because, strategically, politically, it’s almost impossible to guarantee that no veterans will ever be homeless. Instead, they should have said something like "We're going to house 4,000 homeless veterans in two years," which they did. To say we're going to go to zero, you really can't control that. But anyway, a friend told me about the position they were hiring for, there hadn't been one before. And so, I'm like “They have to be in, so this might be a good time to go in.” But at the time, it's 2014, I took the job at the end of September, it was a huge job and there was only one person in the Mayor's office, and really in the city, working on homelessness. The city budget in 2014 being spent on homelessness was $17 million a year. And you said that this year it was $845 million [LAHSA's budget]. That's a big change in 10 years. That's a huge difference. It's not because homelessness wasn't a problem then.
Noé Montes
So before that, the city didn't have any specific efforts to try to reduce homelessness?
Greg Spiegel
The Los Angeles Police Department had a lot of efforts, which were arresting homeless people. So that was where most of the money was being spent, like $80 million a year in arresting people. The $17 million would go to shelters or outreach workers. The city would also get federal money from HUD [Housing and Urban Development] for its continuum of care and the county would too and that's the money that went to LAHSA. So, like $100 million a year in federal money was passed through to LAHSA. But that's not the city budget, the city's budget, its own revenues, weren't any other than $17 million for homelessness. So, y job was about being an evangelist for like a year and a half for "Permanent Supportive Housing. Do you know what that is?" [people's response was] "but you can't allow people go into housing and use drugs." Even though I and you, in our housing, we can use drugs. But we had to teach them about what this model was, why it worked, we had to address that all of our resources to get people out of homelessness had eligibility barriers that excluded them from getting them. It was really early days. Even the progressives didn't get it. It was a lot of evangelism and trying to spread the word, which Mayor Garcetti, to his credit, never said "too much", he was always like, "more, more, more, more, faster, faster, faster." But we really had to coordinate with the county and city council to make sure things moved together.
Noé Montes
You were in that position for a couple of years. A lot of evangelizing it sounds like. How do you feel about that time now? Looking back, knowing more? It sounds like it was an incremental effort that was necessary.
Greg Spiegel
Yeah, it started a collaboration with the county and the city, which had a history of just pointing at each other and blaming each other. It brought some collaboration and comprehensive plans. But there's always pressures to pull them back apart. At the time, there was a bunch of us who had been advocates on the outside of government who went inside to try to get government to more directly address homelessness. I saw it as, we were holding hands from across the silos to pull these comprehensive plans together. But when the people who pulled it together leave government, the same pressures pull everything back apart. So the County and the City are back to not working that well together. They're gonna have to get back to working together. So that's one thing I want to do is get back to better collaboration. But at the time, we also increased the spending from $17 million/year to $100 million a year. County did similarly. The efforts led to the HHH housing bond, $1.2 billion for capital construction, which has built 7,000 units of permit supportive housing. It led to Measure H, which is a sales tax that has funded $400 million in shelter and services that are necessary for the permanent supportive housing. All of these things started to acknowledge that there's a big problem. We've got to provide resources at the level of the need. But there's still much further to go and we are seeing how this isn't about the people on the street being broken but about institutions and an economic system that is breaking these people and driving these outcomes. We really have to go up river to dismantle these systemic causes.
Noé Montes
I saw an opinion piece around 2010 that you wrote. It was short piece, but you cited that it costs more to care for the needs of homeless people than to house them. Does that still hold true?
Greg Spiegel
Yeah, I was citing another resource. The county did a study. This was the early days of the arguments for housing first and permanent supportive housing. Because it wasn't enough to do permanent supportive housing or housing first because it was the right thing for homeless people. There had to be reasons that drive power. And that reason was that it's cheaper. It's cheaper to house someone and serve them than it is to leave them on the street where there's trash, there's policing, there's courts, medical needs. Still all true. And there's much, much more data to support it.
Noé Montes
You've also mentioned that you worked with legal organizations for many decades. What does the work look like from that perspective? How is the legal system, or people who are working within the legal system to address or reduce homelessness, what kinds of things are being done there?
Greg Spiegel
I think that's evolved a lot. When I was first at Legal Aid, we would represent individual clients to help them get access to existing benefits. And it's kind of morphed much more into what we call policy advocacy, which is, the existing programs and rules and laws are insufficient and need to be changed. So, becoming much more advocates, lobbyists to state agencies, city agencies, legislators, about “we need to change these rules of this game.”
Noé Montes
Policy change on a bigger scale?
Greg Spiegel
Right, and that's got more sophisticated from when I started. There's really sophisticated groups out there and individuals who are dealing with the land use stuff and in housing production stuff, and housing finance.
Noé Montes
And that work can be very effective.
Greg Spiegel
Yeah, because that's where the solutions are. It's become many, many more people doing that work with much, much more expertise, appropriate expertise to really implement policies that are going to solve the problems. The expertise used to be limited to just the specific things that impacted a poor tenant. And now people know what a big developer's financials look like, and that's what it takes to really be able to deconstruct their assertions or be informed by their experience. So that you can construct an alternative that solves the problems. So, it's a huge expansion of that. But there's still also direct services that are needed. Tenants that are being evicted, when they're not represented, they lose whether they have a legal right to stay in their building or not. Those rights are meaningless if you don't have a lawyer in court. There's been a big effort to expand resources to provide tenants with lawyers. The county and the city are on the precipice of passing rights to counsel, so any low income person facing an eviction would have a right to an attorney like they would have if it was a criminal prosecution. What that does is, it deters landlords from these frivolous evictions where they just want to get poor people out the building to rents to richer people. When a tenant has a right to counsel there's someone on the other side, who is gonna fight back on behalf of the tenant, and who is informed about the legal process. And so the owner has to recalibrate their strategy. But that's not a long term solution because it doesn't increase the housing stock.
Noé Montes
Lastly, is there an approach or an idea that you think there should be more investment in? Financial or otherwise? You've talked about the public sector facilitating increasing housing stock. That's one thing.
Greg Spiegel
I mean, it's across the board. Approaching housing in isolation is a mistake. Because all these issues are connected. Schools, health care, you need all these things to have a life and to function. I think we really need to question the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and see the impact that has had on the lives of most people in Los Angeles, the cost of doing that. The costs are being imposed on us but we're not benefiting from it and I think that should drive a societal reallocation of resources for the purposes of providing a floor of health, food, education, and housing for everybody, for everyone to have. You can still get your supreme health care if you want to pay for it and your mansion, but everybody should have a enough to thrive because when they don't, it's impacting all of us as well as them. And as a society, we can see where this is going. This is going to an absolute breaking point.
Noé Montes
That's what we see on the streets of Los Angeles, we see the complete dysfunction, we see the expression of that.
Greg Spiegel
Yeah, a manifestation of the choices we've made, who we've decided should have most of the stuff. When people don't get enough, they suffer. The suffering isn't limited to just them, it spreads. But the hopeful part is, United To House LA passed in November 2022, which imposes an increased tax on the sale of high priced properties. So one thing we're trying to do is "Where's the wealth being transferred to fewer and fewer hands?" Transfers of property, sales of properties, is one place. There's something called the title transfer tax on that transfer title. It was a flat tax, regardless of price of the parcel. So, if it's a $50,000 parcel or a $50 million parcel they pay the same percentage, which is a regressive tax. This [United To House LA] said it should be a progressive tax. If it's over a $5 million transfer, it should be taxed at a higher percentage, over 10 million, it should be an even higher percentage. And that money is being used for affordable housing development and protection of low-income tenants. That funding did not exist before this. This is a reflection of the change in politics and changes in the voters’ perceptions about what fairness is, and this is hopeful, this is a hopeful thing.
Noé Montes
That's great. I really appreciate that you see progress in many of these spaces. So many conversations around this issue are so dire. I've been talking to people who are literally saving lives every day. They are going around in a golf cart, keeping people from dying.
Greg Spiegel
That's right. My privilege is I get to be from 30,000 feet.
Noé Montes
That's, of course, a valid perspective as well. We need to look at it from all sides.
Greg Spiegel
My role in coalitions tends to be the one who goes "Hey, we just won this thing." Because I think people who do our work, we're always focused on the next thing, so we never appreciate how far we've come. But it's come some ways. It has a long way to go too though.
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Transcript has been reviewed and edited by Greg Spiegel at his request.