Karen Bass vows to find homes for homeless

Karen Bass was sworn in Thursday as the first woman mayor of Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest city, and she promised to tackle the city’s homeless crisis that is plaguing the city.

 “Tomorrow morning, I will start my first day as mayor at the city’s emergency operation centers where my first act as mayor will be to declare a state of emergency on homelessness,” Bass said. 

While she didn’t go into any specifics, Bass said that the 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. It will create the structure necessary for us to have a true unified and citywide strategy to set us on the path to solving homelessness.”

Bass said there are over 40,000 homeless people living on the streets of Los Angels, and the declaration will recognize the issue of homelessness as a crisis. 

She is the second big city mayor in recent weeks to tackle homeless. 

Eric Adams, Mayor of New York City, also has put a plan together to get people off the streets. 

City Hall is also hoping to cut out shelters where possible and move the homeless on the streets into housing.

Adams, Bass, Lori Lightfoot, mayor of Chicago, and Sylvester Turner, mayor of Houston, are all Black and are mayors of the nation’s four largest cities.

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