As local Los Angeles officials walked up the white steps of city hall on their way to work, a few individuals sat in demonstration on the surrounding grassy fields.
Kevin, a homeless man looking for a place to rest, was one of those people.
"It's a hard life watching all these suits and such walk up those steps," he said, taking the last puff of a cigarette. "I'm doing this for the people who have kids, for those who don't have a voice."
For the last 18 months, Kevin has been on the streets doing what he calls "life reconstruction," or in other words, attempting to clean up his record of drug abuse and anger issues by advocating for the homeless population in and around Los Angeles.
There are about 44,400 homeless people in Los Angeles County and 25,700 in the city itself, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, an agency set up in 1993 to find a solution to the problem of homelessness. Yet, as the population of street-confined people goes up, the prospects of a viable solution from local government has stagnated.
"There are people out there that would care to help. It's not that they don't care or have sympathy or empathy, but they have lives as well and mouths to feed," Kevin said. "They have priorities, but we should be apart of it."
Over the last two years, homelessness in L.A. has increased 12 percent, according to the BBC, which recently caused the city to declare a "state of emergency"--the first time doing so since the Northridge earthquake in 1994.
For some, the reason for policy stagnation is simple: by the time a piece of legislation goes from a mere idea to an actual law, it sometimes becomes an entirely different measure. So, many of the ideas created with the homeless in mind have simply been "left on the street," says Robert Cristo, a community organizer for the Youth Justice Coalition, a local social justice advocacy group.
"You are always looking for the champion of your bill, and you have to choose them carefully," Cristo says. "If a bill or policy plan dies, that person who wrote it might not want to stick with it and then you got problems."
Once a policy measure is sponsored by a city councilman, it then goes through multiple committee meetings where its contents are discussed and many times revised. This is the stage that Cristo says causes good plans to fall apart.
"They are thinking about themselves and their reputation [and] are they going to be elected. Stuff like that," he says. "They worry so much about the language."
Another school of thought exists behind policy stagnation. Many of the homeless are not using the money they get for survival, which is impeding their argument for affordable housing and jobs.
"If you keep giving, it's going to reinforce that system," says Oscar, a student at the Free LA High School, an institution that helps at-risk youth get GEDs. "It's hard when you see someone needy on the street, but don't feel confident the money is going to good things."
Almost 70 percent of young homeless people in the U.S. use alcohol and marijuana regularly, according to a 2008 study supported by the National Institute of Mental Health. But when asked why they had not sought help for their addiction, about 33 percent said they did not know where to go or what service to use.
But Eric Ares, a community organizer and communications coordinator for L.A. Community Action Network, says that this really is not the issue.
"The city spends money everyday on homelessness," says Ares. "It's about how they spend money on it and what they are doing about it."
A report released by City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana in April showed that out of $100,000 spent on homelessness each year, as much as $87,000 goes to LAPD activities such as skid row patrols, arrests, and mental health interventions.
"Law enforcement has managed it as a criminal or legal issue versus as an issue of housing and services," says Ares. "They are doing their job, but are not the best equipped to deal with trying to solve the issue of homelessness."
Between the public report and recent declaration of emergency, public officials are now scrambling to address the issue before the city's allocation of funds becomes too little, too late.
----------------------------Giovanni is a Senior Web Producer for Annenberg Media. He focuses mainly on issues surrounding public agencies and Los Angeles city government. Follow him here @giovannimoujaes.