Helping homeless people get off the streets and into homes was the very first thing the new mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, promised to address.

I will start my first day as mayor at the city's emergency operations centers, where my first act as mayor will be to declare a state of emergency on homelessness.

One tool the city is going to continue to use to get people off the streets

is a federal housing voucher program commonly known as Section 8.

But the program has struggled for years with long wait lists and other challenges.

More than 100,000 people applied for the Section 8 housing wait list on the first day that that list opened. Last year, the federal government did something that's never done before.

It rolled out a $1.1 billion rental assistant program similar to Section 8, but more streamlined.

The goal was to quickly get people into housing during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

Both the failures and successes of this wide-reaching one-time program offer valuable lessons in our nation's ongoing battle.

You get to unhoused, housed. I'm Gustavoiano. You're listening to the Times,

essential news from the LA Times. It's Monday, December 19, 2022. Today, we look at one city's success

into getting people into homes and another city's failures

and what both examples can teach the rest of the country about how to help people get off the streets. Anumida Carr is a former fellow for the Los Angeles Times.

Anumida, welcome to the Times.

Thanks for having me.

So this federal emergency housing voucher program, what did it actually entail?

And what was the reason for it?

Yeah.

So this emergency housing voucher program was funded through the American Rescue Plan Act.

So last spring, the federal housing agency HUD distributed 70,000 emergency housing vouchers

across the nation.

And the point was to rapidly house the most marginalized and vulnerable people at the height

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