(upbeat music) - Thank you for letting me
introduce Secretary Carson. Appreciate that. Anyway, Secretary as I said earlier, I was so excited when you called us and you
agreed to come out here. And like I said,
(indistinct) booked schedule, your day was booked and you promise me we'll move around things in the
schedule around a little bit and it just showed. And you also said to me that
you're really interested in helping LA and to help California and to help the homeless. So, you have been fantastic,
thank you very much. Please ladies and gentlemen
welcome Secretary Carson. (audience applauds) - Well, thank you Governor. And thank you all for being here. I feel right at home in
an academic institution 'cause I spent most of my
professional career in academia and I heard so many
stories about Sol Price because he was a great influencer of Jim Sinegal who founded Costco and I sat on their board for 16 years. So I heard a lot of Sol Price stories and delighted about his
social consciousness. It's wonderful to be here
with so many impactful leaders in Southern California. And I wanna thank Dean Knott
as well as President Folt. Mayor Steinberg, Mayor
Garcia, Mayor Faulconer, Mayor Garcetti, Supervisor
Barger, Governor Davidson, and of course, Governor Schwarzenegger who could be doing anything
he wanted to do in the world, and yet has chosen to do this. We really appreciate you
thank you so much Governor. (audience applauds) I know that we're running a little late and the good thing is
I'm surgeon so I can cut so not a problem. But the Schwarzenegger
Institute has a noble mission that I think everybody
in this room agrees with. And we should focus on good policies as opposed to good politics
if there is such a thing as good politics, I'm not
sure there is quite frankly. We have become so political in our society that we sometimes don't
even listen to ideals from people who are in a different party. And I think it's
imperative that Americans, not Republicans or
Democrats, but Americans recognize that we're not
each other's enemies. And the fact of the matter is even if somebody disagrees with you, it doesn't make them your enemy. I'm trying to saying if two
people agree about everything, one of them isn't necessary. So I think we need everybody and we need to think about things a
little bit differently. We wanna promote promise and
potential for all Americans. And particularly those
of us in public service. Because what is public service? It means you're actually serving
the people, not yourself. And perhaps there's no single issue that's more important
today, than the ideal of a place for everybody
to live that is safe, high quality and affordable. And I'm here in Southern
California this week as part of a national tour, a bus tour, driving affordable housing across America. We're stopping we're talking
to local officials everywhere because believe it or not, the best answers and the best solutions, don't always come from
a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington, DC. They actually come from people
with boots on the ground who are dealing with the issues and that's what America is supposed to be. It's supposed to be a place
that's up for and by the people. And therefore we opt obviously
need to hear from the people and the people who represent them. That's what we're trying to do right now to take care of the so
many vulnerable Americans who have fallen victim to homelessness. And in some cases it's not homelessness but it's severe economic distress, secondary to the fact that
so much of their income is devoted to housing that
it limits their ability to think about or do anything else. Those are severe problems to
37 million American families who pay 1/3 of their income for housing, those are distressed families. And 18 million pay 1/2
or more of their income, severely distressed people. All of us know individuals like that. We may not know they're in that
situation, but we know them. There are probably some people like that sitting in this room today. We need to learn what real compassion is. The health of a community starts at home. The home is the basis of the community and the community is
the basis of the nation. And if we wanna have a
strong and fair nation, then we have to have
strong and fair policies that will allow the people,
the constituents of that nation to be able to live in safe
and affordable housing. Now, in some cases,
housing prices have risen to such a level that we have a workforce that actually is able to work to hold a job down, but cannot afford a place to live. And I had a series of stories I was gonna tell you about people, but I'm gonna just cut those
because I know you know, many of those stories already. But that's the reason
that we're going to have to really concentrate on
what's going on right now. So that more of those
stories don't develop. I mean, this is America,
this is the can-do nation. And as was pointed out
by previous speaker, we've overcome much more
difficult problems than this. But when we have overcome those problems, we have overcome them together federal, state, local, for-profits, non-for-profits, faith based. You'll be hearing it in
a few weeks a rollout that we're doing targeting
faith based organizations, churches. Churches used to do what we do at HUD. And actually, they did a better job because they were able to
develop real relationships with people. And we're gonna be
calling upon every church, synagogue, mosque in America, to adopt a homeless person or a homeless family with
a goal of making them self sufficient within one year. Can you imagine what the
impact of that would be? Pretty much wipe out homelessness. And we need to be able to work together. Not to say well, only I
can do it, you can't do it, because you believe
this or you believe that that's a bunch of crap. We need to get beyond that
and start thinking about the people that we're trying to help. If you have time today, if haven't done so take a walk in Skid Row and
some of the other places and look at the faces
of those individuals. Look at the hollowed out eyes. People who have lost all hope in America. Can we do better than that? We absolutely can. But it means we need to
understand what compassion is. Compassion is not patting
people on the head and saying, "they're there you poor little thing. I'm gonna take care of all your needs." Compassion is providing the security and the love and the mechanism for that person to rise to the potential that
our creator put in them. That's what really gets someone going. When I was a youngster, I was surrounded by a lot of people who really didn't have
the aspiration to move up. They just wanted to get by. But, I had a mother who
had a different idea, even though she only had less
than a third grade education. Got married when she was 13
trying to escape dire poverty discovered that her
husband was a bigger mess. Just trying to make it on her own but she was never satisfied to just get by. She never let us be
satisfied to just get by. And she made us stay in
a house and read books while everybody else was outside playing and her friends would criticize her. And they would say, "you can't make boys stay
in the house reading books. They'll grow up and they'll hate you." I used to overhear them, I'd say, mother you know they're right. But, she wasn't gonna listen to that. And in the long run, she got the last laugh because one of her sons
became a brain surgeon and the other became a rocket scientist. So she obviously had
something going there. And we need to understand
the enormous potential that lies within all of our people. We're only have 330 million people. Sounds like a lot, but
it's 1/4 of what China has. It's 1/4 of what India has. We're gonna have to compete
with them in the future. That means we need to
develop all of our people if we're gonna be able to do that. And the first step in that development is having a safe, decent, affordable place that you can call home. That's the home base for anybody. That's what we must begin to think about if we really wanna be
successful as a nation and if we really want to be compassionate. One of the things that we've done at HUD is announced just recently, we're awarding more than $2 billion to support local Homelessness
Assistance Programs through the Continuum of Care program. And when we looked for
programs to support, we're not looking for ideology, we're looking for results. And I know there's a big argument about housing first versus, faith based organizations versus other kinds of organization. Guess what? It doesn't matter. What matters is are they successful in getting people into the right place? Forget about the labels and forget about the ideology. But I do say it is good to
get people off the street. It actually costs us less money if we get them off the street and that's why I'd like housing first, but I like it even better when it's combined with housing second, which is diagnosing why
they're on the street and housing third, fixing it. That's what we are capable of doing if we're willing to work together. We are making some positive progress in our 2019 point in time homeless data, we see that nearly 800
more homeless veterans were housed between 2018 and 2019, continuing the nationwide decline and veterans homelessness
at 50% over the last decade. And that's prompted 78
communities, 33 different states to declare an effective end to veterans homelessness in certain areas. Three states declared it
across the entire state, Connecticut, Virginia, and Delaware. And if we can do that for veterans, we can do it for everybody. One of the things that is very impressive is a program called the HUD-VASH program in which HUD provides the housing and the VA provides the
wraparound services. That's one of the reasons that we've had such a dramatic impact. We need to think about that for everybody. I was recently in San Antonio at a veterans homeless shelter. They told me that 90% of the veterans who enter there, exit in
a self-sufficient manner. We can do that for our population too. We don't just wanna maintain people. We don't wanna encourage dependency. We have amazing people in our country and we want to develop them to their highest potential. We have the ability to do that again, if we're willing to work together. The president has set out a bold agenda to help nearly 47 million American adults who are living with mental illness. And a lot of those people
with mental illness end up on the street. We again, have to recognize
what compassion is when it comes to dealing
with mental illness. It's not compassionate to take somebody who cannot take care of themselves and just say, you're on your own. That's not compassion. We need to figure out what it is that they need and provide the environment for them to get it. In many cases, people who are mentally ill can function perfectly well in society if they get their medications
on a regular basis and have appropriate
counseling and support. So those are the things
we need to think about when it comes to addiction problems, we need to recognize that
changes occur within the brain of people who are addicted. It's not something they can
just turn off or turn on. It only takes in some cases two weeks for those changes to occur, but it generally takes 12 to 18 months for those changes to be reversed under the best of circumstances. Until we begin to understand these things we will not make appropriate progress. We'll be just spinning in the ocean. But more importantly than that, again, is that compassion, that willingness to reach out our hand, not to look down on someone else. How many families are
only one or two paychecks away from being homeless. There are a lot of them. You perhaps know some of them. We can do much better and I
think we will do much better. I've been very encouraged by
many of the talks that I've had with the mayor here in Los Angeles, with the county supervisor, with even people on the state level. We, all understand that
there is a crisis here. And I think we're all agreeing that in order to solve that crisis, we must be willing to look at data. We must be willing to
look at the evidence. We must be willing to throw away ideology and work together. Recognize that the federal government is willing to do this. We're willing to look at new programs. We're willing to emphasize
and push new programs. We hope that everyone here will use their sphere of influence to help stamp out nimbyism. Which is behind a lot of the problems. Not in my backyard, I understand nimbyism. For most people the most
valuable asset they have their biggest investment is their home and they don't want it to be compromised. But nimbyism has no
place in today's society because there's no reason for it. There was a time when the
government would come in on a white horse with
a big bucket of money and build these gigantic
multifamily complexes with no forethought, no
afterthought, no support. It would quickly deteriorate, become the (indistinct)
for poverty and crime. Would anybody want that
in their neighborhood? Of course not, government
doesn't do that anymore. Now we're talking about
public private partnerships. We're talking about
mixed income developments that are consistent with
the architectural design and the culture of the area. We're not talking about building
multifamily developments in the middle of a block
of single family homes. We want nurses and teachers
and firemen and policemen and mechanics be able to live
in the same neighborhood, where they work. That enhances the neighborhood. It doesn't decrease the
value of the neighborhood. And we wanna start thinking
about responsible ways to get people into homes. And again, our compassion must
be mixed with common sense. More than a decade ago, we
were the compassionate society. Everybody deserved to be in a home, a home that they own. Why? Because the average net
worth of a renter is $5,000, the average net worth of
a homeowner is $200,000 or 40 fold difference. So yes, we can close the wealth gap. We can do all that, but guess what? When you put people in a
home they can't afford, it's not compassionate. They lose the home. They lose their credit. They lose their future possibilities. Today, there are fewer
African American home owners than there were before the crisis, because their credit has been destroyed. We at HUD are looking
for ways to remedy that by looking at other credit sources. But we're all gonna have to
put, combine our intellect to figure out how do we do these things, protect the taxpayer,
but provide opportunities for our people at the same time. And it is something that
we can absolutely do because the vast majority
of people in this country are decent people. The vast majority of
people in this country are not the people you
see on the 6:30 news, throwing water on the police and trying to hurt other people. The vast majority of people
who care about their neighbor. And who are willing to
extend a helping hand. And we need to put aside the partisanship, the hatred, and just look at the facts. Look at the fact that a new construct of a single family home,
25 to 27% of the cost is federal state and local regulations, for multifamily it's up to 42%. That's what we're gonna have to tackle. We have to move those
things out of the way. It's not that we're not innovative people. We are extraordinarily innovative. We have made enormous progress
at manufactured housing. A lot of people think that's
trailers and double whites. Manufactured housings are so nice today. You cannot tell them
from stick-built houses and they're more tolerant
to natural disasters. They accumulate equity just
as fast, a lot less expensive, but we got all these
regulations to keep them out. Modular homes, Accessory Dwelling
Units, 3D printable homes. I actually had the pleasure of driving a 3D printable home,
that I guess is really cool. But the fact of the matter
is we've got all this stuff, but we can't use it because
of the silly regulations and zoning restrictions,
height restrictions, density restrictions, wetlands, unnecessary environmental fee structures, I mean, it just goes on and on and on between point A and point B
it should be a straight line, but it becomes a labyrinth
because of all these things that are layered on top of each other. Can we fix that? We absolutely can. And again, it comes back
to working together. We're not enemies. Let's stop spending time
trying to denigrate each other, working against each other. This is an incredible
nation that we live in. A lot of people like tell us no but the fact of the matter is, do you know of any other nation with caravans trying to get into it? There a lot of nations where people are trying to get out of it. We're not perfect because we're inhabited
by imperfect people. But let's learn from our imperfections and let's correct those things, not to throw the baby
out with the bath water. Our symbol is the bald eagle. A majestic bird flying
high over everything, but it couldn't do that unless it had a right
wing and a left wing. Two left wings it can't fly,
two right wings it can't fly but together it can soar high above and we can solve our problems. Thank you so much. (audience applauds)
