Inner City Law Center CEO Adam Murray on What California Must Do
LOS ANGELES — California’s homelessness emergency cannot be solved without confronting its underlying housing shortage, according to Adam Murray, chief executive officer of Inner City Law Center, who says the state’s biggest challenge remains the lack of homes affordable to people with the lowest incomes.
“The biggest problem with housing right now I think is the lack of housing that is available to low income folks throughout California and throughout much of the country,” Murray said in an interview with the Vanguard on Wednesday. “I think that is clearly what is driving our homelessness crisis is that people just can’t afford rent.”
Murray said many households are surviving on the edge of displacement, where a medical issue, job loss, family disruption or other crisis can quickly push them out of stable housing.
“Lots of people are living right on the edge and barely holding on and then something happens in their lives and it just pushes them out of housing and onto the streets,” he said. “Housing affordability, particularly at the lower end of the market is the biggest challenge and the biggest thing that we need to figure out how to fix.”
He cautioned against expecting rapid progress in a crisis decades in the making. California has increased funding, launched new programs and elevated homelessness as a political priority, but Murray said the scale of the deficit means no quick fix is possible.
“We have dug ourselves a really deep hole with respect to the lack of housing,” he said. “We’re not going to flip a switch and have that be fixed right away. It’s going to take years, probably decades, even with really concerted efforts and lots of resources and lots of attention.”
Murray described the response to homelessness as operating on three levels. The first, he said, is immediate humanitarian relief for people already living outside, in vehicles or in shelters. That includes food, emergency health care, transportation and safe places to sleep.
“It’s a really horrendous thing to be going through,” Murray said. “It’s awful for your health, it’s awful for your safety, it’s awful for your family cohesion, it’s awful for being able to be employed.”
But while emergency assistance is essential, Murray said it does not necessarily change whether someone remains unhoused.
“Giving a person a place to sleep, giving somebody food is all incredibly important to do, but it’s not necessarily changing their trajectory for whether or not they’re going to be homeless,” he said.
The second level, and where much of Inner City Law Center’s work is focused, involves helping people stay housed or return to housing through individualized intervention. That can mean resolving landlord disputes, securing public benefits, obtaining job training, addressing disability claims or connecting people to other support systems.
Murray said effective intervention requires understanding each household’s specific barriers.
“For this individual, what does that pathway look like?” he said. “Is that that they need access to some public benefits? Is that that they have some dispute with their landlord that’s going to push them out on the street if it’s not resolved? Is that they need some job training? What is it that this individual needs?”
The third level is structural reform — changing the policies that create housing scarcity and push people into crisis in the first place. Murray said that includes tenant protections, reducing unnecessary criminalization of unhoused people and, above all, producing more affordable housing over time.
He said much of the organization’s direct service work is concentrated in Los Angeles County, where staff and volunteers assist tenants and unhoused residents across a wide range of legal and housing matters.
According to Murray, those efforts include helping veterans obtain benefits, assisting people with mental health disabilities in accessing Social Security support, preventing evictions and addressing unsafe housing conditions.
He said the organization recovered more than $27 million for clients last year while also providing extensive non-monetary legal assistance.
Murray repeatedly emphasized that homelessness prevention deserves far more attention than it receives.
“Once someone becomes homeless, a whole bunch of things tend to spiral,” he said. “It’s really hard to hold a family together. It’s hard to connect with your community, which is often your support network over time. It’s hard to maintain your health and your mental health. It’s hard to do all sorts of things. It’s hard to get a job.”
He said strong prevention systems depend on two elements: identifying who is most at risk of losing housing and then deploying enough resources to stabilize them before they fall into homelessness.
“The first piece is targeting,” Murray said. “The second piece is having really sufficient resources to really support the individuals who you’ve identified with most likely to become homeless.”
Those resources can include legal representation during eviction proceedings, appeals of denied benefits, health care access, case management, relocation support and income stabilization.
Murray pointed to eviction defense as one example of how intervention can change outcomes. He said in cases where tenants receive representation, many are able to remain housed, and even when they cannot, legal assistance can reduce the damage of displacement.
“In about 60%, I think it’s just under 60% of the cases, we are able to stop the eviction and the tenant when the case is over remains in their unit,” he said. “Almost all those folks are getting evicted” when they do not have representation.
Even when tenants ultimately leave, Murray said attorneys can negotiate sealed records, extra time to move and relocation support that helps prevent a direct path to the streets.
“We’re managing to hopefully help somebody have a soft landing in another space that isn’t on the streets or in a shelter,” he said.
Murray also praised a major University of California, San Francisco homelessness study for documenting how people often enter homelessness through unstable or informal living situations rather than a simple housed-versus-unhoused divide.
“I thought it was absolutely excellent,” he said. “It’s the most thorough piece I’ve seen in a long time on hearing from people who are on the streets about what their experiences are.”
He said the findings reinforce the need for more nuanced intervention points, especially for people who are doubled up with relatives, sleeping on couches or cycling through temporary arrangements before becoming visibly homeless.
“If I could wave a wand and change just a couple of things to impact homelessness,” Murray said, “the biggest thing would be to have a lot more housing that is affordable to extremely low-income folks.” He added, “The second thing would be a lot more focus on preventing homelessness before it happens.”
Murray also warned that proposed federal changes affecting mixed-status families who rely on housing assistance could worsen the crisis if enacted. He said many subsidized households include U.S. citizens who could face impossible choices if family members are excluded or assistance is revoked.
“It’s going to be awful and devastating to a lot of people, including a lot of U.S. citizens,” he said. “They’re either having to choose between keeping their family together, staying with their spouse, staying with their children, or they are having to move out and find other housing or end up on the streets.”
For Murray, the lesson is straightforward: homelessness is not an isolated issue but the predictable result of housing scarcity, weak prevention systems and policy choices that fail to protect vulnerable households before they collapse into crisis.
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