How voters and Hollywood can help

Hayes Davenport is a comedy writer with an enviable resume, having worked on shows like ‘Eastbound & Down’, ‘Family Guy’, ‘Vice Directors’ and ‘Dickinson’. However, he left his career behind for a three-year stint working at City Hall with a special focus on helping Los Angeles’ homeless population.

It’s a journey he first started by supporting the campaign Nithya Ramanwho became a member of the Los Angeles City Council for District 4 in 2020.

“It was Nithya who pushed me to go out and talk to people, something I wouldn’t have felt I could do on my own,” he says. “From gradually seeing opportunities to actually help people off the street … once you’ve done it a few times, you just can’t not do it It activates and empowers you in a way that very few jobs can.”

Davenport first met Raman in 2017 while volunteering with the homeless non-profit SELAH Coalition for the Homeless. When he announced his intention to run for a council seat in 2019, Davenport quit his job co-hosting the comedy series “Chad” with star Nasim Pedrad to focus on the campaign.

“When Nithya said she decided to run for a seat, knowing the tremendous importance that city council has in LA, especially for the issues we face and for homelessness, I thought it was an opportunity I couldn’t miss. I could miss,” he says. “I couldn’t watch her do it and not be involved. It would have been so painful. I thought about going back to TV after the election, but I was looking at my friends that I had campaigned with now at City Hall and they get to experience these issues firsthand and have a real impact.”

Davenport joined Raman’s staff as a senior advisor in July 2021. Although he could no longer run the writers’ rooms, his gigs on the cult comedy podcasts “Hollywood Handbook” and “The Flagrant Ones” provided a release from the challenging work of at City. Room.

Monday, Davenport announced on X that he left his government job after three and a half years — but he’s not slowing down the advocacy.

“I’m off now because I’ve just had my second child and I’m doing some more TV,” he says. “I also feel like it’s a good time to start talking about city stuff again, which is harder to do as a city employee.”

Davenport, who previously co-hosted the local politics and policy show “LA Podcast” from 2018 to 2021, is about to start more conversations. Released a new Substack, The heat of the Big Cityalong with the announcement of his career change and began a podcast miniseries two days later. The most pressing topic he tackles? Measure A.

Measure A asks voters to help fund homeless services over 75,000 people who do not have a home in LA County. It would raise the current 1/4 cent sales tax designation to a 1/2 cent tax. Davenport says the measure — which builds on a previously passed H measure — is critical.

“Every day I am amazed at how radically different our homelessness system is compared to seven years ago when I first started working,” he says. “When people wanted to go into a shelter, the only thing we had to offer as volunteers was a large group shelter in Bell, California, which is 12-15 miles away from where we were doing outreach. A lot of people I was talking to had never been before, or even heard of it.

“There were no city-run shelters at all,” he continues. “Everything was operated by nonprofits. Now, we can go to people and say, “Hey, are you interested in a hotel room in the same community that you’re in now, and maybe where you’ve been living for years? We can get you on the list for that, and there are services out there, and we can continue to work with you to get you into permanent housing. In the city of LA, this is night and day from where we were just in 2016, 2017, and this is a product of this new service infrastructure that we built in part through Measure H, which we started in 2017. these services it’s back to running out of options for people when you’re doing outreach, basically just going there to give water and shrug. In many cases this would even stop expansion for the water stage. They would let people degrade themselves.”

Beyond Measure A, Davenport says the difference between the presidential candidates in terms of how they would impact LA’s homeless services is “night and day.”

“We rely on the federal government for permanent housing vouchers for a lot of one-time funding for pandemic programs,” he says. “The emergency funds that came from the federal government made it possible for us to put people in hotels, which we have never been able to do before. That’s what transformed our shelter network in LA – federal money did that. If Trump is in office, that money is gone. We don’t expect LA to get anything. In fact, we are much more likely to be punished. When he was last in office he threatened to come to LA and set up massive refugee camps in various parts of the county and force people into them under penalty of incarceration. That’s the kind of thing I think we would expect if Trump wins, instead of getting funding to get people sheltered and housed.”

Aside from voting and further education on the issue, Davenport says if people want to help LA’s homeless population, there’s a place they can start.

“An email to your local representative is still a remarkably powerful force in local government,” he says. “Someone is going to read it and probably feel like they have to react to it in some way, and that’s especially powerful if you can get five, 10, 20, 100 people to email about something. If something is important to you and you’ve heard about a policy that’s suspended in the city that could solve the problem, an email or a phone call really means something.”