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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 Principals” and “Dickinson.” Yet he left that career behind for a three-year run 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 of Nithya Raman, who became a Los Angeles City Council member for the 4th District in 2020.

“It was Nithya laying out a path for me to go out and talk to people, something I wouldn’t have felt like I could just do on my own,” he says. “From gradually seeing opportunities to actually help people get 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 outreach non-profit SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition. When she announced her intention to run for the council seat in 2019, Davenport quit his job co-showrunning the comedy series “Chad” with star Nasim Pedrad to focus on the campaign.

“When Nithya said she had decided to run for the seat, knowing the outsized importance that the city council has in L.A., in particular to the issues we were dealing with and homelessness, I just thought it was an opportunity I couldn’t miss,” he says. “I couldn’t just watch her do this and not be involved. That would have been so painful. I thought I would go back to TV after the election, but I was watching my friends who I had worked on the campaign with now be in City Hall and get to actually experience these issues firsthand and have real impact.”

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

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

“I left now because I just had a second kid and I’m getting into some more TV work,” he says. “Also, I feel like it’s a good time to start talking again about city stuff, 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 well on his way to striking up more conversations. He launched a new Substack, Big City Heat, along with his career change announcement, and started a podcast miniseries two days later. The most pressing topic he’s tackling? Measure A.

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

“Every day I’m struck by how radically different our homelessness system is than it was seven years ago when I first started doing outreach,” he says. “When people wanted to go into a shelter, the only thing we had to offer as volunteers was a big group shelter in the city of Bell, Calif., which is 12-15 miles away from where we were doing outreach. A lot of people we were 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 where you are now, and maybe where you’ve been living for years? We can get you on the list for this, and there are services there, and we can keep working with you to get you into permanent housing.’ In the city of L.A., that’s night and day from where we were just in 2016, 2017, and that’s a product of this new service infrastructure that we’ve built up in part by Measure H, which we started in 2017. To rip out those services is to go back to having no options for people when you’re doing outreach, basically going out there just to hand out water and shrug. In many cases, this would stop even the outreach for the water step. It would just leave people to decay on their own.”

Beyond Measure A, Davenport says the difference between candidates in the presidential election, in terms of how they would impact L.A. homelessness services, is “night and day.”

“We rely on the federal government for permanent housing vouchers, for lots of one-time funding for programs in the pandemic,” he says. “The emergency funds that came from the federal government made it possible for us to put people in hotels, which we had never been able to do before. That has transformed our shelter network in L.A. — it was federal money that did that. If Trump is in office, that money is gone. We have no expectations that LA would get anything. In fact, it’s much more likely that we would be punished. When he was in office last time, he was threatening to come into L.A. and set up massive refugee-style camps in different parts of the county and force people into them under a penalty of incarceration. That’s the type of thing I think we would expect if Trump won, instead of getting funds to get people sheltered and housed.”

Outside of voting and further education on the topic, Davenport says that if people want to help L.A.’s unhoused population, there’s one place they can start.

“An email to your local representative is still a remarkably powerful force in local government,” he says. “Someone will read it and they’ll 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 learned about some policy that’s being held up in the city that could address it, an email or a phone call really does mean something.”


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