Mayor Karen Bass revealed the inner workings of her efforts to combat homelessness and answered questions about it in downtown Los Angeles on Nov. 13.

The event – hosted alongside Jim Newton, a professor in the communication department and editor in chief of the Blueprint magazine – began with discussion about the results of the Nov. 5 election. Bass said in a speech at the event that she is trying to do what she can to acquire any money that is intended for the city before President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January.

She added at the event that many regulations have exacerbated homelessness in LA. Bass – who criticized many policies as attempting to only manage the problem but not end it – said she is trying to fight such dysfunctional laws.

“I don’t assume that I can’t get anything done. It’s just that I’ll just have to get things done differently,” Bass said at the event. “Sometimes, deregulation can be a good thing.”

Bass also discussed housing initiatives for veterans and their families, including vouchers for temporary housing, at the event. While there are empty beds at many housing shelters for veterans, many often do not qualify because they do not meet income thresholds, she said at the event.

“I don’t think there has been a lot of attention paid to the rules, the regulations, the laws that are roadblocks in us being able to get people housed,” Bass said at the event.

Newton said he chose to host this event with Bass specifically because she has made homelessness a top priority of her administration.

“She mentioned Inside Safe – that’s probably the most prominent of her initiatives, and that’s the effort to lure people out of encampments,” Newton said. “If you look at the numbers, they’ve had some success with it. There is a decline, the first decline in years, in street homelessness in LA.”

When she took office as mayor, Bass started an initiative called Inside Safe, a program designed to voluntarily place unhoused people in temporary shelters and later remove the encampments.

Bass said she helped write and supported the passing of Measure A, a measure that was on Los Angeles County ballots Nov. 5. The measure, which passed with over 57% of voters in favor, will add an additional sales tax of 0.5% to fund homelessness prevention programs.

[Related: Measure A proposes funding more services for people experiencing homelessness]

According to the Office of the City Controller, there are about $512 million of uncommitted funds out of a total of $1.3 billion allocated for homeless spending.

Bass said she is evaluating her efforts to reduce homelessness based on the number of unhoused people on streets and the amount of comprehensive services for the unhoused.

“I have this dream of creating a headquarters … where we collocate county services – we have health clinics, we have education, LAUSD, community colleges, (and) we have programming,” Bass said.

She added that it is not only important to move unhoused people into some form of housing but to understand why they were removed from their housing, asking how long they will be in temporary housing, what happens to them while in said housing and why they need to be in temporary housing.

Near the end of the event, Bass took questions from the audience and discussed UCLA’s efforts to combat homelessness. She said inconsistency of health care has affected those experiencing homelessness but added that her administration – along with UCLA Health’s Homelessness Healthcare Collaborative – has diagnosed people who might not otherwise receive proper care.

Mihran Kalaydjian, a community member in the audience, asked Bass about government entities and job retention since COVID-19, saying he noticed employment rates in departments such as Parks and Recreation, Sanitation and LAPD. Bass said on the panel that the LAPD has struggled with hiring police.

“Hiring has to be very targeted,” she said on the panel. “But we have not stopped and won’t stop the hiring of police officers.”

She later added that police Chief Jim McDonnell’s first actions as chief will be to correct the hiring process of civil servants.

[Related: Mayor Karen Bass appoints Jim McDonnell as 59th LAPD chief of police]

Bass also said on the panel that she wants UCLA to expand its research on poverty across LA.

“I’d like to know all of the dollars that are spent on low-income Angelenos and how we rethink some of that – maybe consolidate, restructure,” Bass said on the panel. “There’s basically no measurements of what you’re doing, and I am not used to that.”

The United States Supreme Court recently ruled that cities are allowed to punish those sleeping in public spaces. Bass, however, said on the panel such a hard approach is not always the answer.

“What happens when voters get angry is that then they pass terrible policies, and I frankly think the reason we are in this situation now is because of bad policies,” she said on the panel.