LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As part of a stepped up California advocacy campaign to raise awareness and spur civic engagement on and about the state’s homelessness and housing affordability crises and the need for rent control statewide, AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s (AHF) Housing Is A Human Right (HHR) has launched a new monthlong TV and digital ad campaign that began Monday (Nov. 4th) in 11 counties across California.
Three ads titled ‘Apocalypse,’ ‘Squeezed’ and ‘Searching’ are now running on cable, digital (Direct TV and Spectrum News) and online outlets including social media, YouTube and Hulu as part of a half-million-dollar housing affordability and homelessness awareness ad campaign. The ads are running in the following 11 California counties: Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, San Diego, Contra Costa, San Francisco, Alameda, Santa Clara, Sacramento and Kern.
The three ads are part of AHF and Housing Is A Human Right’s broader efforts to effect meaningful change—including implementation of rent control—as part of California’s approach to its housing and rental affordability crisis as well as the state’s catastrophic homelessness rates. For 2019, the official homeless count in Los Angeles County was nearly 59,000, with 36,300 of those individuals found in the City of Los Angeles.
The ad campaign raises awareness about the importance of rent control as a means to provide steady, reliable housing for many of California’s 17 million renters and its importance as a tool to prevent the rolls of California’s homeless from swelling any further because of tenant evictions and/or people being priced out of their homes.
The ads, each fifteen-seconds in length (and which will also roll out shortly in Spanish), include:
- ‘Apocalypse’ – focuses on some of California’s homeless encampments, asking the question: “How did homelessness get so bad?” The ad urges viewers to tell their elected officials “…we need rent control now!”
- ‘Squeezed’ - features a slow-motion close up of a hand squeezing an orange to represent the squeeze that many working-class families in California, seniors and veterans feel from unscrupulous corporate landlords and urges viewers to “…join the movement and stop the squeeze.”
- ‘Searching’ – shows a young woman making a series of phone calls, searching in vain for a room to rent, hanging up repeatedly in frustration--then cuts to her bedding down for the night in her car. Viewers are also urged to tell their elected officials “…we need rent control now!”
Each ad includes the Housing Is A Human Right website www.housinghumanright.org and two ads include a line to text either the words ‘APARTMENT’ or ‘RENT CONTROL’ to the number #40649 to connect with one’s legislator’s office.
For the past several years AHF and its housing advocacy arm, Housing Is A Human Right, has aggressively pursued creative solutions to the intertwined housing affordability and homelessness crises in Los Angeles and statewide in California through its advocacy, by proposed legislation on rent control (2016’s Prop. 10) and by also directly providing housing to individuals through the ‘adaptive reuse’ of a series of single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotels and motels that it purchased and repurposed units—to date, nearly 600—as housing for extremely-low-income and formerly homeless people.
