below the poverty line and rarely seek medical attention. The county appropriated $7.5 million for construction costs. Yaroslavsky and his four colleagues on the Board of Supervisors came under sharp criticism in a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 series by the Los Angeles Times on massive and deadly problems inside Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in South Los Angeles, a county hospital built after the 1965 Watts Riots to serve the area's then-largely African-American population. Current and previous supervisors were accused of failing to take action for decades because of internal board politics and fear of an angry backlash from some African-American community leaders who strongly supported the hospital, despite its documented problems. After the series was published, in-patient services were shut down. County efforts to reopen the facility floundered for nearly two years until Yaroslavsky proposed a "last, best hope" partnership with the University of California, which he first outlined in an Op-Ed piece in the Los Angeles Times. An accord was reached with the UC in 2009. An editorial in The Times said Yaroslavsky had "demonstrated the value of experience and political astuteness." Homelessness With Los Angeles known as the nation's homeless capital, Yaroslavsky created a county pilot program in 2008 called Project 50, aimed at identifying and then providing permanent supportive housing to the 50 people most likely to die on the streets of L.A.'s Skid Row. Funded with a county grant of $3 million, the program was based on the premise that public funds are more effectively and humanely spent by providing chronically homeless people with housing, medical care and social services than by relying on costly jails and emergency rooms. This approach was pioneered by the New York-based group Common Ground. Project 50 has been criticized by some of Yaroslavsky's colleagues on the Board of Supervisors and others for not requiring participants to achieve sobriety before they're permanently housed with public funds. In 2009, the board majority resisted the program's broader, countywide implementation. "Warehousing without healing," is how one described Project 50 in a Los Angeles Times series that raised questions about the program's effectiveness. But Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, whose relationship with a homeless violinist became the basis of the movie "The Soloist," studied the program and concluded that "for the most part the results have been remarkable." Encouraged by Project 50's results, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has created Project 60,