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iAUDIT! - Many people recognize the ancient Greek symbol for theatre: two masks, one of which is smiling and the other frowning. The masks represent the two sides of many theatrical productions: comedy and tragedy. The symbol is ubiquitous, appearing on everything from local theatre playbills to the ornate carved facades of the pre-War movie palaces on Broadway in downtown L.A. Recent news stories on homelessness have taken on the characteristics of Greek theatre: comedy and tragedy; absurdity and morbidness; fantasy and harsh reality. As with most theatrical productions, there are no clear-cut good guys and bad guys in this story.
It is probably best to start chronologically. The play’s first act opened with an L.A. Times article claiming there was a seven percent decline in homelessness in Nithya Raman’s and Kevin DeLeon’s Council Districts. The article’s timing was particularly interesting, being published on Friday, March 1, the weekend before the election, when many people may have sat down to complete their ballots. The Times endorsed Raman for reelection, partially based on her opposition to LAMC 41.18, the encampment prohibition ordinance, and a “collaborative” approach to homelessness, which apparently means collaborating with advocates and encampment occupants while ignoring the pleas of the district’s residents.
Anyone familiar with LAHSA’s PIT count would have quickly noticed how absurd the claims of these reductions are. The supposed decreases took place between the 2020 and 2022 counts (there was no 2021 count because of COVID). Both years’ counts reported numbers by Council District, a practice LAHSA discontinued after 2022 when problems with local counts led to an embarrassing number of news articles and criticism from elected leaders and professional survey organizations. As a reminder, the 2022 PIT count showed a nine percent reduction in homelessness in the area that includes CD-11, where Mike Bonin was the Councilmember. Mr. Bonin, Mayor Garcetti, and LAHSA’s leadership bragged the “reduction” in CD-11 was proof their brand of Housing First was successful. That is, until stories of uncounted encampments and lost data cropped up, forcing LAHSA’s then-CEO to claim the count was meant to be regional, not local. If one checks the change in Service Planning Area (SPA’s) homeless populations between 2022 and 2023, one gets a very different picture. The SPA that includes Raman’s district recorded an 8.7 percent increase in homelessness. The SPA that includes CD-11 experienced a 45 percent increase between 2022 and 2023. (LAHSA 2023 PIT Count, slide 17). In any case, for current policies to show they are effective, all of the SPAs would have to show verifiable and sustained decreases in homelessness, not just isolated fluctuations among areas, which are an indication the homeless population may move, but certainly hasn’t decreased.
If you’re hoping the 2024 count will be more accurate, you’ll be disappointed. Even as the count was being conducted, volunteers were reporting problems loading numbers into the new multimillion dollar counting system. As if that weren’t bad enough, as detailed by Sue Pascoe in Circling the News, LAHSA told volunteers not to count most of the County’s beaches, nor in state parks or PCH. The blizzard of confusing and contradictory information from LAHSA that followed is more worthy of an Abbott & Costello routine than L.A. County’s lead homelessness agency.
While it appears CALTRANS may have counted encampments along state routes like PCH, (as neither LAHSA nor CALTRANS can currently tell us what those numbers were), Paul Rubenstein, LAHSA’s Deputy Chief External Relations Officer said the missed beach areas were only three percent of the total precincts counted. But as anyone from Malibu to Wilmington could tell you, beach areas are among the most popular spots for the unhoused to camp. A few days later, Rubenstein said he would send teams back to count the missed areas. Unfortunately, homeless people by their nature are transient, so anyone counted now may have already been counted during the initial PIT survey, while others may be missed entirely. Then he said most of the beach areas were in fact counted, but he would send a team back anyway to count the few remaining missed spots, although they wouldn’t be included in the numbers sent to HUD. He also said the algorithm used by LAHSA’s software would compensate for any missed areas, since it’s “an estimate”.
These kinds of inconsistencies and questionable assumptions have always made the PIT count a rough estimate at best. This is best described by the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights amicus brief in the appeal of the Grants Pass case pending before the Supreme Court: “Accurate counting is moreover, a myth: Counting people who often want to avoid inclusion depends heavily on algorithms (for example, how many people live in a particular sized tent) and is extrapolating from certain areas physically counted to those that are not, all resulting only in wide ranging estimates at best”. In an unintended way, Mr. Rubenstein was right: the PIT count is at best a rough estimate, but LAHSA’s laissez-fare approach to missed areas creates even more inaccuracy. The problems with the 2024 count became too much for a normally complacent County Board of Supervisors, which ordered an audit of LAHSA’s purchase and implementation of the latest count software.
The play’s next act also premiered on March 1, when Nick Gerda reported in LAIst that LAMC 41.18, the city ordinance prohibiting camping near designated sensitive areas, was ineffective, according to a leaked draft report LAHSA sent to the city in November 2023. A summary of the report at the end of a follow-up LAist article lists a litany of problems and inconsistent enforcement, and alleged unhoused people moved back to most of the cleared encampments within a few days. Some of the City’s Progressive officials like Hugo Soto-Martinez and Kenneth Mejia were quick to cite the report as proof 41.18 is nothing but a mean-spirited effort to hide the homeless from vocal NIMBY’s. LAHSA’s report seems to be a damning indictment on how ineffective 41.18 is at removing encampments. However, a cursory reading of the summary report raises serious questions about its objectivity and accuracy. One the report’s initial statements is, “LAHSA’s analysis found the 41.18 interventions between December 2021 and November 2023 were generally ineffective in permanently housing individuals”. The problem with that statement is that 41.18 isn’t meant to be a housing intervention program. It is an anti-camping ordinance, intended to keep encampments away from schools and other sensitive areas.
City Council president Paul Kerkorian seemed to understand the report’s flaws in a March 2 press release criticizing the timing and content of LASHA’s report. He noted the City’s Chief Legislative Analyst found several instances of missing or inaccurate data, and asked LAHSA for follow-up information, which it has not yet received. Sharon Tso, the Chief Legislative Analyst, confirmed with LAist her office has not received responses from LAHSA to questions her staff had, although she declined to share those questions.
Indeed, parts of the report seem to be more a condemnation of LAHSA’s poor track record housing people than of the city’s ordinance. For example, the report says, “Of those placed into interim housing, 54.6% either exited to a place not meant for habitation or exited to an unknown destination (i.e., an exit interview was not conducted, or the exit destination could not be collected). This means that of all 41.18 clients whose outcomes we analyzed, 92.2% either did not receive housing before being displaced, exited their IH placement back to the streets, or are unaccounted for”. Whoever wrote this seems to have forgotten it is LAHSA, not the anti-camping ordinance, which is responsible for transitioning people from the street to proper supportive shelter and housing. As we already know, LAHSA has a reputation for losing some people and counting those in its system multiple times.
In another section, the report criticizes how 41.18 interferes with LAHSA’s efforts to perform effective outreach: “A key question we looked to answer with this analysis was client participation. We found that 93.5% of 41.18 clients tagged in an encampment were enrolled in Street Outreach and engaged during the signs posted period. This means that a significant majority of individuals were actively working with their outreach workers to find housing before the 41.18 ordinance came into effect”. Again, LAHSA seems to be blaming 41.18 when it is the agency that takes months to perform effective outreach and placement.
[Tim Campbell was a guest on KABC radio. Click here.]
To pile one irony on another, City Controller Kenneth Meija, a vocal Housing First advocate, was quick to cite the report as just more evidence of the City’s campaign to criminalize homelessness. He seems to have a faulty memory as well, since his office issued a report less than four months ago critical of LAHSA’s inability to track people in its shelters.
Taking this fiasco to truly absurdist levels, LAHSA’s report was signed by Paul Rubenstein, the same person who had trouble getting his story straight about the counts near coastal communities, and who thinks there is a beach in Westchester. In a statement that screams of hypocrisy, Mr. Rubenstein “claims that 41.18 was implemented in a “rushed” manner in late 2021, “before tracking design and testing were possible,” resulting in the delay of the report due to LAHSA’s inability to “develop universal tracking standards.” Before putting such a foolish statement in writing, Mr. Rubenstein should be reminded the City Controller slammed LAHSA for not enforcing bed utilization reports in its shelters. In August, LAHSA admitted it doesn't know how many Inside Safe rooms are vacant. For anyone at LAHSA to take another agency to task for poor tracking practices makes a mockery of the idea of accountability.
To be clear, there are no true “good guys” in this situation. While LASHA has failed dismally at its job, the City has earned its share of the blame. For one thing, it has been complicit in LAHSA’s failures by never holding it accountable for its lack of progress implementing effective solutions to the homelessness crisis. It also can’t seem to generate dependable numbers, claiming thousands sheltered by Inside Safe, but permanently housing fewer than 400. By allowing individual Councilmembers to enforce 41.18 in their districts, the City has taken a scattershot approach to encampment clearance, making it difficult to coordinate clean-up efforts with LAHSA and its housing providers. Inconsistent enforcement encourages urban campers to move from Districts where the ordinance is aggressively employed to those where it is rarely used.
Like a Greek drama, the feud between the City and LAHSA about 41.18 moves from absurd to tragic when we remember encampments are inhabited by real human beings who need support and services, and who are receiving neither from a broken system that puts more emphasis on politics than solving a vast humanitarian crisis.
(Tim Campbell is a resident of Westchester who spent a career in the public service and managed a municipal performance audit program. He focuses on outcomes instead of process.)
