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iAUDIT! - On Friday, June 28, LAHSA and the City released the results of the 2024 PIT count—a count completed in late January but requiring five months of data scrubbing to release. LAHSA and City officials set up a webinar to show how the region is “turning the corner” by achieving a .27 percent decrease in county-wide homelessness and a 2.2 decrease in the City of LA. In addition, unsheltered homelessness in the City decreased by 10 percent, while the number of those in shelters increased by 17 percent, due primarily to the success of Inside Safe.
While even a paltry decrease in homelessness is good news, we must empirically assess these claims. To begin with, the real decrease in the County-wide count is only 206 people, and the decrease in the City was 1,008. There are still 75,312 unhoused people in the County and 45,252 in the City. A professor from USC’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work said the count’s margin of error was 1,592—or greater than the reported decrease; the real number of unhoused people could have actually increased. To quote the professor, the supposed decrease was “statistically insignificant”.
There’s a lot to unpack in the latest count, but before we start celebrating “turning the corner” we need some perspective. First, let’s think about what it took to achieve even these minor successes. LAHSA’s fiscal year 2016-17 budget was $132.1 million, and it had 200 employees. The 2016 PIT count showed 46,874 homeless in L.A. County. By fiscal year 2023-24, LAHSA’s budget ballooned to mor than $840,000,000 and it had 800 employees. The 2024 PIT count showed more than 75,000 homeless in the County. For a six-fold increase in budget, and a quadrupling of staff, the County suffered a 60 percent increase in homelessness. In 2016, the City of Los Angeles allocated $138 million to homelessness programs; the current fiscal year budget is $1.3 billion, nearly ten times more. In 2016, there were 28,464 homeless people in the City; now there are more than 45,000. It would quite an understatement to say this is a perfect example of the law of diminishing returns. If it takes massive increases in spending to achieve an insignificant decrease (if indeed it was a decrease), should we expect similar budget increases in the future? What would it take to achieve meaningful decreases?
Second, much of the decrease in unsheltered homelessness was attributed to Mayor Bass’ Inside Safe program. According to the latest Inside Safe report on the City’s website, fiscal year-to-date expenditures for Inside Safe are $232,654,810. 2,728 people have been placed in interim housing and 506 in permanent housing. Therefore, the cost per permanently housed person is $459,790. The report says 686 people—1.35 times more than have been permanently housed--exited back into homelessness. Costs like that for such minor returns are unsustainable. Spending nearly a half-million dollars per person to move someone from the street to permanent housing—and then to incur the continuing costs of keeping that person housed—is not a model that can be successfully transferred to LA’s huge homeless population.
Next, we should consider the source—LAHSA. Specifically, Paul Rubenstein, Deputy Chief External Relations Officer, whose grasp of surveys and numbers seems to be rather tenuous. The LA Times, whose article on the count duly parroted the City/LAHSA PR line, quoted Mr. Rubenstein, “These shifts in both the city and the county mean that this year, across our region, more people are experiencing homelessness inside, where they are safer, where they have food, showers and better access to medical and other services”. Sounds great, except Mr. Rubenstein is the same person who headed the 2024 PIT Count, which missed hundreds of people camping on beaches and in state parks. At first he denied missing the areas, then said they were insignificant, and finally said they would be counted in a follow-up survey. Other major problems with the Count’s ESRI software are succinctly summarized by Christopher LeGras in his All Aspect Report column in the new count’s numbers. In short, the 2024 count may have undercounted as many as one-third of the people it normally would, and this doesn’t take into account the half who may be routinely missed in any given year.
Mr. Rubenstein is also the person who wrote LAHSA’s error-filled “analysis” of the City’s anti-camping ordinance, LAMC 41.18. The report claimed the ordinance was an abject failure because most of the cleared encampments were quickly repopulated. Although embraced by some “progressive” Council members as a damning indictment of an ineffective law aimed at the unhoused, the report’s many factual and procedural errors were detailed by the City’s Chief Legislative Analyst in a May 2024 response. In short, trusting any number LAHSA generates would be like trusting Bernie Madoff to do your income taxes.
Following the line of flawed reports, LAHSA’s Friday presentation cited the UCSF Benioff survey of homelessness to bolster its argument that the paucity of housing and its high costs are the primary drivers of homelessness. The presentation included a chart from the Benioff survey showing 54 percent of homeless respondents reported a financial downturn caused their homelessness. Remarkably, the survey didn’t connect financial loss to causation. Given that the survey showed 65 percent of respondents said they had period in their lives when they regularly used drugs, and 62 percent had periods of heavy alcohol use, perhaps a follow-up question about the reasons for their financial troubles would have been appropriate. Again, Chris LeGras, this time writing in the Westside Current, provides a highly detailed analysis of why the Benioff survey is biased and its logic flawed.
Finally, we turn to the City’s claims that far more people were sheltered and housed in 2023. The Times reported “27,951 people had obtained permanent housing, a 24% increase over 2022”. In a late afternoon email, LAHSA corrected its initial count down to 27,300, which is odd considering the USC professor took great pains to assure the audience the housing count was one of the few numbers that weren’t an estimate. Again, there are a couple of pesky problems with that figure. Just like the 2023 PIT Count, 2024’s housing number included this caveat: “Data provided courtesy of County of Los Angeles’ Homeless Initiative. It is possible for one person to have multiple permanent housing placements in a year”. In other words, the 27,951(or 27.300) “people” are actually placement “actions” and include an unknown number of repeat clients; neither the City, County, nor LAHSA knows how many there are.
The other problem is a bit more troublesome. According to the City’s own data, one set of programs that don’t seem to be achieving any housing goals are known as the “Freeway Agreement” programs, a group of five interim shelter and safe space programs that are meant to assist people in transitioning to permanent housing. The programs are:
1. 15 Bridge Home Sites and 18 Other Interim Housing locations
2. 11 Tiny Home Villages
3. 8 Safe Parking Sites
4. 15 Project Homekey facilities
5. One Safe Sleep Site
Per the City’s quarterly performance reports to the US District Court these five programs serve about 4,600 clients each quarter, (pages 8-10). These same reports show that no one—not a single person—has been successfully transitioned to permanent housing for the first three quarters of fiscal year 2023-24 (column viii). Several clients have been enrolled in time limited subsidy or permanent supportive housing, but enrollments are not actual occupancy. As with most other shelter/transitional programs, there were far more “exits to unknown destinations” –958—than any other exit category.
Assuming the City’s reports are correct and not just the result of lazy data collection, they raise an interesting question. Where did the 27,300 people housed come from? They didn’t come from any of the Freeway Agreement programs. They may have come from Inside Safe, but the latest report for that program shows only 506 people were permanently housed through May 17,2024. Therefore, there are more 27,000 people “housed” with no direct path from the streets to housing. Of course, many of these people were probably carried over from prior years’ housing statistics, (22,540 in 2023). Again, assuming 2023’s and 2024’s numbers are correct, the net difference housed is 4,760; 506 of that number can be attributed to Inside Safe, but the rest would have had to come from other programs or straight from the streets to housing with no transitional services. Based on currently available data, there is no certain answer to how the City and LAHSA accounted for the number of people housed.
The quarterly reports share another concerning pattern with other programs; the number of people who fall back into homelessness or “unknown destinations”. For Inside Safe, its is 1.35 times the number housed, and for the Freeway Programs it is 958 people. We must remember each of those people could very well be feeding back into the system, accounting for an unknown number of repeat clients inflating the statistics.
In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find any statistic that isn’t accompanied by a caveat about the numbers. Besides the possibility of duplicative clients in permanent housing, other disclaimers include:
For Inside Safe:
“LAHSA and service providers strive for complete, accurate, and timely data in HMIS. The Data Management team at LAHSA is actively collaborating with providers to resolve any data discrepancies”.
For the City’s Quarterly Performance Reports:
“Interim Housing staff continues to work diligently with providers on improving data quality and gaining a better understanding of issues related to exits to outside destinations”.
For LAHSA’s Dashboard reports:
“LAHSA and Service Providers strive for complete, timely, and accurate data, however the numbers represented here are subject to data integrity issues”.Note the commonality of the language: the dependency on other organizations to provide accurate information; no mention of proactive data quality control to correct errors before they are reported; and a statement the City strives to improve data quality, but nothing about how it intends to do so.
So, we really can’t be sure how many people were served, sheltered or housed, or even how many unhoused people occupy streets, underpasses and hidden spaces. Moreover, we need to remember the numbers we saw on Friday were produced by agencies with a huge financial interest in maintaining and expanding business as usual. They are zealously committed to Housing First regardless of costs or results. Significantly, there was no mention of the 1,200 units of homeless housing left vacant for as long as two years, nor the fact the City pays as much as twice over market for units purchased under Project Homekey. The timing of the PIT count release should be considered in light of the recent announcement that a new County measure to replace the temporary revenue from Measure H with a permanent half-cent sales tax to fund homelessness programs in perpetuity. What better way to justify the new tax than by showing current programs are succeeding and will do even better with another infusion of cash?
How cynically should we view the new numbers? Probably with a bit more doubt than in previous years. The City’s cheerleading presentation, trying to convince the public that a statistically insignificant change is a sign of progress, is disingenuous. What we didn’t see was an honest assessment of how massive increases in budgets have resulted in, at best, insignificant improvements. We heard the phrase the “new LAHSA”, as if there have been structural changes in the way it does business, when in fact there have been none, other than doing more of the same. If you compare the 2024 slides to 2023’s, you’ll see very little has changed. The only thing that’s different is the spin.
(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.)
