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iAUDIT! - Last week, I had the pleasure of joining a Zoom discussion of homelessness with the Valley Alliance of Neighborhood Councils (VANC), a collation of 34 San Fernando Valley neighborhood councils whose purpose is to promote a unified and coordinated response to regional issues. Since I wanted to hear alliance members’ questions and concerns, I kept my verbal presentation short and spent about an hour answering questions about LA’s homelessness programs.
The discussion covered a wide range of ideas, views, and emotions, but the one that was most obvious was compassion. Many of the Alliance members feel frustrated and ignored by their City Councilmembers, who seem more interested in espousing abstract political theories and responding to the priorities of large nonprofit organizations and developers than in the concerns of local residents. Despite the City’s and LAHSA’s claims of making progress, neighborhood council members hear from their constituents every day about new encampments, or troubled people left to fend for themselves on the streets. They were angry the City, despite expending billions of dollars, seems unable to address the homelessness crisis with a coherent, proactive plan.
They share the same sentiments as the unhoused themselves. One of the meeting’s participants was a homeless person who echoed VANC’s members’ feelings of being unheard and ignored by the City and its constellation of well-paid service providers. She has tried to find shelter and housing by contacting every local official and so-called service provider she could, but she remains one of the 70 percent of LA’s homeless who are unsheltered. There is a tragic synchronicity in elected neighborhood council members sharing the same frustrations as the unhoused people who live in their communities.
Despite advocates who are quick to label any critics of their failed policies as NIMBY’s, the council members were unanimous in their desire to see homeless people properly sheltered and supported. Its not the homeless they’re angry at—it’s the City, County, and LAHSA for wasting time and money on ineffective programs that do nothing but enhance the financial profiles of a few large nonprofit organizations.
They have good reason to be angry. Within a day of the meeting, the Economic Roundtable and USC released a plan to reduce homelessness in time for the 2028 Olympic Games. Although much of it should be taken with a grain of salt, (one of the co-authors is Sam Tsemberis, who developed, marketed, and now profits from Housing First policies), it does contain some interesting information, including an estimate of the true homeless population in LA County at 139,000, far more than LAHSA’s official PIT count of 75,312. The higher number is based on an annual, rather than a point in time, estimate, and includes the number of “short-term” homeless people who are missed during LAHSHA’s brief PIT count window.
Unsurprisingly, the Economic Roundtable found the longer people are homeless, the less likely they are to be successfully re-housed because of resocialization problems; this has led to a high proportion of chronically homeless people among the unhoused population; the chronically homeless make up about 70 percent of LA’s homeless, and 82 percent of them are unsheltered (LAHHSA 2024 PIT count, slide 13).
There’s a certain irony to the higher estimate, since it comes from USC, with which LAHSA contracted to ensure the accuracy of the 2023 and 2024 PIT counts. During the June 28th presentation touting the supposed reduction in homelessness, Dr. Benjamin Henwood, the USC professor who was in charge of the survey’s methodology, took great pains to explain the improvements made to ensure the count’s accuracy. He failed to mention the 63,688 people they missed.
A second reason to question the wisdom (or sanity) of local leaders was an LA Times article on a draft proposal to double the City’s homelessness budget. Through a public records request, Times reporters obtained a report created by city housing staff, estimating the budget to functionally eliminate homelessness by 2032 at $20.4 billion dollars, requiring expenditures nearly doubling the $1.3 billion per year the City currently spends. As if such a stratospherically high budget wasn’t absurd enough on its face, the City’s plan proposes no structural changes to the failed programs that leave everyone so frustrated and underserved. The article stated. “As drafted, the analysis does not propose new programs to address homelessness. Rather, it assumes the city scales up its existing efforts, such as Inside Safe and the building of permanent supportive housing". In other words, don’t try to reduce the average cost of homeless housing from $600,000 per unit; rather, increase expenditures to meet the inflated costs. Our leaders, who constantly boast about bringing radical change to homelessness programs, and about “locking arms” to improve interagency coordination, want to double the spending on objectively failed programs. To paraphrase the old cliché, this is neither raising the bridge nor lowering the river; its raising the bridge AND raising the river.
There is no better example of spinning failure as success than Inside Safe. According to the City Controller’s dashboard, Inside Safe expenses exceed $342.4 million, and have housed only 697 people, nearly half of whom are in time-limited subsidized (TLS) housing. As the title implies, TLS housing lasts only as long as the subsidy; when it runs out, anyone who hasn’t found alternative housing could be back on the street. As paltry as housing 697 people may seem, it’s far lower than the number of people who fell back into homelessness, at 868, or about 25 percent more than the number housed.
If our city’s leaders want to boast about something, perhaps they can boast about their ability to cross cultural, economic, and social lines by leaving nearly everyone angry and frustrated. But there are some signs of hope. Anger often triggers action. Besides being unanimous in their dissatisfaction with homelessness programs, the neighborhood council members also expressed a universal desire to band together and demand accountability from our leaders.
Part of their frustration stems from feeling isolated by a City leadership uninterested in listening to them. In the face of a powerful and well-funded advocacy lobby entrenched in the City’s power structure, what can advisory neighborhood councils do? I suggested one possibility would be to join together and coordinate their actions by working with the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, the small nonprofit that successfully sued the City and County (and for whom I do volunteer research and reporting). The Alliance was the primary driving force behind the independent audit ordered by federal Judge David Carter, and it is working with community groups to create a united front to demand positive change in the way Los Angeles treats its housed and unhoused residents.
After last week’s meeting I was tired, yet hopeful. Doing research for the LA Alliance has given me a keen understanding of the stunning breadth and depth of local government’s failure to address the homelessness crisis. It is often depressing and maddening to see the waste and how little has been done to stop it. Listening to representatives from the Valley’s 34 neighborhood councils gave me hope. These are people deeply committed to the well-being of everyone in their communities, not reactionaries who want to ship the unhoused to the desert. These are the people we, as residents, should support by sharing our concerns with them and with our City Council members, and by forming our own coalitions to demand that our voices are heard, and insist that homelessness policy is not the exclusive property of those who profit from maintaining the status quo.
(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.)
