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iAUDIT! - This is the first in a three- or four-part series on who the major players are in LA’s homeless system, and why they seem unable to work together to solve the homelessness crisis.
In the days before baseball teams embroidered names on the backs of their jerseys, players could only be identified by their numbers. Jumbotrons with player photos and stats didn’t exist, and PA systems were quite sketchy. The only way for fans to keep track of players on the field was with printed programs (or scorecards). “You can’t tell the players without a program” was a constant refrain from vendors hawking programs at ballpark gates. These programs bore little resemblance to today’s slick advertising pamphlets. Traditional programs were a trove of data about players; their batting averages or ERA’s, their recent performance, and occasional biographical tidbits. In the hands of a true fan, a good program was the equivalent of a modern database. In the 1950’s, a real baseball aficionado would tell you the best hitter in the game wasn’t Ruth, DiMaggio, or Williams; it was Stan Musial batting in Ebbets Field.
Knowing the players is key to understating how the action should play out. Understanding the people, organizations, and funding of local homelessness programs is vital if you want to understand why things aren’t working. Let’s start by looking at the three most important government agencies; the City, the County, and LAHSA.
The City of Los Angeles has a weak mayor/strong council form of government. While the mayor can introduce and approve legislation, she cannot take unilateral action or set policy on her own. This is why she needs to periodically return to the City Council for approval for her Executive Directives: ED-1, her policy streamlining development to increase the housing stock, and ED-2, establishing her hallmark Inside Safe program.
The City Council has 15 members, each representing an average of about 266,000 people, more than the population of most California citries. A Councilmember has near-feudal power within his or her district, including the final say on land use decisions. The Council member decides which city policies are prioritized and which can be ignored. This explains why some districts have active encampment clearing programs while in others, encampments have become virtually permanent. Because there is no way for a single Council person to directly connect with so many constituents, they depend on a staff of field deputies and policy specialists for services and policy formulation. Often, key staff members exert tremendous influence over a Councilmember’s policy decisions.
The single restraint on a Councilperson’s powers is that he or she is one 15, and to get approval for a favored piece of legislation, he or she must find at least seven allies. Rallying support can be difficult at times because of the ideological divisions among the members. Some of the moderates include Blumenfeld, Rodriguez, and Park, while the extreme left is represented by Raman, Hernandez, and Soto-Martinez. Others, like Katy Yaroslavsky, seem to blow with the prevailing winds on a given topic. Many Council observers believe the Council has adopted an informal (and borderline illegal) policy of vote-trading to expedite city business. There is an unwritten agreement that if a Councilmember wants a positive vote for his or her legislation, he or she will consistently vote for other members’ proposals.
Given the massive size of its government, (about 50,000 employees in a vast array of departments and bureaus), almost all city business is filtered through one or more of 15 Council committees. Among the most powerful is the Budget, Finance, and Innovation Committee chaired by Councilmember Blumenfeld. Another key committee is Housing and Homelessness, chaired by Nithya Raman; the committee controls the $1.3 billion the city spends on homelessness interventions. If a proposed policy cannot make it out of committee, its death is virtually guaranteed.
Beaneth the level of the Mayor and Council, there is a huge bureaucracy of appointed and civil service managers and employees. At the top of this pyramid is the City Administrative Officer, Matt Szabo. Unlike city managers in smaller cities, the CAO has no administrative authority over the city’s operating departments. Rather, he provides support to the city’s apparatus and acts as a professional advisor to the Mayor and Council. In the support role, the CAO’s office develops the city’s Comprehensive Homeless Strategy. The Strategy is supposed to be the overarching policy all other city departments follow.
LA has no Homelessness Department, although Mayor Bass has proposed one. Lourdes Castro-Rameriz is the mayor’s chief of homelessness policy, but she has no authority over the city’s departments. Her primary role is advocacy for the mayor’s policies, such as her support for “relentless outreach” instead of more aggressive encampment clearing.
There are two other major players in city government, one appointed and one elected. They are the appointed Chief Legislative Analyst and the elected City Controller. The CLA’s job is to provide unbiased nonpartisan advice on major issues before the Council. It was the CLA who produced the city’s response to LAHSA’s amateurish criticism of Municipal Code 41.18, the city’s anti-encampment ordinance. The City Controller should be the city’s impartial watchdog over public money and resources. In the past, City Controller Ron Galperin released studies critical of the costs and delays in the use of Measure HHH funds. Kenneth Mejia, the current Controller, is a vociferous supporter of Housing First, and tends to take a highly negative view of any program that does not support that policy.
When it comes to homelessness, and to oversimplify for the sake of clarity, the City’s role is primarily to provide shelters and housing (hence the passage of Measure HHH in 2016 to provide funds for housing construction). The County should provide supportive services, such as mental health, medical care, and addiction recovery (more on that later). LAHSA is supposed to spearhead outreach and coordinate services between the City and County. As we know, it does none of that well—more on that later, too.
If all this sounds confusing, it is. The City, like regional homelessness program administration in general, is disjointed, with no clear source of coordinated policy. This fragmented and siloed structure is supposed to meet the needs of the City’s more than 50,000 homeless people, while simultaneously coordinating its services with the County and LAHSA, two other agencies that also suffer from hazy authority and a lack of clear goals.
Like an old-time baseball program, you can learn a lot by going through the City’s homelessness program performance website. As I detailed back in April, the website’s reports reveal many inconsistencies in the City’s statistics, combined with a willingness to pay LAHSA with little or no proof of achieving anything of value. Given the lack of meaning performance metrics, it should come as no surprise federal Judge David Carter ordered a comprehensive performance review of the City’s homelessness programs, an effort that is continuing at the time I write this.
Stated simply, the City is spending about $1.3 billion per year—10 percent of its operating budget--on programs for which it provides little direction, sets few meaningful goals, and has done nothing to improve. It is hobbled by a structure that diffuses accountability and encourages silos and territoriality. It values process over results, and gives more importance to political ideologies than to outcomes.
The next part of this series will look at LA’s County’s government which, if anything, is more complex and less accountable than the City. Hang onto your programs!
(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.)
