Comments
iAUDIT! - Looking back on 2024, there are few reasons to celebrate LA’s homelessness programs. Despite an insignificant and unverifiable reduction in unsheltered homelessness, the news was unremittingly bad. Audits from the County and City Controllers detailed how neither the City, County, nor LAHSA can produce any reliable statistics on how many people have been sheltered, housed, or received services. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been paid to providers who are not held accountable for their performance or expenditures; according to the County Controller, LAHSA fails to exercise even rudimentary control of more than $700 million paid to providers. Elected leaders stubbornly defend Housing First and its failed No Barrier/Harm Reduction policies. Much of the housing meant for homeless people remains vacant, mired in bureaucratic finger-pointing. Meanwhile, six people die on LA’s streets every night.
Do we have any reason to hope 2025 will be any better? Oddly enough, yes. There were some bright sports in 2024 that may become brighter in 2025. One of the most positive stories came out of the South Bay, when the City of Redondo Beach announced it achieved “functionally zero” homelessness. After reading about the achievement, I spoke with Ronson Chu, the manager of the South Bay Cities’ Council of Governments (SBCCOG) homelessness programs about how Redondo Beach achieved functional zero homelessness.
Mr. Chu said a key to the program’s success was the use of a “by name” system to track clients. Every individual experiencing homelessness is included on a comprehensive list, updated in real-time, with their personal information, allowing for detailed tracking of the homeless population and their specific needs, rather than just counting overall numbers; this method targets housing and services to individuals and monitors progress towards ending homelessness.
The COG wasn’t happy with the lack of results from LAHSA and the County, so it designed its own system based on successes with by name programs elsewhere. SBCCOG developed a comprehensive program to encourage people to move off the streets into the proper shelter, and to make sure they had somewhere to go. One innovation was Redondo and Hermosa Beaches’ creating a “homelessness court” that offers people arrested for minor offenses like drug use a chance to enter treatment instead of jail. The COG also uses a more flexible system than the City/County, offering relocation or temporary rent assistance to get people off the street as quickly as possible. Mr. Chu gives his field staff $500 gift cards for people to use to pay rent or get a car repaired. He can get his boss to sign checks on the fly for rent deposits, and they do family relocation very quickly. Mr. Chu estimated the program can get as much as 30 percent of the unsheltered homeless inside very quickly using various methods.
Mr. Chu said the top-down approach forced on cities by LAHSA and the County doesn’t work. For example, the County was unresponsive to the City of Redondo Beach’s request for a dedicated person for mental illness and substance abuse care referrals, so the COG found funding for a position through Health Net, the health insurance company.
What really gives me hope was Mr. Chu’s response when I asked him if he thought the program was scalable county-wide. He explained, if you take the cities of LA and Long Beach out of the mix, the average number of homeless per city is a little more than 100. Empowering local cities to build similar programs to the COG’s makes the problem more manageable. The City of LA could assign homelessness response to each of its 99 Neighborhood Councils, giving them the resources to solve the unique needs of their local unhoused populations. Housing First’s rigid one-size-fits-all approach is a key weakness; pushing solutions down to the local level would provide more flexibility and more immediate assistance to those most in need. With both the City and County of LA considering splitting from LAHSA, 2025 offers the opportunity to redirect funding to more nimble providers.
Another bright spot, (even though it had advocacy groups prophesizing doom), was the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision. Beginning with the Boise case in 2018, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a series of decisions that broadened the rights of homeless people to camp in public spaces. While superficially reasonable, the cumulative effect of the Court of Appeals’ decisions created an environment where cities risked expensive lawsuits if they dismantled sprawling and often dangerous encampments. Despite advocates’ dire predictions of massive sweeps of homeless people into jails or sterile tent cities in the desert, the Grants Pass decision gave cities the tools they need to encourage people to move off the streets, where they are subjected to crime and diseases at far higher rates than those in shelters. As a report from the nonprofit Hollywood 4WRD describes, about 50 percent of people with serious mental illness don’t know they need help, (a condition known as anosognosia). Per the County Department of Mental Health, 95 percent of people with substance use disorders do not seek treatment. No amount of repetitive outreach will convince these people to move off the streets. The Grants Pass decision allows cities and counties to move people most in need of treatment off the streets. But the City, County, and LAHSA have to step up and vastly improve the way shelters and interim housing are provided and managed. Our local leaders also need to change their mindset; as soon as the Grants Pass decision was published, Mayor Bass and other elected officials were quick to defend Housing First and its failed policies.
The final positive sign for 2025 is the audit of the City of LA’s homelessness programs ordered by federal Judge David O. Carter. While “positive” and “audit” are rarely used in the same sentence, the independent audit may finally bring some accountability to the City’s $1 billion homelessness budget. Statements made by audit staff in court hearings suggest there is significant waste and the potential for fraud within the City/County/LAHSA troika of overlapping and process-bound programs. While this may not seem like a positive development, this audit will be different from previous ones because elected leaders will be unable to point fingers at one another to avoid responsibility for their failures. Judge Carter has made it clear he expects homelessness programs to achieve measurable and meaningful results. The audit, due sometime in February 2025, may finally be the trigger for fundamental reform.
The overarching positive theme in these and other developments is a renewed focus on the unhoused as individual human beings who need assistance, even if its just help with the rent for a few months. People become homeless for unique reasons and deserve unique solutions. They deserve more than to be treated as symbols of economic injustice, as many advocates do, or to be rebranded with trite labels like “our unhoused neighbors” or “houseless”. Very few people choose homelessness, and they should not be doomed to months or years of dealing with a broken and inefficient system.
Los Angeles’ homelessness crisis may seem intractable, riddled with waste and led by leaders who value political rhetoric more than results. But any problem created by human foibles can be corrected by those with the proper perspective, initiative, and integrity. 2025 may be the year we see those people finally have their moment in the sun.
(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.)
