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iAUDIT! - For the past two years, I’ve based this column on verifiable facts and statistics. It would be an understatement to say I’ve found few instances where homelessness program performance matches the narrative from our elected officials. It is as if homelessness exists in two different worlds; the one municipal leaders want us to believe; that homelessness programs are effective and people on the street receive the services they need. Leaders tell us all that’s needed is more compassion, more understanding, and above all, more money. The other world is the one where the unhoused really live. It is fraught with danger, instability, and indifference. After two years writing this column, just when I think I’ve seen the ultimate in poor program performance, I find another report that is more appalling than those that came before. A recent report on shelters from Calmatters is a perfect example, (more below).
Trying to expose the reality of homelessness in Los Angeles has not been easy. The City, County, and LAHSA produce service statistics that either fail to show actual performance or are wildly inaccurate. They compound that by issuing long narrative reports full of platitudes but short on facts, such as Mayor Bass’ “Delivering Results” press release of December 9, 2024. Reading the release, one would think homelessness is steeply declining, and those in shelters and housing are receiving a robust suite of services to help them stay housed. The following day, City Controller Mejia released an audit showing the reality of homelessness programs: shelter beds left empty, fewer than 20 percent of those in shelters moving onto permanent housing, and a dearth of reliable data from the City and LAHSA. The audit was a cold jolt of reality to the warm—and ultimately meaningless—words from the Mayor’s press release.
If there is one component of the homelessness system where leaders’ narratives and reality could not be further apart, it is the network of shelters throughout LA County. LAHSA, the agency charged with managing service contracts for many shelters, wants us to believe they are centers of serenity and healing, where people coming off the streets can find the support they need. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Most shelters are little better than living on the streets, and in some cases, worse.
A February 25 investigative report from CalMatters’ reporter Lauren Helper should outrage anyone with an ounce of humanity. The story uses state records to expose the sexual abuse, violence, and mistreatment the homeless are subjected to in many shelters, including those operated by HOPICS, one of LAHSA's favored nonprofits. (This is the same HOPICS that mishandled $140 million in rent subsidies so badly that many formerly homeless people lost their housing). While local leaders lecture us about compassion, they support a multi-million dollar system that the article refers to as a "voluntary jail".
Problems with shelter operations are not unique to HOPICS. According to LAHSA’s latest financial reports, HOPICS (operating under the name of its parent nonprofit, Special Services for Groups) has received at least $16.8 million in payments from LAHSA year-to-date, about $3 million less than L.A. Family housing, which has received well over $21 million and has also been reported for mismanaging its shelters. PATH, which manages the problem-plagued Riverside Bridge Home, receives about $17 million from LAHSA.
As you read the CalMatters article, pay particular attention to the language used by both municipal officials and nonprofit leaders. It is the bland, generic language of corporate America; "we investigate all allegations of misconduct and take appropriate action". "The safety of our clients is our top priority". Yet the facts tell a vastly different story; staff diverting donations to themselves, taking food and serving moldy leftovers to residents, and ignoring violent clients. The list goes on as if we're reading about a Dickensian bedlam instead of a modern homeless shelter.
Who should be held accountable for the appalling conditions in shelters? There’s plenty of blame to go around, but we can start at the top—the state. The state’s Interagency Council on Homelessness (Cal-ICH) is nominally in charge of collecting statistics on shelter operations from cities and counties, but as a July 2024 article from CalMatters reported, only five of 58 California counties and four of its 478 cities have filed the required reports. According to the California State Auditor, in an April 2024 audit report, Cal-ICH has not been enforcing reporting requirements on regional continuum of care agencies (such as LAHSA), creating what the CalMatters article called, “…[shelter reporting is] a black box. No state agency keeps an updated list of how many shelters are operating, or where, officials told CalMatters. There is no state licensing process for shelters. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development tracks numbers of emergency shelter beds and how long people live in them, but no information about resident deaths, health or safety”.
Since the state shows no interest in making shelters decent places to live, what about local agencies? LAHSA would be the natural place to look since it provides much of the funding and manages many of the contracts for shelters. It is also supposed to coordinate resources from the City and County so people in shelters receive the services they need to become housed. However, as the February 25 CalMatters article shows in great and depressing detail, LAHSA can’t even prevent its providers from hiring convicted felons and turning them loose on helpless shelter residents. (This, despite contract requirements that are so onerous, only the largest nonprofits can qualify). As CalMatters reports, active drug users and people with serious mental illnesses are often placed in congregate shelters with vulnerable women, children, and the elderly. The result has been a constant stream of reports of assaults and antisocial behavior, where those willing to accept help rarely receive it.
LAHSA’s problem isn’t just one poor management; the failure of the shelter system is also structural. To begin with, as I’ve written several times before, LAHSA is stuck in a jurisdictional limbo between the City and County, both of whom pay the Authority’s budget but neither of whom are willing to give up political authority over their respective homelessness programs. As the designated Continuum of Care for most of Los Angeles County, LAHSA should be able to direct policy, but it has little real power. This makes it a convenient scapegoat for City and County officials, who can point at the disjointed structure of homelessness intervention in LA as a reason for their failure, but who also do nothing to remedy them.
The shelter system’s failure is more ingrained than LAHSA’s murky authority. Indeed, it is baked into the very nature of Housing First/No Barrier policies. As I mentioned in an earlier column, LAHSA’s Scope of Required Services, (SRS) specifically prohibits shelter managers from refusing entrance into a shelter for a variety of reasons, including mental illness, a refusal to get treatment or criminal history. The SRS also allows those who’ve been ejected from a shelter to reenter after a suspension period. It’s the perfect recipe for disaster, which is probably the best one-word description of LA’s shelter system. As the CalMatters article shows, many shelter clients are involuntarily “exited” (kicked out of) shelters for a wide variety of offenses. But because of No Barrier policies, they jut wait until the exclusion period expires, or go to another shelter, where they are admitted again (and counted as a separate client—again). Meanwhile, clients who are seeking respite from the streets endure the consequences. Little wonder the word “warehousing” is used multiple times in the CalMatters article.
It seems the only parties who benefit from the chaos are large nonprofits. Both the CalMatters article and one of my previous columns reported on the skyrocketing revenue of some of the largest nonprofits. They are perfectly positioned to take advantage of the authority vacuum between LAHSA, the City, and the County and collect payments with little or no need to actually do anything besides count heads. The executives of these nonprofits, many of whom are paid well into six figures, practice a unique form of hypocrisy, pleading they work to improve the lives of LA’s most unfortunate, while callously ignoring their clients needs. So powerful is the coalition of corporate nonprofits, it was able to bully the City into grating them a 56 percent increase in the nightly per bed rate for interim housing, without showing what they’re doing to earn it. These nonprofits not only make money from a broken system, but they have unfettered access to elected officials, ensuing nothing is done to bring more accountability to their programs. They have created a system so self-serving, a 19th-century political boss would envy them.
At the bottom of this system, looking up as if they were trapped at the bottom of a murky lake, are the homeless themselves. They can only see small, dark visions of what’s going on around them. Their desire to find a safe, clean place to stay, and perhaps get off the streets for good, is drowned in a morass of bureaucracy, unaccountable nonprofits, and an advocacy industry that treats them as symbols instead of human beings.
Many local government leaders were overjoyed with the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision, because it gave them a tool to coax people off the streets and into shelters. But cities and counties cannot morally move people off the streets when the alternative is worse. The conditions in shelters are more evidence that homelessness interventions must be fundamentally restructured before we can make any progress.
(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 in his iAUDIT! column for CityWatchLA.)
