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HOMELESS - Homeless encampments have become part of the landscape in LA. Over the past decade, Angelenos have become accustomed to seeing people living on the street. No one's saying this is an easy problem to solve. There are a lot of different reasons people end up living on the street, including high housing prices, lack of mental health care, and substance abuse. In order to address these challenges, LA voters approved two ballot measures to provide funding to address the problem: Measure HHH (2016), which provided $1.2 billion in bonds to fund housing for homeless people, along with mental health care and addiction treatment; and Measure H (2017), a 0.25 percent sales tax increase in order to fund homeless services and prevention.
But while our elected officials claim they're making progress, there's widespread frustration about the fact that there are still many people without housing camped out on LA's streets. And now an audit has been released that raises serious questions about what’s happening to the money that the City of LA is allocating for homelessness. The recent report by the firm Alvarez & Marsal first noted that a lack of complete and accurate documentation made it difficult for them to even perform their assessment. Their report says that, “Insufficient financial accountability led to an inability to trace substantial funds allocated to the City Programs. Fragmented data systems across LAHSA, the City, and the County and inconsistent reporting formats made it challenging to verify spending [….] The lack of uniform data standards and realtime oversight increased the risk of resource misallocation and limited the ability to assess the true impact of homelessness assistance services.”
In other words, the City of LA doesn’t actually know if it’s making progress or not, and many Angelenos are more frustrated than ever. I recently spoke to Marshall Blanchard, who lives in South LA. He says when he moved into the area 15 years ago, there were no encampments and the neighborhood was fairly well maintained. When homeless tents first started to appear, Blanchard worked with the office of Councilmember Curren Price in an effort to manage the situation. But at some point, Blanchard says, Price's office stopped returning phone calls and e-mails, and the encampments now seem to be there to stay. At times Blanchard finds that sidewalks in the neighborhood are covered with trash, and while LA Sanitation will come to clean it up, it's only a temporary fix. Many of the neighborhood's streetlights have been out for months, and in some cases it appears that this is because homeless persons are using the lights as a power source.
Blanchard is particularly angry about the RVs that seem to have taken root around Broadway Place and 38th. The posted signs say parking is prohibited 2:00 to 6:00 am, but the City doesn't enforce the restrictions. It appears that the RVs are now a permanent fixture. One of them caught fire a while ago, and now its blackened remains sit on the street between two charred trees. I seriously doubt Curren Price would tolerate this in his own neighborhood, but apparently he doesn't care what his constituents have to deal with.
Angelenos want to see progress on homelessness, and they've showed they're willing to invest in solutions. In addition to the two ballot measures cited above, voters approved Measure A in November 2024 to provide a perpetual funding stream to solve this problem. But looking at the recent audit by Alvarez and Marsal, it looks like the money we've invested is disappearing into a black hole. Why should we believe the story will be any different with the funds from Measure A? We hear the LA City Council talking constantly about their desire to end homelessness, but they haven't even taken basic steps to find out if the taxpayer money they're spending is producing any results. And then you have someone like Councilmember Price who doesn't seem to care how bad things are in his district.
We've heard a lot of talk about homelessness over the past decade. When are we going to see some real progress?
(Casey Maddren is president of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA [www.un4la.com]) and a CityWatch contributor.)
