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iAUDIT! - This month will marks the second anniversary of LAHSA’s appointment of Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum as its CEO. Her hiring was made to great fanfare, with Supervisor Janice Hahn praising her as “someone who has risen to meet the homelessness crisis in a new way”. Mayor Bass said “In Dr. Adams Kellum, we are bringing new leadership to LAHSA that is completely aligned with the new spirit of unity and urgency that the City and the County are bringing to our crisis of homelessness”. Some news outlets noted Adams Kellum compensation was substantially higher than previous CEO’s: her annual salary at hire was $430,000, about 40 percent more than her predecessor’s at $290,000. LAHSA’s Board of Commissioners and elected officials assured the public the price tag was well worth it. As former CEO of St. Joseph’s Center, one of LA’s largest homelessness nonprofits, and a close advisor to Mayor Bass, Adams Kellum would bring a new spirit of leadership and interagency cooperation to the Authority.
As we’ve seen over the past two years, we’re still waiting for the bold action we were promised. From botched PIT counts to two devastating audits, LAHSA has failed to enact even basic reforms. A County audit found a financial system so chaotic, the Authority doesn’t even know how many organizations it contracts with, and routinely issues payments to agencies with expired contracts—or no contracts at all, a problem its had since at least 2018. In February 2024, Adams Kellum announced three key executives had “parted ways” with the organization, giving no advance notice to the City or County, the agencies that created LAHSA. The L.A. City Controller issued reports on how poorly LAHSA tracks Inside Safe room vacancies and its dismal performance moving people from transitional to permanent housing. These are hardly signs of effective leadership.
The one thing Adams Kellum and LAHSA seem to excel at is creating high-cost positions of dubious benefit. A quick review of LAHSA’s leadership webpage shows, in addition to the CEO, there are five Chief Officers, seven Deputy Chief Officers, and at least 10 Department Directors. The Authority’s organization chart shows several Associate Director positions beneath the Department Directors. A search of the Authority’s job descriptions shows the annual salary for these positions range from about $111,000 to $322,000. One of the more curious job descriptions is that of the Chief Executive Strategist, a position created in September 2024 and given to Kris Freed, whom LAist reported has close ties to nonprofits contracting with LAHSA. The job description suggests the incumbent handles project management, data analytics, policy research, stakeholder engagement, and strategic planning. But the organization chart shows positions with similar duties in other areas, like a Systems and Planning Director under the Chief Program Officer and Deputy Chief for Analytics under the Chief of Staff. The Strategist’s duties seem more like those the CEO should be doing—providing leadership and overall organizational vision. What makes the job even more questionable is that it pays $322,000 per year (the second highest after CEO) and is only part-time. At the 29 hours per week allotted, the position pays $213 per hour. The top 10 executive positions make a combined $2.75 million in salary, not including benefits.
There appears to be significant overlap in job duties. For example, the organization chart shows the Deputy Chief Talent Officer reports to the Chief Operating Officer. The Talent Officer, in turn, manages the HR Director, who supervises at least one Associate Director. There is also a Deputy Chief Equity Officer, whose job description suggests he or she splits time between internal (HR-related) and external service-oriented initiatives. What is the relation between the Deputy Talent Officer and Equity programming—what does the Deputy Chief for Equity contribute beyond what a normal Human Relations manager should?
For every Chief Officer, there’s a Deputy Officer; for every Deputy Officer, there’s a department director, and for every director, there’s an associate director. That is probably why LAHSA does things so slowly; actions have to go through multiple steps before they’re approved, and then they may bounce from one section to the other, like from Systems and Planning in the Chief Program Officer to the Chief Strategist. Based on my audit and managerial experience, when you’ve got an organization loaded with managers, they all want input to justify their positions. I’d like to see a process flowchart of how various things get approved; I’d be willing to bet even the most routine decisions must pass through multiple levels of approval. We need to ask what purpose some of these positions serve or what value they bring. For example, despite all the managers in Finance, vendors with no contracts have been getting paid. This kind of structure is also great for avoiding accountability; you can always blame the guy above you or below you, or the “they” in an entirely different department who throw in their two cents.
For the purposes of comparison, the 890 employees in LAHSA are about the same as you’d find in a medium-sized full-service city. But most cities I’m familiar with have nowhere near the number of managers LAHSA does. The city I worked for has about 800 employees. There is a City Manager (equivalent to a CEO), and a Deputy City Manager. Beneath those positions are the individual department heads—no Chief Officers between the City Manager and operating departments. In addition, there are very few associate or assistant directors. HR management consists of the HR Director and one Personnel Manager to handle recruiting and hiring. LAHSA appears to be a very top-heavy organization. This is all the more concerning because LAHSA has a very narrow band of responsibilities; it distributes funds and does some outreach. Cities provide an array of services, from police to libraries. It brings into question why LAHSA needs so many senior managers to fulfill its mission, something it struggles to accomplish.
For additional context, we should consider why the previous head of LAHSA left in mid-2022. In her resignation letter, Heidi Marston noted the pay discrepancy between the Authority’s top managers and the people doing the work on the ground. Marston unilaterally increased the salaries of LAHSA’s lowest-paid employees from $33,000 to $50,000, pointing out some employees were at risk of losing their own housing. Rather than supporting her initiative, LAHSA senior managers and some Board members accused her of “undermining” the Authority’s bargaining process. Apparently, they’ve found a much more compliant chief in Adams Kellum.
Of course, compensation is only one dimension of a position’s value. The most highly-paid position may be worth the cost if it contributes actual value. Again, we must add context. LAHSA’s managerial, performance, and financial problems go back to its creation in 1993. As I described in a previous column, it’s never had a clearly-defined mission, occupying a gray zone between the City, County, and state and federal funding sources. It was created to provide centralized funding for homelessness programs, but is also LA County’s designated Continuum of Care agency, which should grant it some authority for how homelessness programs operate. But neither the City nor County have been willing to delegate such authority. The County Auditor defines LAHSA as a “pass-through” agency, primarily meant to distribute funding to other local governments and providers. But it describes itself as the leading agency in creating a unified regional response, something it was never intended nor designed to do. Every time it takes on a new task or creates a new program, it adds more staff and management, with no corollary improvement in performance.
Like living organisms, organizations tend to adopt behaviors to sustain themselves and adapt to their environments to grow. Poor coordination between the City and County created a gap in services LAHSA was ostensibly intended to fill, but it was never given the authority to do so. Its been allowed to redefine its role with little oversight. In addition, the City and County, as the members of the Joint Powers Authority that created it, have expressed little interest in its operations other than to ensure the regular flow of money. LAHSA’s own Board of Commissioners is heavily weighted towards Housing First advocacy groups, and lacks members experienced in program performance or organizational efficiency. There is simply nobody willing or able to question the need for more highly-paid executives or programs with ill-defined goals.
As I’ve written several times, the only remedy to L.A.’s homelessness program problems is a fundamental restructuring of City, County and LAHSA’s relationships, combined with leadership’s advocacy for more flexible programs. But as long as the revenue continues flowing, there will be more executives making more money, at the expense of people stranded on our streets.
(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.)
