In the city and county of Los Angeles, various agencies have different pieces of the puzzle that make up the effort to end homelessness, whether it be mental health services, outreach, permanent housing, or interim housing.
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is the closest the city and county have had to a general authority. It was created as a joint city-county agency in 1993 to help the two governments stop fighting over who was responsible for which homeless services. Their roles have increased as homelessness and funding for services have increased.
In addition to conducting the annual point-in-time homeless count, a vast three-day task each January that brings together thousands of volunteers to track nearly every census tract in Los Angeles County, LAHSA has become the conduit for almost all homeless services contracting. . For example, if the city needs service providers for its publicly funded permanent housing projects, LAHSA consults with city officials about the goals of the service, publishes a request for proposals, chooses the service providers, and drafts the contracts. .
Now the county wants to reform LAHSA, eliminate its enormous contractual responsibilities and let it maintain a homeless count, a homeless database and an emergency shelter program. The Board of Supervisors passed a motion several weeks ago ordering a feasibility report and other analyzes before moving forward.
Is it necessary to dismantle LAHSA? Maybe not.
Although Los Angeles is far from solving homelessness, numbers decreased in the city (by 2.2%) for the first time since 2018, and numbers remained stable in the county. By contrast, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development just released figures indicating that, nationally, the number of homeless people has increased by a staggering 18%. The city of Los Angeles was one of several cities where it did not increase — a testament, says LAHSA Executive Director Va Lecia Adams Kellum, to the city and county working together.
There is no doubt that LAHSA has gotten bigger over the years. As agencies working for the homeless proliferated and dollars grew, particularly with the 2017 passage of Measure H's quarter-cent sales tax increase to fund homeless programs, so did the amount of money that LAHSA was granting. The agency currently has a budget of $875 million, of which about $717 million comes from federal, state and local funds earmarked for grants to service providers.
And it has always served as a punching bag for elected city and county officials frustrated by the continued rise in homelessness, although the main reason is that Los Angeles County has a shortage of 509,000 affordable apartments.
Like any other large organization, LAHSA has its problems. A recent audit found that contractors were often paid late and not monitored effectively. Additionally, many providers who were given a total of $50 million in cash advances, as of fiscal year 2017, have yet to return the money. Adams Kellum says providers were given those dollars to bolster their ability to carry out their contracts as demand for services increased.
The passage of Measure H added hundreds of millions of dollars to the system. Nonprofits, already stretched to the limit, had to quickly expand their operations to meet demand.
Providers were told they would not have to worry about returning their advances until Measure H funding stopped at the end of 2026, according to Adams Kellum and several long-time respected providers. Since then, Measure A, the half-cent sales tax increase, has passed. It will go into effect in January as it repeals and replaces Measure H funding.
Supervisors have acknowledged that much of what the audit identifies as problematic occurred before Adams Kellum took the CEO job in March 2023.
“I knew LAHSA was broke,” he says. “We wanted to come and fix it.”
Adams Kellum was the CEO for 15 years of a Westside service provider, St. Joseph Center, which in 2021 successfully moved more than 200 homeless people from the Venice boardwalk into motels and hotels. She was the architect of the Inside Safe program for Mayor Karen Bass, which works on the camp-to-home model and has moved more than 3,500 homeless people from camps into temporary housing. Bass then appointed her to lead LAHSA.
Adams Kellum says the agency has made many changes since she arrived there. These include tracking grant recipients monthly and paying them in a more timely manner and, after years of problems tracking available beds, implementing a new shelter bed inventory tracker that allows providers See which beds are available immediately. It has been used by the city's Inside Safe program and the county's Pathway Home program, both of which move people from encampments to temporary housing. It will be rolled out system-wide in the new year, he says.
We agree that greater accountability is imperative. But the county should take a hard look at whether it wants to dismantle one agency and create another just as the county is about to get about $1 billion a year in Measure A funds, little of which will be funneled through anyway. from LAHSA.
The mayor has reservations: “New urgency has been at the center of our work to get people off the streets, not the creation of new bureaucracy,” Bass said in a statement.
Of course, LAHSA could benefit from some restructuring. The agency also provides some services itself, mainly outreach. Should I do it? Some nonprofit providers and advocates think a government agency should not do outreach. It should be the sole responsibility of nonprofit organizations whose primary mission is to provide services. Adams Kellum says his agency has taken on the role of “first responder” when elected officials relay constituent concerns about someone languishing on a sidewalk.
Nonprofit providers want LAHSA to be the strategist for the entire system. It could identify and correct inequality in services. Why do providers sometimes receive one bed rate from one agency and another rate from another agency when the service is the same? Additionally, LAHSA must ensure that services are standardized, so that “scope” and “case management” are the same no matter who provides them.
Before supervisors make a final decision on the fate of LAHSA, they should consider whether they want to create a new funding agency or reform the current one.
