In the city and county of Los Angeles, various agencies have different pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that comprise the effort to end homelessness — whether it’s 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 an overarching 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 homelessness services. Its duties have grown as homelessness and funding for services have grown.
In addition to running the annual point-in-time homeless count, a vast three-day undertaking every January that marshals thousands of volunteers to scour nearly every census tract in Los Angeles County, LAHSA has become the conduit for almost all contracting of homelessness services. For example, if the city needs service providers for its publicly financed permanent housing projects, LAHSA confers with city officials on service goals, releases a request for proposals, chooses the service providers and writes up the contracts.
Now the county wants to overhaul LAHSA, take away its enormous contracting responsibilities and leave it to maintain the 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 analyses before going forward.
Is it necessary to break apart LAHSA? Maybe not.
Although Los Angeles is far from solving homelessness, the numbers did go down in the city (by 2.2%) for the first time since 2018 — and the numbers were flat in the county. In contrast, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development just released numbers indicating that, nationwide, homelessness has gone up a staggering 18%. The city of Los Angeles was one of a number of cities where it didn’t go up — a testament, says LAHSA Chief Executive Va Lecia Adams Kellum, to the city and county working together.
There’s no question that LAHSA has gotten bigger over the years. As agencies doing homelessness work proliferated and dollars grew — particularly with the 2017 passage of the Measure H quarter-cent sales tax increase to fund homelessness programs — so did the amount of money LAHSA was granting. Currently the agency has a budget of $875 million with about $717 million of that from federal, state and local funds going to grants to service providers.
And it has always served as a punching bag for city and county elected officials frustrated by the continual rise in homeless numbers — although the main reason is that L.A. County has a shortage of 509,000 affordable apartments.
Like any other big organization, LAHSA does have its problems. A recent audit found that contractors were often paid late and not effectively monitored. Also, many providers who were given a total of $50 million in cash advances, starting in fiscal year 2017, have yet to pay the money back. Adams Kellum says that providers were given those dollars to shore up 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 thin, had to swiftly scale up their operations to meet the demand.
Providers were told they would not have to worry about paying back their advances until Measure H funding stopped at the end of 2026, according to Adams Kellum and various longtime respected providers. Since then, Measure A, the half-cent sales tax increase, has passed. It will take effect in January as it repeals and replaces Measure H funding.
The supervisors have acknowledged that much of what the audit identifies as problematic happened before Adams Kellum got the job as chief executive in March 2023.
“I knew LAHSA was broken,” she says. “We wanted to come in and fix it.”
Adams Kellum was the chief executive for 15 years of a Westside service provider, St. Joseph Center, which successfully moved more than 200 homeless individuals off the Venice boardwalk in 2021 into mostly motels and hotels. She was the architect of the Inside Safe program for Mayor Karen Bass, which works on the encampment-to-home model and has moved more than 3,500 homeless people out of encampments into interim housing. Bass then appointed her to lead LAHSA.
Adams Kellum says the agency has made many changes since she got there. These include monthly monitoring of grant recipients and paying them in a more timely fashion and — after years of problems tracking available beds — implementing a new shelter bed inventory tracker that allows providers to see what beds are immediately available. It’s been used by the city’s Inside Safe program and the county’s Pathway Home program, both of which move people from encampments into interim housing. It will roll out systemwide in the new year, she says.
We agree that more accountability is imperative. But the county should take a hard look at whether it wants to dismantle an agency and create another one just as the county is about to get an estimated billion dollars a year in Measure A funding — little of which will be funneled through LAHSA anyway.
The mayor has reservations: “New urgency has been at the core of our work to bring people off the street, not the creation of new bureaucracy,” Bass said in a statement.
Of course, LAHSA could benefit from some retooling. The agency also provides some services itself — mostly outreach. Should it? Some nonprofit providers and advocates think a government agency shouldn’t be doing outreach. It should be solely the role of nonprofits whose core mission is providing services. Adams Kellum says her agency has taken on the role of “first responder” when elected officials relay constituents’ concerns about someone languishing on a sidewalk.
Nonprofit providers wish that LAHSA could be the strategist for the entire system. It could identify and fix inequity in services. Why are providers sometimes paid one rate per bed by one agency and another rate by another agency when the service is the same? Also, LAHSA should make sure services are standardized — so “outreach” and “case management” are the same no matter who provides them.
Before the 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.
