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HOMELESSNESS - After the June 28 announcement that LAHSA’s latest PIT count showed miniscule decreases in overall and unsheltered homelessness, LA officials were quick to take victory laps touting their success. The new 2024 slide presentation brags, “This year’s homeless count numbers suggest that our unprecedented coordinated emergency response is making a difference”. Over the course of my career, I learned organizations usually use numbers to back up their performance claims but will switch to percentages when they want their results to look better than they are. I recall a political campaign in the late 1970’s complaining about inflation. The speaker was lamenting the cost of #2 pencils had increased “100%”, or from five cents to a dime. A five-cent increase doesn’t sound as dramatic as 100 percent.
Looking at LAHSA’s presentation, we can see how the use of percentages works to its advantage. LAHSA claims a 2.2 percent reduction in homelessness in the City of L.A. In real numbers, that translates to 1,008 people out of a 2023 count population of 46,260; the count is now 45,252. It certainly sounds better to claim a percentage decrease than admit the huge budget increases resulted in a minor decrease that still left more than 45,000 people homeless. Similarly, LAHSA said there has been a 17.7 percent increase in sheltered homelessness. Again, the numbers are less impressive. Sheltered homelessness increased by 2,397 people, from 13,580 to 15,977. If that still sounds notable, consider that much of the gain was attributed to Inside Safe, the Mayor’s flagship shelter program. Inside Safe’s projected fiscal year 2023-24 costs are around $255,000,000. Through March 2024, Inside Safe brought 2,571 people indoors; rounding that number up to 2,800 by the end of the fiscal year, the cost will be $91,070 per sheltered person. For reference, the estimated 2022 median household income for Los Angeles County was $82,455, meaning the City is spending 110 percent of the average household income to shelter one person. As a bridge to permanent housing, Inside Safe is a costly failure. According to the most recent report on the City’s website, 506 people have been permanently housed, while at least 686 have fallen back into homelessness,1.3 times as many as were housed.
Indeed, the PIT count and other news raise more questions than they answer. Consider these issues:
What do the numbers really tell us? In its presentation, LAHSA said “Our unified response to unsheltered homelessness is contributing to meaningful change”, yet the USC professor who headed the count’s analysis said the changes were “statistically insignificant”. The margin of error was 1,592, meaning there could have been more people on the streets instead of fewer. So, are the numbers a positive sign or just a reflection of natural fluctuation or counting errors?
Speaking of counting errors, what about all the problems with the ESRI software? As detailed by Christopher LeGras in his All Aspect Report, many volunteers reported problems with the new ESRI-based counting app, including showing the wrong locations for tents and encampments and numbers that disappeared from user screens. Counters were told to write their counts on a map, which may or may not have been transferred to the final count. Are the supposed reductions due primarily to uncounted homeless people, as they were in 2022? We don’t know because no mention of the problems volunteers encountered was made during the June 28 cheerleading event.
Continuing the theme of problems with the 2024 count, what happened to the homeless encampments on the Westside’s beaches? As described in a series of articles in Circling the News, LAHSA missed counting tracts along several beach areas. At first, LAHSA officials tried to brush off the error as missing only “one percent” of the tracts, even though beach areas contain a high concentration of encampments. Then they said they’d send follow-up teams to do a count, including the beach in Westchester, which has no beach. Obviously, given its transient nature, the homeless population in a given area is fluid, and coming back days or weeks later to perform a follow-up count likely means counting people who were counted elsewhere and missing people who moved. Again, nobody at the June 28 presentation addressed missing data. What effect did missed counts and LAHSA’s policies on limiting the count areas have on the final tally?
Other pertinent questions about the count include how the drop in L.A.’s overall population may have affected the supposed decrease in homelessness, and how deaths from the opioid and methamphetamine crisis may account for part of the decrease. In a March 2024 LA Times article, RAND economist Jason Ward said he continues to see a “very high rate” of mortality among unhoused people in Los Angeles because of fentanyl. He said fentanyl-related deaths are cutting so deep that the overall homeless population in the city is likely decreasing. When it comes to the PIT count, the best analogy I can think of is the height of the COVID pandemic, when President Trump said the only reason cases were increasing was because the government did such a good job counting them. LAHSA seems to have taken a page from his playbook and decided the best way to show a reduction in homelessness is by not counting the unhoused.
Moving onto the claims about gains in housing, LAHSA said it permanently housed 4,760 more people in 2023 than in 2024, (slide 14). However, as in past years, that claim included the caveat: “Data provided courtesy of County of Los Angeles’ Homeless Initiative. It is possible for one person to have multiple permanent housing placements in a year”. Setting aside for the moment the oxymoron of claiming someone can be both “permanently housed” and have multiple placements, the real meaning of the sentence is that LAHSA has no idea how many of the 27,300 people it says it housed were multiple placements of the same person. How many of the 27,300 were repeat clients? We may have a simple answer: Nobody knows. We must remember LAHSA counts “placements”, not people. What slide 14 really tells us is that LAHSA took 27,300 placement actions of some kind. Placements are not people.
Any mention of housing should also raise the question of vacant and overpriced Project Homekey units. As reported in the Westside Current, the City has spent more than $800 million buying hotels and motels to convert to homeless housing. Of the 2,750 units purchased, 1,200 remain vacant, some for as long as two years, representing unused assets worth mor than $350 million. Nobody from the City nor LAHSA discussed this issue during the presentation, so we don’t know what actions are being taken to make those units available. Nor has there been any justification offered for the lavish payments made for the properties, most of which were bought for way above what the market indicated. How can the City explain massive expenditures for housing and then leave 1,200 units vacant?
There is also a question of how the City can claim it is housing more people than ever when its own reports show a key group of programs have housed no one. As I previously reported, five programs, including Project Homekey, show no one was transferred to permanent housing in the first three quarters of fiscal year 2023-24, despite annual expenditures exceeding $100 million. How can the City explain such the apparent failure of some of its most high-profile programs?
Advocates tell us a vital component of Housing First is providing proper support services. Given the high incidence of mental illness and substance abuse among the unhoused population, treatment and recovery programs are necessary to keep people housed. Yet, as detailed in a report from the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights (which I helped write), LA County has a long track record of underspending on support programs, and, like the City, it fails to track clients and services. When the Westside Current printed a story about the report, publisher Jaime Paige asked the County Board of Supervisors for comment but received no reply. A recent study by a coalition of advocacy groups used surveys and interviews to ascertain the true results of the Mayor’s million Inside Safe program. Although the report bends toward political posturing, the numbers speak for themselves; 45 percent of Inside Safe participants have received no offer of services of any kind. Despite the prevalence of mental illness among the unhoused, 75 percent of program enrollees have been offered no mental health services, even though the County claims it has expanded its mental health and substance abuse services to the homeless. How, then, can the City and County claim to be permanently housing people when they are not receiving the services they need to stay housed? How can the County support a proposed permanent increase in the Measure H sales tax from a quarter-cent to a half-cent when it is not spending the money it already has?
Unless and until our leaders can answer these straightforward questions, and provide some kind of accountability for the billions of dollars flowing through the homelessness system, we must assume, as has federal judge David Carter, that “There had apparently been ‘absolutely no accounting and no transparency’ for at least $600 million that had flowed through the city to combat homelessness in years before [Mayor Karen] Bass was elected mayor in 2022.”
(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. Tim is a regular contributor to CityWatchLA.com. )
