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iAUDIT! - This is the second in a series on the major agencies and organizations responding to Los Angeles’ homelessness crisis. The first installment described the City’s programs. This column focuses on the County of Los Angeles.
By any measure, Los Angeles’ County government is massive. The County employs about 108,000 people working in 38 departments. The County serves nearly 10 million people spread out over 4,060 square miles. The fiscal year 2024-25 budget tops $45 billion; of that, at least $745 million to two billion is spent on homelessness. The exact amount is tricky to identify because homelessness programs are scattered throughout the government’s structure: the County’s Homeless Initiative Office (HI) budgets $745 million, but there are several other departments that directly or indirectly budget for homelessness programs, and the County pays part of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s (LAHSA) budget, along with the City of L.A.
The County’s governing body is the five-member Board of Supervisors. The Supervisors are among the most powerful local government officials in the country. Each represents about two million people and sets the priorities for their districts for a vast array of services, from law enforcement to parks and recreation. People unfamiliar with the structure of local government often conflate city and county services. If you live in one of L.A. County’s 88 incorporated cities, you get most services from your city government. The County provides direct services to people living in unincorporated areas. According to the County’s website, about 65 percent of the county’s land and one million people are in unincorporated areas. But County government still has a presence in incorporated cities; activities like public health and regional parks are provided by County departments. Many smaller cities contract with the County for law enforcement (Sheriff) and fire services.
Under California law, counties, like cities, are considered “political subdivisions of the state,” meaning the State Legislature can exercise some measure of control over local government operations. County governments are subject to more state control than cities, because the state regards them as the primary conduit for funding, policies and services from the state to local government. Although L.A. County’s budget seems huge, much of it comes from state and federal sources and is restricted to specific uses. For example, the County receives about a billion dollars per year in state Mental Health Services Act (MHSA) money; these funds can only be used for services specified by the state, and the County must (or should) report to the state how the money is used. Locally, the County Homeless Initiative manages funds from Measure H, the county-wide quarter-cent sales tax dedicated to homelessness services.
As I mentioned in Part One of this series, the relationship between the City and County for homelessness services is superficially simple: the City provides shelter and housing, and the County provides support services. To coordinate services between the two, the City and County created LAHSA, a joint powers authority, in 1993. In reality, there is quite a bit of overlap, especially in the areas of outreach and support services. Throwing LAHSA into the mix further muddies the waters, as I’ll explain in a future column.
As mentioned previously, many County departments are involved in homelessness services. Besides HI, the departments of Public Health, Mental Health, Health Services, the Sheriff, and others provide direct or support services to the unhoused. The office of the Homeless Initiative is supposed to be the coordinating agency within county government and the point of contact for other government agencies’ homeliness programs. Per its website, “The Board of Supervisors has tasked the Homeless Initiative to lead unprecedented collaboration between County departments, elected officials, local jurisdictions, service providers, and people who have lived the experience of homelessness”. This is quite similar to LAHSA’s mission statement, which says its purpose is “To drive the collaborative strategic vision to create solutions for the crisis of homelessness grounded in compassion, equity, and inclusion." In addition to overlapping mission statements, we should remember HI has no administrative or operational control over other County departments. It cannot tell the Department of Mental Health how to prioritize its homelessness services; policy is the prerogative of the Board of Supervisors.
The County and City are supposed to work together to ensure people in interim and permanent housing receive the services they need to stay housed and reintegrate into mainstream society. This is (or should be) done using the Coordinated Entry System (CES), which shares information on client needs so they can be connected to the needed services. The primary way client information is shared among the city, county, and providers, is the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), a software package required by HUD to be used for coordinating services. (LAHSA is the administrator of CES and HMIS). Theoretically, individual client needs are entered into HMIS by shelter intake staff, then shared with the County so it can identify that person’s needs and assign the proper provider. HMIS is used to track the client’s progress through the system, from shelter to housing.
The reality isn’t quite that neat. As described in a RAND/United Way survey, only about 48 percent of providers use HMIS to track client services. Those who use it criticize it as clunky and not user-friendly. Because of high turnover among provider staff, there is an almost constant learning curve as new users access the system. Issues with HMIS are exacerbated by LAHSA’s notoriously lax contract management for providers. At an August 2023 City Council meeting, LAHSA’s leaders admitted they weren’t enforcing reporting requirements for Inside Safe, so the City was paying for an unknown number of vacant Inside Safe rooms. In December 2023, L.A.’s City Controller issued a report that found several problems with LAHSA’s data practices, including a bed availability tracking system so bad, LAHSA depended on daily emails for bed counts, and city service staff would call individual shelters to check on vacancies. Add to this the disjointed system that allows clients to be counted more than once as they move through the system, and thousands of clients may go unserved, as described by LAist in December 2023. The County can’t provide services if it doesn’t know where its clients are.
The lack of coordination between the City and County, and within the County itself, has led to untold numbers of people going unserved. According to some studies, about half the people on the street receive no services of any kind. Even when people are placed in shelters or interim housing, they rarely receive the services they need. A survey of Inside Safe clients showed 75 percent never received mental health services, and only seven percent received drug treatment, despite the high number of mental illness and substance abuse among the unhoused. The survey’s results are consistent with the findings of a review of County services from the LA Alliance for Human Rights that showed the County chronically underserves unhoused people in need of mental health or substance abuse services. (I helped write that report). The disconnect between what the County should be doing and what little it actually does can best be summarized in the report’s section on MHSA funding. While the Director of the Department of Mental Health was decrying the state directing MHSA money to new mental health facilities, County budget documents showed the County consistently underspends its funding, to the degree the State Auditor found it was sitting on 175 percent of is MHSA budget in its uncommitted fund balance.
Like their counterparts on the City Council, the County Board of Supervisors have shown scant interest in holding LAHSA and providers accountable for their lapses in services. The County’s inability to produce meaningful data for an independent audit of City programs resulted in a frustrated federal judge ordering it to cooperate with the audit team.
So now that we’ve looked at the City and County’s homelessness programs, what do we see? Both organizations have failed in the peremptory duty to serve some of their most vulnerable residents. The astonishing lack of coordination between the two, combined with no central internal authority, had resulted in thousands of people left unsheltered and unserved, languishing on the streets where six die every night. But the systemic failure of L.A.’s homelessness programs is not the sole responsibility of the City and County. There is at least one more player—LAHSA, the subject of the next column in this series.
(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.)
