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iAUDIT! - I started this series of articles on a baseball theme. To continue that analogy, suppose you are the owner of a new major league expansion team. For the first few years, you might expect the team to struggle, as players adjust to one another’s playing style, and become familiar with opposing teams. Your manager would change the lineup, sending some players back to the minors, and rearranging the batting order as your star hitters began to stand out. After some time, you’d except the team to improve its performance from one year to the next. Perhaps you’d set some goals, establishing a winning percentage by the fourth year, and capturing the division or league title by year ten. Throughout this process, you, your manager, and the coaches would pore over the team’s statistics: batting averages, ERA’s, fielding performance, and a host of other data. Your object would be to create a team with the winning combination of pitching, hitting, and fielding. Of course, you’d know if your strategy was working by the number of games won and lost.
Flash forward 30 years. Soon after creating the team, the original owner lost interest and sold it to someone else. Now, a new owner has bought the team, and she’s horrified at what she finds. In almost 30 years, the team has not only failed to improve but often performed worse than the year before. The team has become the running joke of the major leagues, a second incarnation of the infamous St. Louis Browns. Before the new owner visits the team’s camp for the first time, she has dinner with the previous owner to figure out what’s gone wrong. The former owner can’t understand her concern. He says sure, we’ve had a progression of pretty bad managers, and some of the players didn’t work out so well, but we’ve done okay. When the new owner asks what the stats say, he replies he doesn’t really pay much attention to the numbers; he goes by how he feels about the team’s performance. “We’re in a tough league”, he tells her, “and it hasn’t been easy to build a winning record. The fans aren’t supportive, and the weather is really bad at the start of the season. Even though I’ve spent millions on some of the best players, they can’t seem to play as a cohesive team. But they do the best they can, so I changed the definition of winning”. The former owner redefined winning and losing to focus on efforts instead of scores; if the team tries really hard, he counts that as a win. “Besides”, he says, “our ticket sales are great and we’re making more money than ever”. Of course, it’s the only team within 100 miles, so it has a monopoly on the market.
What will the new owner do? She’d probably fire the top management, bring in new blood with new ideas, and emphasize individual and team performance. She may expect the new manager to create a training regimen, so the players learn to work together toward the common goal of winning games. She might demand to see the performance metrics for each player after each game and meet with the manager and coaches to map out a long-term strategy to rebuild the team. She’d make her expectations clear and change managers if they can’t meet them.
Now transfer that scenario to LAHSA. When the City and County created the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority in 1993, they expressed high hopes. Here was the winning team that would level up homelessness program performance and provide seamless coordination between the City’s housing programs and the County’s supportive services. By any reasonable metric, LAHSA hasn’t met expectations. As the size of its workforce and budget increased, homelessness in LA went up to match. LAHSA has no clear mission other than to write checks to service providers with little or no accountability. Much like the delusional baseball team owner, LAHSA’s top managers insist their programs are effective in the face of an ongoing and growing crisis on our streets. They’ve redefined success as completing processes, counting the number of “housing actions” instead of people actually housed, and have concocted a host of excuses why homelessness continues to increase.
To understand why LAHSA is a failed organization, we need to look back at its beginnings. LAHSA’s creation was not a proactive act to coordinate city and county homelessness efforts. According to a UCLA report on the history of homelessness in LA, LAHSA was formed as a result of a series of lawsuits between the City and County in the early 1990’s, as each tried to get the other to take some kind of action on homelessness. When the City and County finally settled, each contributed $2.5 million to create the new Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. As the UCLA report said, creating LAHSA did nothing to expand homelessness services—it merely provided a framework for the City and County to coordinate their efforts. As The report points out, the political will to give LAHSA more authority to truly manage and coordinate homelessness response has been an ongoing problem. In 2021, UCLA’s researchers said, “The county and city of Los Angeles should reimagine the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) by transforming it into a superagency with executive leadership that is empowered to site homeless housing projects and expedite their approval across the county”. No action was forthcoming, even as homelessness continued to climb. After claiming a relatively low 4.1 percent increase in homelessness between 2020 and 2022 (there was no PIT count in 2021 because of the COVID pandemic), homelessness increased by nine percent in 2023. In response to the jump in the numbers, LAHSA’s leadership said “LAHSA is assuming a leadership and coordinating role to urgently address the humanitarian crisis happening on our streets”. Yet the structure to give LAHSA a coordinating role in homelessness does not exist. As I described in the two previous columns on the City and County, neither organization has an internal centralized homelessness authority; they are hardly prepared to cede power to a third party.
So, what is LAHSA, and what does it do with its 900 employees and $800 million budget? How does it fit into homelessness interventions in Los Angeles? LAHSA is the designated Continuum of Care (CofC) agency for LA County. HUD requires regional governments to designate one agency as a CofC to coordinate funding and programs to reduce homelessness. LAHSA is the conduit through which millions in HUD grants and other federal and state funding flow to cities, the County, and service providers. As the title Continuum of Care implies, LAHSA is supposed to ensure clients receive continuous services as they move through the shelter-housing system, something it has proven unable to do for many reasons, some of which are detailed here.
One of a CofC’s duties is to conduct the HUD-required PIT Count. LAHSA’s habitual mismanagement of the count and chronic undercounting have been documented in many publications. To add to that evidence, consider a recent report from the Economic Roundtable, that estimates the real homeless population at 139,000, far greater than LAHSA’s 75,300. To that, add the UCLA study criticizing LAHSA’s undercount of homeless people with substance abuse disorders—29 percent in 2021 and a preposterous 27 percent in 2014. The UCLA study said the real percentage was closer to the LA Times’ estimate of 67 percent. Even if the City and County did a better job coordinating services, LAHSA has set an artificially low target for them, and espoused programs that are ineffective at addressing the true needs of the unhoused population.
Like our fictional baseball club owner, City and County leaders have shown little interest in reforming or restructuring LAHSA. Even though it is a public agency, as a joint powers authority, its leaders are not elected. They are appointed by their sponsoring agencies, the City and County, and do not answer to voters. Three of 10 LAHSA Commission members are elected city or county officials, (Supervisor Horvath, who is also LAHSA’s Board chair, Supervisor Barger, and Mayor Bass). The remaining six are community advocates (one position is vacant). Even though LAHSA deals with a population with a high incidence of substance abuse and mental illness, none of the current Board members are medical professionals. One has a degree in social health policy, but that is not a medical degree. Given that the majority of its members are part of the advocacy community, it is unsurprising the Board has a reputation for lax contract management and has not been able to effectively monitor provider performance. It is very unlikely change will come from the appointed leadership, since LAHSA’s CEO, Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum, is the former Executive Director of St. Joseph Center, one of the largest homelessness nonprofits in Los Angeles and the recipient of millions in service contracts, so she now writes checks to the organization she once led.
Like our new baseball team owner, we are left to decide what to do with an underperforming team that doesn’t know the difference between winning and losing and is more interested in protecting its revenues than in building a successful program. After 30 years, and hundreds of millions spent on failed remedies, we can’t expect our elected officials to step up to the plate and make the needed changes. It is left to us, the voters, to decide who we want to manage our homelessness teams.
The next and final installment of this series will cover the network of nonprofit organizations that should be providing the majority of services to the unhoused community.
(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.)
