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iAUDIT! - We’ve been seeing a lot of news about the County’s new department of homelessness. Last week, the Board of Supervisors chose a name for it: the Department of Homeless Services and Housing. More importantly, on Thursday July 3, the Board named the first department head, Sarah Mahin, who currently runs the County’s Housing for Health program. She will lead a department that will prioritize the use of the $350 million the County is pulling from LAHSA in an effort to improve homelessness services. She is a veteran of LA’s homelessness system, having spent time as Director of Policy and Systems at LAHSA and as a Regional Coordinator for the VA’s Supportive Services for Veteran Families unit. Supervisor Horvath said she “…knows the County, she knows LAHSA, and she knows how to get things done. Sarah is a collaborative leader who will bring service providers and all of our city partners together in this vital effort." What does Ms. Mahin’s appointment mean in terms of promised reforms?
Before answering that question, I want to make it clear I am in no way impugning Ms. Mahin’s dedication, work ethic, or character. She may very well be a conscientious and skilled leader who genuinely wants to help reduce homelessness. Any criticism of her appointment must be understood in terms of the milieu in which she has spent her career.
Let’s start with Ms. Mahin’s time with LAHSA. The position of Director of Policy and Systems no longer exists among the Authority’s job descriptions, which isn’t surprising given the constant shuffling of titles and jobs over the past few years. However, a quick Internet search of the job definition for “Policy Director” describes someone who is, “a senior executive role within a government, nonprofit organization, or corporation. Their primary responsibility is to lead the development and implementation of policies that align with their organization's strategic goals”. So, we can reasonably assume Ms. Mahin’s primary role was to create, implement, and monitor policies that supported LAHSA’s goal of preventing and reducing homelessness. Since her title included “Systems” we can also assume she oversaw the development and use of the information structure used to make informed policy decisions. How did LAHSA perform during Ms. Mahin’s tenure from September 2016 until March 2019? I prepared the chart below for an LA Alliance for Human Rights report on LAHSA:
As you can see, in fiscal year 2016-17, the year Ms. Mahin started, LAHSA’s budget was about $106 million and the PIT count for 2017 reported 52,765 unhoused people in LA County. By the time of Ms. Mahin’s departure about three-quarters of the way through fiscal year 2018-19, LAHSA’s budget had ballooned to almost $258 million and 2018’s homeless population had increased 25 percent to 66,433. (For comparative purposes, the annual PIT count looks backwards, so the count for 2019 would have been for the homeless population in 2018). After more than doubling LAHSA’s budget, homelessness increased by more than 11,000 people. Of course, we cannot assign all the blame for the increase solely on Ms. Mahin or LAHSA; she worked for just one three agencies, along with the City and County, which are supposed to provide coordinated services for unhoused people, and as we know, none of them have performed well. But LAHSA is the designated Continuum of Care (CoC) agency for LA County. A CoC is supposed to coordinate housing, funding, and programs for homeless people. LAHSA has hardly filled that role. For almost three years, Ms. Mahin was in a key position managing LAHSA’s programs.
It is also interesting to note the similarities in public statements about Ms. Mahin’s appointment as head of County homelessness with what elected leaders said about Dr. Adams Kellum when she became LAHSA’s CEO in 2023. When Adams Kellum was hired, Mayor Bass said, “In Dr. Adams Kellum, we are bringing new leadership to LAHSA that is completely aligned with the new spirit of unity and urgency that the City and the County are bringing to our crisis of homelessness”. Supervisor Hahn said Adams Kellum “…has risen to meet the homelessness crisis in a bold way.” Both Adams Kellum and Mahin came from the environment of current homelessness programs--Adams Kellum is a close friend of Mayor Bass and was CEO of St. Joseph’s Center, one of the largest corporate nonprofits in the homelessness network; Mahin has spent a good part of her career working in local homelessness programs, including LAHSA. All either of them knows is service provision within the current structure, a structure that has proven ineffective.
More troubling, Ms. Mahin was a senior manager at LAHSA during the period covered by a scathing November 2024 audit from L.A. County’s Auditor/Controller, which found serious problems with the way the Authority paid contractors with little or no proof performance. As head of Polices and Systems, Ms. Mahin would have been closely associated with the problems detailed in the County’s audit. Indeed, starting on page 25 of 57 of the audit report, LAHSA’s management response laid much of the responsibility for its multiple failures at the feet of previous management, which included Ms. Mahin.
We don’t know why Ms. Mahin left LAHSA in 2019. Perhaps she was frustrated by the lack of progress or the poor performance. But we do know how programs she was directing performed, and they were underwhelming to say the least.
Moving on to Ms. Mahin’s time with the County, in 2019 she left LAHSA to be COO of Housing for Health (H4H) and became its Director in 2020. According to its website, H4H is a medically-based approach to homelessness. It has several programs covering street outreach, clinical services, interim housing, permanent supportive housing, and other support services. Its clientele are people most in need of medical and/or mental health care, and who could benefit from a stable housing environment.
According to press releases, H4H will be the model for the County’s new homelessness department. As I described in a May 2025 column, Housing for Health, although touted as cost effective and successful, is expensive and performs no better than most other programs. Its emphasis on housing leaves little room for street-based or immediate interventions, which are less expensive and may result in more positive outcomes for those who do not need intensive services. In my column, I detailed the inconsistent performance data H4H has released, including the possibility of counting people multiple times because services among providers are not coordinated.
What is most troubling is that Ms. Mahin, regardless of her skills or intentions, comes from an environment I describe as a culture of complacency. It is a culture that assumes completing processes is the most important job, even if those processes are ineffective. As we know from the County audit and a March 2025 assessment ordered by a federal judge, it is a system that pays providers regardless of their performance, and with almost no accountability for how taxpayer money is spent. It is a system where LAHSA’s former CEO “accidentally” paid a nonprofit where her husband is a senior manager and nobody said anything until the payments were exposed by the press. Believing someone steeped in that culture can suddenly become a force for change is wishful thinking.
We are all products of our environments, and we view the world from the perspective of those environments. If all someone knows is the current way of doing business, they have no other point of reference to gauge success. Simply stated, Ms. Mahin may be very good at what she does, but what she does doesn’t work.
Perhaps the County should not have hired a collaborative leader instilled with a spirit of unity. Maybe what’s really needed is a disruptor, someone from outside the system with a hard-nosed focus on performance and outcomes. LAHSA has gone through four leaders since Ms. Mahin worked there, while County leadership has remained relatively stable. But no matter who the leaders are or how long they stay in their positions, the result has always been the same; more money spent and more people on the streets. More of the same is clearly not an option.
Only time will tell if the County’s new program and its director are successful. But it is hard to take the County’s commitment to reform seriously when leaders have decided to hire someone who works within a failed system. Ms. Mahin’s promotion is consistent with other actions that hold out little hope for real reform. As I described a few months ago, revenues from Measure A will be controlled by the same entrenched special interests that have spent billions in taxpayer dollars with no accountability. Regardless of claims of bold action and a disdain for business as usual, Mayor Bass and Councilmember Raman continue to oppose the withdrawal of City funding for LAHSA, despite its long history of failure and questionable business practices.
I wish Ms. Mahin all the luck she can get. In addition to building a whole new department, she faces the daunting task of overcoming decades of entrenched financial and political interests who desperately want to maintain the status quo. This will be a true test of the local government’s commitment to real reform.
(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 in his iAUDIT! column for CityWatchLA.)
