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iAUDIT! - As I’ve written before, numbers can be inconvenient things. They can ruin the most carefully crafted narrative and expose myths passed off as fact. In the past few weeks, there has been several news stories about homelessness numbers. Last week, I wrote a column about the increase in family homelessness. City and LAHSA leadership continue to tout an unverifiable reduction in LA’s homelessness, despite statewide and nationwide increases, and despite serious questions about the count’s methodology and honesty. The City Council deferred a decision to pay a law firm almost $6 million to fight an already-settled lawsuit from the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights. In light of scandals and two scathing audits, on September 10, the Council voted to investigate creating its own homelessness department instead of relying on LAHSA for funding and services. Measure ULA, the so-called “mansion tax” has generated far less income than projected. These and other stories are really about numbers: the number and demographics of LA’s homeless population, and the hundreds of millions of tax dollars spent on homelessness with little to show for it. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the latest stories, and what the numbers tell us about the reality of homelessness in LA, and the common theme that ties them together.
As part of the City’s PR campaign after the release of the latest homelessness count, the Mayor’s office claimed thousands more housing units have been created. But for more than year, Jamie Paige, Christopher LeGras, and Angela McGregor from the Westside Current have been reporting on thousands of converted hotel units left vacant for two or more years. McGregor’s latest investigative article on a vacant Ramada Inn in Venice details how more than $19.5 million has been spent on the site since 2022, with no active construction taking place in almost three years. The article describes how one delay after another have kept the project in limbo. The project’s manager, PATH Ventures, the real estate arm of PATH, a huge nonprofit with a budget over $160 million, has claimed “funding shortages” have kept construction on hold. Yet PATH saw its assets grow 116 percent between 2019 and 2023, and its cash on hand grow 97 percent in the same period. PATH is also the manager of the infamous Riverside Bridge Home shelter in Councilmember Raman’s district, a shelter plagued by violence, theft, drug dealing, and recently, homicide. So, when the City claims it has created thousands of housing units, we should ask how many truly exist and are occupied.
When voters approved Measure ULA in November 2022, supporters assured us the ‘mansion tax” would generate $1 billion per year by taxing high-dollar real estate transactions. Yet the tax has raised just over $800 million, or about 40 percent of its projected revenue, in the two and a half years since it took effect. As reported in LAist, a recent study from UCLA’s Lewis School for Regional Policy Studies has shown the tax, which applies to multi-family and commercial property as well as mansions, has suppressed the construction of new apartment buildings. That study was just the latest of several that showed a decline in housing production in LA compared to surrounding cities. Instead of the promised housing construction, much of the funding has gone to rent relief programs and a legal defense fund for renters fighting evictions. Only about $1.5 million has been spent on affordable housing.
Critics of the UCLA report say it failed to account for other economic factors like a general slowdown in the real estate market. ULA’s supporters cited another study written by a team from UCLA, USC, and Occidental College, and a report from the Measure’s Citizens Oversight Committee showing it has created thousands of jobs and built more than 800 housing units. The UCLA Lewis School took the unusual step of publishing a rebuttal to that report, showing how the estimate of 10,000 new construction jobs was inaccurate, based in part of projections from ULA’s sponsors. The LAist article points out many of the supposed 800 units have not even started construction yet, falsely inflating the number of units and the jobs they create. Again, we see rhetoric that doesn’t match reality.
Recognizing the reality the tax has suppressed multifamily housing construction, Mayor Bass worked with the Legislature to enact a change to the Measure that would reduce the tax on newer apartment buildings, office space and grocery stores. However, howls of protest from the advocacy lobby, sensing a potential loss of their cashflow, forced the Mayor to retract the proposed legislation at the last minute. Again, the use of rhetoric and catchphrases like “reducing funding for affordable homes” overrode the reality that the measure is suppressing the very market its supposed to be supporting.
According to budget documents, the City will spend about $38 million on its two main homeless encampment clearing programs, CARE and CARE+. Again, Mayor Bass claimed encampment clearances increased last year, accounting for thousands more people being placed in shelters or transitional housing, mainly through her signature Inside Safe program. However, as any Council office staff person or observant community member can tell you, camps are often reoccupied, sometimes on the same they are cleaned. In a Westside Current article on the proliferation of garbage on city streets, Jaime Paige reviewed city records that showed in just two months--May through June 2024--the city removed 714 tons of solid waste and almost 19 tons of hazardous waste from the public right-of-way as part of RV camp cleanings. In fiscal year 2021-22, the city collected 369 tons of trash and almost 21,000 needles in Skid Row in the second through fourth quarters of the year. In just one day in 2023, crews collected 19 tons of debris when the RV encampment next to Ballona Wetlands was cleared. In reality, CARE and CARE+ are little more than endless cycles of clearing, cleaning, and repopulation, with few people actually moving from the streets to shelters.
What all these stories have in common is the elevation of rhetoric over results. And most of the rhetoric is centered on the city’s central policy, Housing First. In 2020, social researcher Stephen Eide produced a comprehensive study of Housing First, applying strict scientific methods to its claims of widespread benefits in reducing homelessness. In a remarkably succinct 24 pages, Eide’s study, Housing First and Homelessness: The Rhetoric and the Reality assessed Housing First’s successes and failures. What is particularly interesting about the study is its balanced view, and Eide’s ability to separate the rhetoric used by advocates from the facts shown by a rigorous review of the data. Although critical of Housing First’s results, Eide is not a rabid “kick them out of their tents and send them to the desert” radical. Rather, he documents the limited circumstances where Housing First has shown some success, but he also dispassionately shows how it has failed as the universal solution advocates want us to believe it is. He calls out the use of isolated successes at the individual level to imply community-wide success. And he also shows how claims of evidence-based success are actually based on “humanitarian concerns, intuition, ideology, or some other factor. There is no evidence-based proof of Housing First’s ability to treat serious mental illness effectively, or drug or alcohol addiction. Housing First is not a reliable solution to social isolation, a very significant cause and effect of homelessness. Claims made on behalf of the campaign to end homelessness—that Housing First has ended veterans’ homelessness, chronic homelessness, or homelessness at the community level—are not based in “evidence,” as that term is normally understood, and they rely on a highly technical (and dubious) definition of “ending” homelessness”. In other words, Housing First’s claims of success are based on the same kind of rhetoric we hear from leaders in Los Angeles.
Eide writes that rhetoric is so important to advocates’ claims of Housing First’s success that other approaches must be discredited, “or at least drastically de-emphasized”. He is especially critical of the use of success among individuals as evidence of community-wide benefits. Advocates use the successful housing of a relatively narrow range of unhoused people as “proof” that Housing First is the single best solution to homelessness. He goes into great detail about claims that Housing First is more cost-effective than other solutions, and how its low-barrier policies provide support to those with substance abuse and mental health issues, and how those claims cannot be supported by robust empirical evidence. Finally, he cited two studies from 2015 and 2012 that suggest the open-ended provision of housing or housing subsidies acts as a disincentive to achieve financial and housing self-sufficiency; rather, it creates a population that is permanently dependent on public housing.
Despite its statistical and research jargon, Eide’s study makes a very straightforward conclusion; if Housing First successfully addressed homelessness, then homelessness would decrease. But just the opposite has happened. Even as more money has been poured into housing, homelessness has increased.
In the absence of actual evidence, advocates and supporters of Housing First have turned to rhetoric to defend their position. As Mr. Eide shows, despite all the talk about “evidence-based” proof that Housing First is successful, the evidence advocates use is selective and limited, but broadly applied to all homeless people regardless of their situation. Eide calls for a recalibration of the discussion about homelessness that includes Housing First as one of many possible solutions that must be tailored to each client. As long as devotees to Housing First insist on controlling the narrative, homelessness will continue to exist at crisis levels in LA and nationwide.
(Tim Campbell is a longtime Westchester resident and veteran public servant who spent his career managing a municipal performance audit program. Drawing on decades of experience in government accountability, he brings a results-driven approach to civic oversight. In his iAUDIT! column for CityWatchLA, Campbell emphasizes outcomes over bureaucratic process, offering readers clear-eyed analyses of how local programs perform—and where they fall short. His work advocates for greater transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness in Los Angeles government.)
