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iAUDIT! - Readers who are familiar with Greco-Roman philosophy should know about the life of Greek philosopher Diogenes. Of noble birth, Diogenes was caught up in a scandal involving his father, the Treasurer of his hometown of Sinope, who was charged with forging coinage. Forced into exile, Diogenes became an ascetic, forgoing almost all material things, and living in a large jar under the steps of a temple in Athens. He became obsessed with the ideal of honesty, and was famous for walking around the city’s marketplace with a lit lantern, telling people he was searching for a completely honest man, (some translations say a truly wise man). Legend says he never found a totally honest or wise man, because it is impossible to be completely honest in the material world.
If Diogenes took his lantern to the halls of Los Angeles’ homelessness agencies, his search for honesty or wisdom would be disappointing. Judging by recent news stories, it seems neither virtue is valued among homelessness program leaders. We should start with a withering column from Westside Current publisher Jamie Paige. The article quotes Mayor Bass’s press release about the arrests of two developers for fraud regarding the misuse of state Project Homekey funds. Ms. Paige calls out the Mayor’s press release for its hypocrisy, since she and other Current writers have been reporting on the same subject for at least two years. As Ms. Paige wrote, the Current’s articles were met with denial and disdain. That same attitude is evident in the City’s response to a damming assessment of its homelessness programs from audit firm Alvarez & Marsal. Rather than admit its programs are ineffective and that oversight is nearly nonexistent, the City chose to pay a high-powered law firm nearly $6 million to fight a federal judge’s order to appoint an independent monitor over its performance reporting, and dragged its feet agreeing to a monitor.
If Diogenes walked a few blocks southwest from City Hall to LAHSA’s headquarters, he’d be even more challenged to find a hint of honesty. When the preliminary 2025 PIT count numbers were released earlier this Spring, Mayor Bass and former LAHSA CEO Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum claimed homelessness was “trending downward” after two consecutive years of slight declines. If real, the reductions were so small that calling them a “trend” is laughable on its face. And a series of news stories have raised serious questions about the count’s accuracy. First, a June report from LAist described problems with the counting software, and how mid-managers in LAHSA made off-the-cuff decisions to exclude hundreds of count areas because the data could not be properly loaded into the system. Second, allegations from whistleblowers allege LAHSA executives purposely manipulated data to make Mayor Bass’ signature Inside Safe program look like it was performing better than it is. As if those two stories weren’t bad enough, the RAND think tank, which performs its own annual homelessness count in three targeted areas of the City, estimated LAHSA could have missed up to 29 percent of the unhoused in its 2025 PIT count. None of these stories have deterred local leaders from bragging about the “downward trend” in homelessness. Perhaps it will take an announcement of yet more criminal charges to get them to change their story.
Finding neither honesty nor wisdom in LAHSA’s palatial offices, maybe our modern-day Diogenes will seek those virtues among the many large nonprofits that provide homelessness services. Tiring of LA’s sordid environment, he may hop on a Greyhound bus to San Francisco. (Being an ascetic, he’d never debase himself by taking something as bourgeois as a plane). From the bus station, he’d walk several blocks north to the headquarters of Urban Alchemy, (UA), on the edge of the Tenderloin District. There, he would find people working for an organization that started from virtually nothing in 2019 and has grown to making more than $70 million in revenues in 2023. Urban Alchemy has outreach and other service contracts with several large cities, including San Francisco, Austin, and of course Los Angeles. LA’s contract database shows Urban Alchemy has at least $23 million in contracts with the city, many granted as no-bid amendments to an agreement originally approved in 2021. The nonprofit provides outreach services and crisis intervention (via the CIRCLE program) to LA’s unhoused population. Despite its popularity with civic leaders, Urban Alchemy has had more than its share of controversy, almost since the day it was created. Problems include allegations of physical assault and drug dealing in shelters it manages, and questions about what services its outreach teams actually provide. in January 2024 in Los Angeles, an Urban Alchemy employee was filmed using a pressure washer to chase a homeless person off the sidewalk. That incident triggered an investigation by the City Controller that was then quashed by the City Attorney with no explanation. The city of Austin recently cancelled its contract with Urban Alchemy because the NPO wasn’t reporting its work properly. San Franciso, UA’s homebase, placed it on a financial watch list because of its irregular financial practices. Triggered by those and other incidents, the City of Portland is reviewing its contract with the organization. These and similar issues are nothing new. In 2023, I wrote about Urban Alchemy’s troubles and shaky claims of success. Yet Los Angeles continues to grant UA contract extensions.
Urban Alchemy’s CEO Lena Miller usually claims the allegations are a result of her unorthodox formula for success, which uses employees with lived experience of incarceration and/or homelessness to perform outreach. As she made clear in a 2022 interview with the San Francisco Examiner, she was very upset by the charges and criticism about political cronyism. She said most of the allegations reflect entrenched interests’ negative reaction to her innovative service models. It seems ironic that a nonprofit making $70 million from taxpayer-funded contracts claims to be an outsider, but that is up to readers to evaluate.
Indeed, as Rachael Gaudiosi reported in a recent Westside Current article, homelessness is a growth industry for nonprofits. She reviewed the revenue from 30 nonprofits and found huge increases in revenues between 2015 and 2023, even as homelessness was climbing by double digits from one year to the next. The Weingart Center’s revenues increased more than 357,000 percent in eight years, from $8,874 to $31,703,483. Even though some of the nonprofits reported net losses in revenues, they have experienced large increases in real assets (buildings and land), as I showed in a CityWatch column last year. St. Joseph Center saw its real assets increase 37 percent in four years, while Hope the Mission has seen an astounding 2,213 percent increase. Most of these increases are due to the acquisition of homeless housing projects, similar to the ones described in the US attorney’s indictment and a series of Westside Current articles on how several of these projects have been left vacant for years.
Finding few signs of honesty or wisdom in San Francisco, Diogenes might get back on the bus to return to LA. From the bus station, he could walk to City Hall’s west entrance on Spring Street and vocally lament the lack of honesty and wisdom in local homelessness programs. As he shouted his concerns, he might be thinking about St. Joseph Center, one of LA’s largest homelessness services providers. Before becoming LAHSA’s CEO in early 2023, Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum led St. Joseph Center. Her position with LAHSA seems to have been a beneficial move for the nonprofit, since, as LAist reported, Dr. Adams Kellum approved a $250,000 contract with St. Joseph Center just two months after getting the LAHSA job, in apparent violation of state law prohibiting public officials from approving contracts with former employers for 18 months. Based on my review of LAHSA’s leadership web page, Dr. Adams Kellum hired at least nine former St. Joseph employees in LAHSA senior management positions, some of which didn’t exist before her tenure. Like Urban Alchemy, St. Joseph Centerr has had its share of troubles. In 2020, Christopher LeGras reported that St. Joseph employees dumped a homeless woman in a Santa Monica restaurant’s parking lot. LA County chose St. Joseph Center to manage a Santa Monica housing facility for people with serious mental health issues until community outrage postponed the project pending proper public outreach from the city and County. One could hardly blame residents for their concerns, since nonprofits are known for mismanaging shelters throughout the LA basin.
It seems Diogenes would find himself in a landscape bereft of honesty and wisdom. But if he searched a bit further, he could find some signs of hope. Walking back toward the bus station and Skid Row, he’d discover the Union Rescue Mission (URM) on San Pedro Street. A relatively small nonprofit in the homelessness arena, it has had an outsized effect on homelessness. Its legendary former CEO, Rev. Andy Bales, eschewed official Housing First practices in favor of a graduated program where homeless people are expected to actively participate in their transition back to mainstream society. I will go into more detail in a future column, but URM has a far higher rate of transitioning people to permanent housing than most government programs. If Diogenes hopped on Metro’s westbound E Line, he could visit the offices of SOFESA in a nondescript building in Westchester’s unoffical downtown. SOFESA takes a healing approach to homelessness, working with clients to reestablish their relationships with others and with society at large. As SOFESA’s CEO (and formerly homeless person) Jess Echeverry said in a 2021 interview, the current system is creating generational homelessness, where individuals and families become permanently dependent on the homelessness system for their shelter, food, and other vital services. Through its healing programs, SOFESA reintegrates people into the proper relationship with others and with the community. Notably, SOFESA publishes its Conflict of Interest policy on its website. LAHSA, on the other hand, dithered for more than two years until it recently adopted its policy, and that was only after its former CEO, Dr. Adams Kellum resigned following revelations she approved contracts with her husband’s nonprofit.
So, Diogenes could indeed find some honest and wise people in LA’s homelessness universe. He would just need to look beyond the official system, where rhetoric, press opportunities, and outright lies are valued more than helping people. And that is a shame, because if the billions of taxpayer dollars wasted on pointless programs were redirected to more effective services, we might see real reductions in homelessness, instead of ones that exist only in the imagination of local leaders.
(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. )
