Comments
iAUDIT! - Followers of homelessness news in LA are no doubt aware of the ongoing contempt of court hearings at the federal courthouse. Several months ago, federal judge David O. Carter ruled the City of LA has not produced proof it can meet the terms of a settlement with the LA Alliance for Human Rights; that settlement, reached in 2022, required creating more than 9,800 new beds to alleviate homelessness. Despite repeated attempts to obtain reliable data from the city, neither the Alliance nor the court have received proof the city is making progress. A scathing review in March 2025 from the audit firm Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) found that the city has been “unable to verify the number of beds the city claims to have created.” For example, the City claimed it had created 6,000 new beds as of May 2025. Yet it could provide no proof it had paid anything for more than 1,400 beds provided through a rental subsidy program. LAist investigative reporter Nick Gerda found the County paid LAHSA for the subsidies, with no contribution by the City, yet the City tried to take credit for them in violation of the settlement agreement. This was just one of several problems with data accuracy A&M discovered; others included the possibility of counting the same people in shelters more than once and paying for services clients never received.
Instead of acknowledging its failures and committing to improvement, the City threw up a wall of rhetorical and legal challenges to Judge Carter’s decision to appoint an independent monitor to assess the city’s data reporting. First, it hired the large law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher to fight the judge’s decision, at a cost hovering near $6 million and climbing by the day. Reading the court transcripts, one gets the sense Gibson Dunn’s attorneys are more interested in impugning A&M’s expertise than in providing proof the City is living up to its obligations. Meanwhile, city officials seem to have resorted to rhetorical tricks and whining in the press instead of taking responsibility for their failures.
Councilmember Raman, who heads the Council’s Homelessness and Housing Committee, wrote that Judge Carter’s “repeated evidentiary hearings and resource-intensive data requests go far beyond our reporting obligations in the original settlement agreement. They are taxing an already strained system and adding confusion and significant cost. In a city with limited funding and capacity, the court's demands are now actually taking away from the work of housing as many people as possible." Here we see the reliance on rhetoric in absence of objective facts. Councilmember Raman suggests that Judge Carter is somehow depriving people of housing by demanding proof of how many people have been housed. What Raman failed to mention is why there has to be a hearing to get the City to produce data it should already have. Neither she, nor most other Councilmembers, have addressed the serious issues raised in A&M’s report and the facts that have been revealed in hearings following its release.
Councilmember Raman’s statement is just one example of how rhetoric has replaced objective facts when discussing homelessness. In April 2020, social researcher Stephen Eide described how rhetoric has distorted the empirical evidence around the success of Housing First, the official federal and state policy for reducing homelessness. Based on initial small-scale positive results at the individual level, Housing First was quickly upscaled to be universally applied at the community level regardless of individual needs. As Eide writes, when success could not be repeated on a large scale, advocates resorted to rhetoric to replace analysis. He uses the passage of LA’s Measure HHH in 2016 as an example. Supporters said that since Housing First has proven that stable housing is the key to ending homelessness, building more housing would lead to reduced homelessness. As we know, that has not been the case. Eide points out that if housing alone solved homelessness, then after three decades of Housing First policies, there should be fewer unhoused people. Instead, homelessness has continued climbing at alarming rates. Eide concludes Housing First’s fatal flaw is that it applied some initial individual successes to the homeless population at large and assumed it would work regardless of personal circumstances. Eide found that people in Housing First programs may access housing more quickly and stay housed longer, but without needed support services, their quality of life did not improve. His findings are consistent with a 2018 NIH study that found “there is no substantial published evidence as yet to demonstrate that PSH [permanent supportive housing] improves health outcomes”. Housing First then becomes little more than warehousing human beings.
The epidemic of fentanyl and other highly addictive opiates has done nothing to change advocates’ approach. Even as the demographics of homelessness changed, advocates continued to insist Housing First was the only solution. Large numbers of unhoused people with addiction problems and untreated mental illness have been explained away as a consequence, rather than a cause, of homelessness. Any decent manager knows a policy must evolve to remain effective, yet advocates insist on using methods developed 30 years ago to address a whole new population of homeless people.
Despite Councilmember Raman’s protestations, the direct result of replacing facts with rhetoric is why the City finds itself before the court in a contempt hearing. If city and county leaders had been more honest--with themselves and with the public--about the performance of their homelessness programs years ago, the LA Alliance would never have filed suit against them, and oversight organizations from A&M to the County Auditor would not have found serious problems, as they have for nearly 20 years. In fact, rhetoric has become a goal unto itself. Advocates have linked the moral argument for solving homelessness to what they perceive as the inherent value of Housing First. Therefore, criticizing Housing First is the same as hating the homeless. Hence, Raman feels perfectly justified in saying that the requirement to show proof of performance is actually “…taking away from the work of housing as many people as possible." The moral outrage is clear; “How dare Judge Carter and the Alliance force us to stop the hard work of housing people to make us prove what we’re doing is working”. Of course, the problem with that attitude is that you don’t really have to be good at housing and supporting people as long as you use the right words and phrases while demonizing your critics.
Elevating rhetoric over results has resulted in billions of taxpayer dollars spent on ineffective programs, and millions more spent defending them. It has also divided community members who otherwise agree on many aspects of assisting the homeless. Most reasonable people believe the unhoused need decent shelter and the support services to either reintegrate into mainline society or live the best lives they can in some kind of structured care. They may disagree on the best way to deliver shelter and services, but they agree on the fundamentals. When advocates use terms like “hating the homeless”, many critics respond with their own epithets like “enabling homelessness”, further degrading the quality of the discussion. The contempt hearing, then, is about far more than the City failing to submit a few reports to a federal judge.
In a very real sense, the contempt goes beyond the courtroom, and affects all residents, housed and unhoused. Raman’s statement reveals the arrogance behind advocates’ worldview. Since they cannot tolerate any criticism of Housing First, they are willing to do virtually anything to defend it. Paying a high-powered legal firm to defend the city is only the beginning. Advocates can easily justify paying millions for no-bid contracts to the same clique of large nonprofits, regardless of performance. It justifies the attempt to establish a supportive center for people with serious mental illness on prime oceanfront land in Santa Monica, with no prior community feedback. It shapes an environment where LAHSA’s CEO can approve contracts with a nonprofit where her husband is a manager because that’s the way things have always been done.
Despite what leaders want us to think, rhetoric and results are two very different things. Anyone can say anything about a program they like. The proof is in the numbers and in outcomes. By continuing to defend a failed system, leaders not only risk contempt of court, but show the same to the unhoused and to the public at large. The contempt hearing is scheduled to continue on January 12, 2026, following a mediation session on December 22.
(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.)
