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MY VIEW - Words should not mask reality. Let’s dispense with the euphemisms and niceties. Homelessness is a marketing word to make it seem palpable to taxpayers. The word Homelessness conveys a guy or a family down on its luck, one break away from getting back on its feet and being upstanding citizens. Our collective eyes see the wrecks of human beings who need treatment, massive amounts of counselling, and tough love. Homelessness, the word is being replaced by Unhoused, but this word is still far from the truth in terms of what the real situation is.
The “Homeless Industrial Complex.” This phrase is far too benign. What Los Angeles has constructed is something closer to a Homelessness Cartel, not in the cinematic sense of secret meetings, thugs with guns, and duffel bags of cash, but in the real-world sense of a protected economic system with political cover, weak enforcement, and participants embedded throughout respectable civic life.
Non-Governmental Organization (NGO): An NGO is a private entity that can be nonprofit or for-profit and is typically funded by government agencies to carry out humanitarian or public service work. In Los Angeles, NGOs are often organized in ways that allow them to extract significant sums from taxpayers while minimizing their efforts to fulfill their stated missions and maximizing financial benefits for founders, operating officers, and favored contractors.
Cartels do not require every participant to be a criminal. They require only predictable money, minimal consequences, and institutional protection. Los Angeles has delivered all three.
Homelessness in Los Angeles wasn’t accidental; it was financialized. Billions flow to nonprofits, contractors, and administrators whose income depends on managing, not solving, the crisis. Outcomes are suboptimal, accounting is flexible, and funds are recorded as “spent” once disbursed, not when services are delivered. The books show success, but the streets reflect failure.
Therefore, oversight must be treated as hostility and a lack of empathy. Failure is not punished; it's treated as proof we didn’t spend enough money. When you create a funding environment that is urgent, moralized, politically insulated, and operationally opaque, you do not merely risk abuse; you invite it.
Los Angeles poured billions into homelessness programs year after year while encampments metastasized, neighborhoods hardened into permanent triage zones, and taxpayers were encouraged to confuse spending with compassion. But seemingly, most of that compassion I fear ends up in personal checkbooks.
As Federal prosecutors allege that Alexander Soofer, executive director of a South Los Angeles homelessness nonprofit, called Abundant Blessings, obtained roughly $23 million in public funds intended for housing and services, and diverted at least $10 million for personal use [1].
According to court filings and reporting, that money allegedly funded a multimillion-dollar Westwood home, luxury vehicles, private school tuition, private jet travel, high-end shopping, and resort stays, paid for with money meant to shelter the unhoused.
The operational details are worse. Contracts reportedly required meals and care. Investigators say residents were served cut-rate food, while the nonprofit billed taxpayers at premium rates. Prosecutors allege fake invoices and fabricated documentation designed to make theft appear as service delivery. This was not subtle fraud. It was structural exploitation. In a system so poorly designed that it can be milked for years while the people it claims to serve receive the cheapest cup of noodles in the world.
In April 2025, U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli announced a Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force targeting misuse of homelessness funds across seven Southern California counties, including Los Angeles. That announcement was itself an indictment. You do not create a specialized federal task force unless local oversight has collapsed, or normal accountability mechanisms have been so degraded that a parallel enforcement structure is required.
For a city with a budget exceeding $35 billion, the City Controller’s office has only a handful of auditors capable of reviewing major departments, and critically, no unilateral authority to conduct real-time performance audits of mayoral initiatives or politically sensitive programs.
This is everything you need to know about accountability for how your tax dollars for compassion, harm reduction, and shelter were spent: when the City Controller wants to be empowered to audit homelessness programs in real time. He is blocked by Mayor Bass and the City Attorney Feldstein-Soto. Why? You do not restore trust by blocking audits.
Entire agencies that distribute billions, most notably LAHSA and large portions of Los Angeles County’s homelessness apparatus, do not routinely inspect, independently audit, or verify the performance of the nonprofits they fund. Grant monitoring is largely paper-based, retrospective, and compliance-oriented rather than outcome-driven. In practice, this means billions in public dollars are distributed through a system where meaningful inspection is rare, enforcement is optional, and failure carries no automatic consequences. That is not oversight. It is governance by an honor system at a scale where the incentives to abuse it are overwhelming.
The most damning evidence against the homelessness cartel is not ideological. It is documentary. A Federal Court-ordered review by Alvarez & Marsal found that the City of Los Angeles could not reliably track how much it spent on homelessness programs or consistently reconcile spending with services delivered. Translation: billions went out the door with no reliable way to verify what taxpayers bought.
LAist summarized the findings bluntly: outsourcing, fragmented data, and weak vendor controls made accurate tracking effectively impossible. Billions in spending. No clean ledger. No clear outcomes. That is not a bookkeeping error. It is the enabling condition for grand larceny of taxpayer dollars. When money cannot be traced, and services cannot be verified, fraud becomes indistinguishable from “business as usual.”
Compounding the credibility crisis is the role played by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority itself. While LAHSA is under active scrutiny in the federal homelessness litigation overseen by Federal Judge David O. Carter, the agency commissioned and relied on an internal review that cleared its own CEO, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, of wrongdoing related to contracts with an organization employing her spouse. The review characterized the matter as an administrative “routing error,” despite clear conflict-of-interest concerns raised by journalists and watchdogs.
Whether or not that conclusion is technically defensible is beside the point. The optics are corrosive: an agency with no meaningful independent audit function, under the shadow of a federal judge’s ongoing oversight, effectively whitewashed a governance failure through an internally bungled controlled process and moved on. In any system serious about accountability, such a conflict would trigger external review and corrective action. In Los Angeles’s homelessness apparatus, it triggered paperwork, absolution, and silence, reinforcing the perception that insiders are protected while scrutiny is treated as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a responsibility to be honored.
Harm reduction is defended as public health, but it can’t reduce immediate harm if it encourages someone to keep using. But Los Angeles has weaponized harm reduction as a substitute for strategy. When the primary deliverables are needles, pipes, and perpetual “engagement,” the city is not interrupting the behavior driving drug addiction; it is institutionalizing it. And because it is wrapped in the language of compassion, it becomes untouchable.
If no one can say what success looks like or what happens when it isn’t achieved, you are not running policy. If no one can define success or impose consequences for failure, the program is not designed to work; it is designed to spend. Taxpayers do not accept this because they approve of it. They accept it because the system is designed to exhaust accountability and label a critic as a heartless MAGA.
Meanwhile, the court intervenes. Federal Judge David O. Carter’s supervision of homelessness compliance underscores how far governance has drifted from basic competence [9]. When courts become the venue for extracting operational truth, the political system and its NGO cohorts have failed.
Here is the truth that explains everything: Homelessness is now economically embedded in Los Angeles. Billions of dollars do not merely respond to the crisis. They sustain a parallel economy built around its permanence. Nonprofits. Developers. Consultants. Lawyers. All depend on the assumption that homelessness will persist. If the funding pipeline were to stop tomorrow, Los Angeles would suffer a real economic shock. Jobs would vanish. Nonprofits would collapse. Vendors would default. Political alliances would fracture. That dependency explains why scrutiny is resisted, audits are delayed, and every failure becomes an argument for more money instead of reform.
We created a system that cannot afford transparency. A system that is so entrenched it cannot afford success. This is no longer just a moral scandal involving fraud; it's a sustainable business model. Los Angeles has transformed a humanitarian emergency into a durable, protected industry, one that monetizes misery, rewards, and needs failure to continue, and treats accountability as an existential threat.
Our compassion and tax dollars will continue to flow rapidly down a storm drain until there are enforceable consequences. Our political leaders, our NGO CEOs, are one side of the same coin, with the mentally ill addict being the other side. Both refuse to give up their lifestyle. One will not sober up and take his medicine. The NGO will not spend public money effectively without enriching their key personnel. They are both outlaws, dependent on each other to keep the misappropriation of billions of dollars going. Until that changes, Abundant Blessings will not be an outlier. It will be the emulated business model.
(Eliot Cohen has served on the Neighborhood Council for 12 years, served on the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, is on the Board of Homeowners of Encino, and was the president of HOME for over seven years. Eliot retired after a 35-year career on Wall Street. Eliot is a critic of the stinking thinking of the bureaucrats and politicians that run the County, the State, and the City. Eliot and his wife divide their time between L.A. and Baja Norte, Mexico. Eliot is a featured writer for CityWatchLA.com.)
