Inside Safe: The Neverending Failure

iAUDIT! -  On April 5, the LA Times ran a story on the current state of Inside Safe, Mayor Bass’ signature homelessness program. The article explains how, after expenses of more than $300 million in the past three-and-a-half years, about 40 percent of Inside Safe participants fall back into homelessness.  Indeed, the longer the program goes on, the more people return to the streets.  The reason is easily discerned: Inside Safe has picked the low hanging fruit, the people who want to move indoors and have the ability to live on their own.  Now program managers are faced with a more resistant population; those with untreated mental illness and substance abuse problems who cannot adapt to normal life.  You need only to read the interviews with some of those who were evicted from Inside Safe to see the problem.  Clients insist on continuing the behaviors that made them homeless in the first place.  Inside Safe, which has a reputation for failing to provide effective support services, cannot meet these clients’ needs, so many end up back on the streets. 

The problems with Inside Safe are not new.  Since its inception in early 2023, it has been plagued by poor performance and a lack of meaningful data, as described in an April 28, 2023 LAist article.  As a condition of approving Mayor Bass’ emergency declaration funding Inside Safe, the City Council required regular reports on the program’s performance.  It took several months for the Mayor’s office to produce the reports, and when it did, performance was quite underwhelming.  As I described in a December 2023 CityWatch column, even in the program’s early months, many people were falling back into homelessness, and the numbers for those who were housed or sheltered were unreliable. The numbers became even more suspicious when whistleblower complaints alleged LAHSA’s former CEO, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, ordered senior managers to manipulate the numbers so Mayor Bass’ program would “look good”. 

Despite its questionable performance history, Inside Safe continues to be the City’s premier homelessness program.  The CARE+ encampment clearing program, which costs about $36 million per year, is tied to Inside Safe because camp occupants are referred to Inside Safe services for housing.  Every press opportunity on homelessness features Inside Safe success stories, usually in the form of showcasing one of the few people who have been permanently housed through the program.  Typically, the City and LAHSA treat homelessness as a public relations problem first and a crisis second.  Leaders use the word “crisis” as a trope to bring a sense of urgency to homelessness and to justify billions spent on ineffective but socially popular programs. They use the crisis as an excuse for poor management and uncontrolled spending on favored providers. What they don’t do is use the money to implement robust performance measures and effective program management. 

Since 2026 is an election year, we can expect to see candidates go to great lengths to either support or vilify the status quo.  They will also try to play both sides of the issue, as Councilmember Raman is doing.  Last year, Raman joined Mayor Bass in sending a letter to the County Board of Supervisors urging them to maintain LAHSA’s funding despite the Authority’s many managerial and financial problems. Now that she’s a mayoral candidate, Councilmember Raman suddenly supports creating an independent city homelessness department and defunding LAHSA.  Her new three-point homelessness plan is a call for significant change in how LA responds to homelessness.   Among other things, she is calling for increased accountability and performance measurement among homelessness programs.  Her new-found support for real oversight flies in the face of her past actions.  When community members complained about crime and drug use at the Riverside Bridge Home in her district, she did nothing other than giving a $42,000 no-bid contract to the nonprofit she founded for ill-defined “ambassador services”.  It took the stabbing death of a former client for her to contract with a new provider, and operations have yet to improve. 

One must also wonder why she has done virtually nothing to bring accountability to the homelessness system despite being chair of the Council’s Homelessness Committee. Instead, she has steadfastly supported spending millions of dollars to pay a high-priced law firm to avoid the release of the data that would bring a semblance of accountability to the City’s billion-dollar homelessness system.  She even published a press release decrying federal Judge David O. Carter’s attempt to obtain reliable data from the City.  As I mentioned in a December 2025 column, Raman’s press release 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.  She has been a steadfast supporter of Inside Safe until she wasn’t.  Her sudden embrace of accountability and real results seems a bit hypocritical in light of her history as a consistent champion of the status quo. 

Indeed, Inside Safe is nothing more than a very expensive and high-profile version of preexisting programs.  There is nothing new or innovative about housing people in hotels.  Several cities, including LA and San Francisco did just that during the COVID pandemic.  And the result was just as disastrous as Inside Safe. The City of San Francisco paid 25 hotels, including famous ones like the Mark Hopkinms, to house thousands of homeless people.  By the time the pandemic abated and the hotels returned to normal operations, the city had spent $415 million, much of it in damage repairs.  One hotel near city hall was paid $32 million.  Like Inside Safe, the residents in San Francisco received virtually no support services.  As the April 5 LA Times article and a survey of Inside Safe clients reveal, the vast majority of clients receive no services, with substance abuse and mental health services being especially lacking. 

In reality, Inside Safe isn’t about interim or permanent housing.  It is a very expensive glitzy warehousing system where 1.5 as many people fall back into homelessness instead of being housed.  It is the epitome of show over substance, where the city, and especially the mayor’s office, can claim success even if many of the clients cycle through the program two or more times.  Regardless of Councilmember Raman’s sudden conversion to being an acolyte of performance, we have to look at her track record, as well as that of the mayor and others who may pay lip service to accountability but still choose appearance over substance.