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iAUDIT! - Last week, my column asked a simple question: When will we start hearing some honesty from Los Angeles’ homelessness leaders? That question was neither rhetorical nor unnecessarily inflammatory. As I have written many times before, we seem to be caught in a netherworld between what leaders are telling us and what news stories and audits report. Leaders tell us unsheltered homelessness has decreased, but the RAND Corporation says rough sleeping has increased in its three survey areas. Mayor Bass’ campaign is claiming her signature Inside Safe program has been a booming success, but the City Controller’s dashboard shows the program has spent $391,401,960 to house 1,571 people, at a cost of $249,140 per person. At the same time, 2,555 of the 6,189 people “served” (41 percent of the total), have fallen back into homelessness; that’s 1.6 times more people returning to homelessness than have been housed. The 1,571 people housed represents just 3.6 percent of the City’s homeless population of 43,695. If we project the $294,140 cost out to the remaining 42,124 unhoused people in LA, the total cost would be an astounding $10,494,854,310, or almost the entire city budget. In addition, LAHSA and the City claim homelessness has declined 5.6 percent over the past two years (see Side 7), or an average of 2.8 percent per year. At that rate, it will take 33.5 years to get everyone off the street, and that’s assuming there is no net increase in the number of people becoming unhoused. So, even if we believe in the minor increases in homelessness leaders claim, it will take decades and tens of billions more dollars to solve the crisis.
Besides questionable claims of success, we must also take a more detailed look at how the City and LAHSA define “homeless” and “housed”. That definition goes to the heart of who is truly housed and who must still depend on public assistance. A recent LAist story on housing subsidies illustrates the issue. The City’s Housing Authority said it has been successful in retaining funding for more than 4,300 households that rely on vouchers to pay the rent. The COVID-era subsidy program is ending, and these 4,300 households (many with children) could have become homeless without new funding. Fortunately, HACLA was able to obtain federal money from other sources to continue the program and keep everyone housed. While it is unquestionably beneficial that these people will continue to live in their apartments, can we call them truly “housed”? If the subsidies hadn’t been funded, all 4,300 households would have been at high risk of being on the streets. They are only housed in the sense they are no longer on the street, but they are still at the mercy of shaky government funding for their housing. Along the same lines, only 89 (5.6 percent) of the 1,571 people housed under Inside Safe are in unsubsidized housing, with the remaining clients in some type of subsidized permanent housing. There is nothing inherently wrong with permanently subsidizing housing, but those living in subsidized units should not be lumped in with those who have achieved independent housing.
Zooming out from the specifics of who is truly housed, we can raise the question of the overall legitimacy of many of the claims made by local governments. For years, we’ve heard the main reason homelessness hasn’t declined is the lack of resources. Measures HHH, ULA, A, and others have all been sold to voters as vital to making progress on solving homelessness. As we know, we have seen few results from the billions of dollars generated by these measures. And yet, numerous reports have shown that the City, County, and LAHSA have habitually underspent their existing funding. For example, in 2023, I helped the LA Alliance prepare a report on County homelessness programs, and found the County’s departments historically underspent state mental health and Measure H money. For example, a 2020 State Auditor report found the County had underspent mental health services money to the extent it was sitting on an unencumbered balance of 175 percent of its annual budget (p. 14).
For two years in a row, L.A.’s City Controller has reported the City has underspent its $1 billion annual homelessness budget. Last year, the City left $473 million unspent and uncommitted. The Controller linked the underspending to a cumbersome and decentralized organizational structure coupled with chronic staffing shortages. Finally, LAist reporter Nick Gerda noted a recent independent audit showed LAHSA has been underspending about $100 million of its budget for several years.
And yet we have been told for years that homelessness programs are starved for funds and seriously understaffed. The answer has always been more revenue. The latest initiative, the County’s Measure A, was supposed to generate $1 billion in revenue for affordable housing and other homelessness programs, but according to some reports, it has fallen well short of its income goals, a failure it shared with the City’s Measure ULA, the so-called Mansion Tax, which has generated a little more than a third of its projected revenues.
L.A.’s homelessness programs don’t suffer from a revenue shortage. It suffers from a shortage of qualified leadership. Last month, Councilmember Rodriguez sent a letter to federal Judge David O. Carter detailing the County’s failure to provide mental health services to people in City-owned homeless shelters. Many shelters have become nothing more than warehouses for people with untreated serious mental illness or substance abuse problems, which in turn cause problems with criminal activity inside and around shelter facilities. The problem has become so egregious that Judge Carter has ordered an August hearing on why the City and County can’t coordinate services.
As I have written before, one of the central problems is that leaders treat homelessness as a public relations problem instead of a humanitarian crisis. Tremendous amounts of resources and effort have gone into staged press opportunities and carefully crafted press releases, without a commensurate level of effort on the streets. The political rhetoric around homelessness is so heated, any criticism of business as usual is branded as an attack on the homeless themselves, even though it is mismanaged and ineffective programs that leave thousands on the street.
An excellent example of poor management is the annual Point in Time (PIT) count, managed by LAHSA. I and other writers have written extensively on methodological and managerial problems with the count, so I won’t repeat them here. But given that the PIT count has been used as primary proof of decreasing homelessness, we should be able to have faith the numbers are accurate and verifiable, which they most definitely are not. Now there are questions swirling around the January 2026 count and why the results haven’t been released. According to a report in LAist, the numbers are late, and the best excuse LAHSA can offer is that HUD’s funding suspension is preventing completion of the count. This excuse is weak, even by LAHSA’s standards, because the count was conducted in mid-January, and HUD didn’t announce its suspension until June 11. LAHSA’s community relations person said it can’t release the numbers till they have been reviewed by HUD, which according to LAist is not true. And remember that Mayor Bass and former LAHSA CEO Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum rushed to release the 2025 count early to bolster their claims of reductions in homelessness (claims that have since been questioned in whistleblower court filings).
Asking when leaders will be honest with us is far from rhetorical, and its import goes well beyond tax dollars. Every unspent dollar and every questionable statistic represents a human being who is left on the streets or in precarious housing situations that depend on eternal funding streams. Leaders have wrapped themselves in such thick clouds of rhetoric and political posturing, it is nearly impossible to know what is really happening on the homelessness front. Nobody really knows how many unhoused people are stranded on our streets, how many are in shelters, or how many have been truly housed. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been poured into homelessness programs that cannot show objective and measurable benefits. Residents, business owners, and taxpayers must come together to demand accountability the current system is unable to provide, and which current leaders are unwilling to demand.
(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 trans)
