Within the metropolis and county of Los Angeles, various agencies have different pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that comprise the hassle to finish homelessness — whether or not it’s psychological well being providers, outreach, everlasting housing or interim housing.
The Los Angeles Homeless Companies Authority is the closest town and county have needed to an overarching authority. It was created as a joint city-county company in 1993 to assist the 2 governments cease preventing over who was chargeable for which homelessness providers. Its duties have grown as homelessness and funding for providers have grown.
For the report:
11:29 a.m. Jan. 1, 2025An earlier model of this editorial incorrectly said that L.A. Mayor Karen Bass appointed Va Lecia Adams Kellum to guide LAHSA. She was appointed by the LAHSA Board of Commissioners.
Along with working the annual point-in-time homeless rely, an unlimited three-day enterprise each January that marshals hundreds of volunteers to scour almost each census tract in Los Angeles County, LAHSA has develop into the conduit for nearly all contracting of homelessness providers. For instance, if town wants service suppliers for its publicly financed everlasting housing tasks, LAHSA confers with metropolis officers on service objectives, releases a request for proposals, chooses the service suppliers and writes up the contracts.
Now the county needs to overhaul LAHSA, take away its monumental contracting duties and go away it to take care of the homeless rely, a homeless database and an emergency shelter program. The Board of Supervisors handed a motion a number of weeks in the past ordering a feasibility report and different analyses earlier than going ahead.
Is it mandatory to interrupt aside LAHSA? Possibly not.
Though Los Angeles is way from fixing homelessness, the numbers did go down within the metropolis (by 2.2%) for the primary time since 2018 — and the numbers have been flat within the county. In distinction, the federal Division of Housing and City Growth simply launched numbers indicating that, nationwide, homelessness has gone up a staggering 18%. The town of Los Angeles was certainly one of a variety of cities the place it didn’t go up — a testomony, says LAHSA Chief Government Va Lecia Adams Kellum, to town and county working collectively.
There’s no query that LAHSA has gotten greater over time. As companies doing homelessness work proliferated and {dollars} grew — significantly with the 2017 passage of the Measure H quarter-cent gross sales tax enhance to fund homelessness applications — so did the amount of cash LAHSA was granting. At present the company has a budget of $875 million with about $717 million of that from federal, state and native funds going to grants to service suppliers.
And it has at all times served as a punching bag for metropolis and county elected officers pissed off by the continuous rise in homeless numbers — though the principle cause is that L.A. County has a shortage of 509,000 affordable apartments.
Like every other massive group, LAHSA does have its issues. A latest audit discovered that contractors have been typically paid late and never successfully monitored. Additionally, many suppliers who got a complete of $50 million in money advances, beginning in fiscal yr 2017, have but to pay the cash again. Adams Kellum says that suppliers got these {dollars} to shore up their capacity to hold out their contracts as demand for providers elevated.
The passage of Measure H added a whole lot of tens of millions of {dollars} to the system. Nonprofits, already stretched skinny, needed to swiftly scale up their operations to satisfy the demand.
Suppliers have been instructed they might not have to fret about paying again their advances till Measure H funding stopped on the finish of 2026, in response to Adams Kellum and varied longtime revered suppliers. Since then, Measure A, the half-cent gross sales tax enhance, has handed. It is going to take impact in January because it repeals and replaces Measure H funding.
The supervisors have acknowledged that a lot of what the audit identifies as problematic occurred earlier than Adams Kellum bought the job as chief government in March 2023.
“I knew LAHSA was damaged,” she says. “We wished to return in and repair it.”
Adams Kellum was the chief government for 15 years of a Westside service supplier, St. Joseph Middle, which efficiently moved greater than 200 homeless people off the Venice boardwalk in 2021 into principally motels and lodges. She was the architect of the Inside Protected program for Mayor Karen Bass, which works on the encampment-to-home mannequin and has moved greater than 3,500 homeless individuals out of encampments into interim housing. She was appointed to guide LAHSA by the company’s board of commissioners.
Adams Kellum says the company has made many modifications since she bought there. These embrace month-to-month monitoring of grant recipients and paying them in a extra well timed trend and — after years of problems monitoring out there beds — implementing a brand new shelter mattress stock tracker that permits suppliers to see what beds are instantly out there. It’s been utilized by town’s Inside Protected program and the county’s Pathway House program, each of which transfer individuals from encampments into interim housing. It is going to roll out systemwide within the new yr, she says.
We agree that extra accountability is crucial. However the county ought to take a tough take a look at whether or not it needs to dismantle an company and create one other one simply because the county is about to get an estimated billion {dollars} a yr in Measure A funding — little of which might be funneled via LAHSA anyway.
The mayor has reservations: “New urgency has been on the core of our work to convey individuals off the road, not the creation of recent forms,” Bass mentioned in an announcement.
After all, LAHSA may benefit from some retooling. The company additionally supplies some providers itself — principally outreach. Ought to it? Some nonprofit suppliers and advocates suppose a authorities company shouldn’t be doing outreach. It needs to be solely the position of nonprofits whose core mission is offering providers. Adams Kellum says her company has taken on the position of “first responder” when elected officers relay constituents’ considerations about somebody languishing on a sidewalk.
Nonprofit suppliers want that LAHSA may very well be the strategist for all the system. It might determine and repair inequity in providers. Why are suppliers typically paid one charge per mattress by one company and one other charge by one other company when the service is identical? Additionally, LAHSA ought to make certain providers are standardized — so “outreach” and “case administration” are the identical irrespective of who supplies them.
Earlier than the supervisors make a closing resolution on the destiny of LAHSA, they need to contemplate whether or not they wish to create a brand new funding company or reform the present one.
