L.A. homeless agency posted solid numbers. But it’s under fire

To its supporters, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority was just starting to hit its stride.

Last summer, the little-known but well-funded agency announced that homelessness had effectively leveled off across Los Angeles County after years of increases. Results for the city of Los Angeles were even more encouraging, with the number of “unsheltered” homeless — people living on the street — falling by more than 10%.

LAHSA’s top executives have promised to show more progress against the humanitarian crisis in the coming months, when the latest homelessness numbers are formally released.

But instead of drawing praise, the city-county homeless agency is under fire from multiple directions — and on the verge of being pulled apart.

On Tuesday, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to vote on a plan to move more than $300 million and hundreds of workers out of LAHSA and into a new county homelessness department. Officials in the cash-strapped city of L.A. recently began exploring a similar step.

Meanwhile, a federal judge has been savaging LAHSA. At a hearing last week, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter criticized LAHSA’s numbers as untrustworthy, assailed it over its financial controls and even denounced the location of its offices.

“I will never go into LAHSA’s office building again because it’s ostentatious,” said Carter, who oversees settlement agreements on the allocation of homeless services.

LAHSA’s top executive, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, sent Carter a letter last week spelling out the improvements her agency has been working on. Carter responded by accusing her of making “meaningless” promises.

Adams Kellum, who took over LAHSA two years ago, said the day after the court hearing that her agency has been working to improve its data collection and upgrade its system for tracking available shelter beds. LAHSA increased the number of homeless people moved off the street and into interim housing by 32% in 2023-24, she said.

“I took the job knowing that LAHSA and the housing system as a whole needed significant change,” she said in an interview. “We have definitely made substantial progress in creating that change.”

LAHSA has been a public punching bag for years, drawing criticism from city leaders, county supervisors and other public officials who say its data collection has been poor, its oversight weak and its operations secretive.

In 2022, a blue ribbon commission recommended that county officials create their own homelessness agency and “streamline” LAHSA’s duties. The system for serving the county’s unhoused population is under “tremendous strain,” with too many agencies confused about their role, the authors wrote.

With a majority of the county supervisors endorsing a pullout, some at City Hall are expressing fresh concerns about the looming breakup. Council members said they have heard little from the county on whether services to the region’s neediest will be disrupted or even reduced.

“When they take their money, they’re going to take the best people out of LAHSA too,” said Councilmember Bob Blumenfield. “I mean, they’re going to gut that organization, take all the folks that actually know what they’re doing, and leave us with what’s left.”

City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, the city’s top budget analyst, went further.

“The concern is, can an organization survive if it loses more than half its staff and nearly half its funding?” he said. “Or will it just collapse?”

Backers of the LAHSA shakeup say they have been working to get to this moment for years. They point to the work of the blue ribbon commission and a string of highly critical audits as reasons for taking decisive action.

One report, produced by the county’s auditor-controller last year, concluded that lax accounting procedures and poorly written contracts had prevented LAHSA from recouping millions of dollars it had provided to its contractors as an advance in the 2017-2018 fiscal year. (LAHSA officials contend that full repayment was not due until 2027.)

Another audit, demanded by Carter, found that LAHSA lacks sufficient financial oversight to ensure that its contractors deliver the services they are paid to provide. That has left the agency vulnerable to waste and fraud, the audit said.

L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who is spearheading the push for a new county agency, said the need to track homeless spending has become even more urgent following the passage of Measure A, a half-cent sales tax approved by voters in November to pay for housing and homeless services. Direct oversight by the county will ensure those funds are properly spent, she said.

“What we are proposing on Tuesday does not erase LAHSA,” said Horvath, who represents parts of the Westside and San Fernando Valley. “It scales back LAHSA, and it says that the county is now taking authority over the money that is entrusted to it by this ballot measure. It is the county’s money.”

“A lot of the homeless out here don’t know what’s happening out here for funding,” said Colby Johnson, 32, left, about lack of financial oversight for homelessness spending, in front of his tent in Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Supervisor Hilda Solis offered a similar perspective, saying the county agencies that provide homeless services, such as the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Health Services, operate more efficiently, provide more accountability and engage in more direct communication.

Supporters of the shakeup say that LAHSA would still conduct the annual homeless count and oversee the Homeless Management Information System, a database that tracks the services provided to homeless individuals. It would also continue to operate emergency shelters.

LAHSA was formed in 1993 as a joint powers authority serving both the city and the county, as part of an effort to improve coordination on homelessness. The agency has a 10-member board that is equally split between the city and the county.

The county provides 40% of LAHSA’s $875-million budget, with another 35% coming from the city and most of the rest from the state and federal governments, according to the agency’s website.

That budget grew dramatically following the passage of Measure H, a 2017 county sales tax that generated hundreds of millions of dollars each year for homeless outreach, housing navigation and other social services. The agency took on hundreds of additional employees and now manages more than 800 contracts.

Even with those funds, the county’s homeless population remains at about 75,000, following five years of increases, according to LAHSA’s count from last year.

“I just believe that they grew too fast,” said L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who has been pushing for withdrawal of Measure A funds from LAHSA. “It was not well thought out to grow that quickly, hire that many staff, have that many contracts.”

Mayor Karen Bass, who won office in 2022 on a promise to combat the crisis, said she agrees that the homeless services system needs major changes — not just at LAHSA but at the county and within her own office, which operates Inside Safe, a program she created to move unhoused Angelenos into interim and permanent housing.

At the same time, Bass has been the most prominent public figure to speak out against the creation of the county homelessness department, saying it will interrupt the successes of the past two years.

By Jan. 31, more than two years into the program, Inside Safe had moved about 3,900 people into interim housing, such as hotels and motels, according to LAHSA figures. Of that total, nearly 900 eventually made it into permanent housing, while another 1,400 had left the program, either by returning to homelessness, going to jail or dying.

“I want the county to take into consideration the potential unintended consequences of doing this,” Bass said. “I think it is going to stop the forward movement of getting people off the street.”

Mayor Karen Bass attends the press conference to open the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s 2025 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count in February.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

Attorney Elizabeth Mitchell, who represents the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, which sued the city and county over their handling of the homelessness crisis, had little positive to say about LAHSA. But she sounded skeptical of the county’s proposal, comparing it to the movement of deck chairs on the Titanic.

She criticized the county Department of Mental Health, saying it helps only a fraction of those who need its services. And she voiced doubts that county officials will successfully break down the barriers that exist between their various departments.

“You’re taking money away from one terrible organization … and moving it to another terrible organization,” said Mitchell, whose lawsuit and subsequent settlement agreements have been debated in Carter’s courtroom.

If the supervisors approve the funding pullout on Tuesday, county officials would begin forming a new department whose budget would quickly exceed $1 billion. The new agency would absorb an estimated 76 workers from the county’s chief executive office, which oversees Pathway Home, an initiative similar to Inside Safe.

The new agency would take in about 245 employees from the county’s Department of Health Services, which runs Housing for Health, a program targeting homeless people with serious medical and behavioral conditions, plus an estimated 384 DHS contract workers, according to a county report on the transition.

As many as 468 workers from LAHSA would also move to the new county agency, with all the transfers completed by July 1, 2026, according to Horvath’s office.

Two people stand outside a tent during the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority 2025 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count in Febraury.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

County officials will have to discuss the changes with Service Employees International Union Local 721, which represents three-fourths of LAHSA’s workers. And they have yet to provide a timeline for moving workers from several other agencies into the new department.

County Supervisor Holly Mitchell, whose district stretches from Koreatown to Carson, is worried about the tight turnaround.

“Before we talk about a billion-dollar transfer, we need to make sure that this move is right, and that everybody that’s impacted … gets to weigh in,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell has voiced dissatisfaction in recent days with the county’s own work on homelessness. In parts of her district, residents have waited years for outreach workers from Pathway Home to carry out encampment operations, she said.

L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who heads the council’s homelessness committee, said she doesn’t see how a new county agency will fix the problems plaguing the homeless services system.

“Until we can make those connections clearly, I remain very skeptical that big changes will result in improvements to the lives of people on the ground,” she said.

Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who has been calling for the city to create its own homelessness department, had no such qualms, saying that L.A. “can’t be left strapped to this sinking Titanic.”

Barger, the county supervisor, said she has no intention of changing course. She described last week’s court hearing, where Carter railed against LAHSA over its financial controls, as the “final nail in the coffin.”

“Nothing can change my mind,” she said in an interview. “Nothing.”

Times staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this report.