Landless in Los Angeles

I’m Ruth and I’ve been living in public in the City of Los Angeles for around eight years. I’m one of Ava’s many advocates (including Ava herself!) trying to facilitate her transition into sustainable, dignified housing.

For those who participate in the 2025 Greater Los Angeles Count, which has been delayed for one month because of the #LAfires, Ava V. may be a mark on a tally sheet or a tap in an app. But to others in Venice Beach, she’s a longtime neighbor, friend and empowered tenant.

Ava has rented at her building near Muscle Beach for the past 20 years.

She has already been evicted.

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Her days in her apartment are numbered. Despite the existence of many vacant affordable units on the Westside, Ava doesn’t have a place lined up and will be falling onto the street for the first time. She, like many, have found the process of accessing deeply affordable housing prohibitively convoluted.

Ava spends most of her time enrolling in services, pursuing assistance, and seeking applications for affordable housing units, especially those targeted at older, low-income tenants with disabilities. She has done dozens of “intakes”, hoping each would be able to help.

Over the past year, Ava has called 211, which only had help for families with minor children, LA’s Homeless Services Authority “LAHSA”, and the City’s Housing Rights Center, who said:

“Try 211.”

Neighbors supporting neighbors

Ava’s athletic neighbor in Venice Beach, Danny Slant extended a hand and made her story a feature on his YouTube channel, a slight deviation from his usual content. He had an open-hearted conversation with Ava and set her up with a GoFundMe. It did little to put a dent in her rent debt but warmed her heart, fed her over the holidays and made her feel seen. Danny calls Ava “a unicorn” because she’s such an upstanding neighbor who never causes commotion. He doesn’t want to see her on the streets or forced out of the neighborhood.

Even if Ava’s fundraiser had raised enough to purchase an RV for several thousand dollars, she’d still have nowhere on the Westside where she’d be allowed to park. Slant’s other videos show vehicle dwellers being displaced and threatened with parking violations and poverty tows. Police enforcement makes downsizing into a vehicle seem impossible, but high costs make maintaining a life indoors prohibitively expensive, too.

How did an incumbent tenant find herself in this untenable situation?

Ava saw her financial hardship coming from a mile away after she went through a breakup and downsized from a “1BR” into a “0BR” unit in her rent-controlled building. She made the opposite move many years prior to accommodate her partner, occupying three different units at the same address over the past two decades.

Ava applied for General Relief, Medi-Cal and CalFresh from Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Social Services “DPSS” and was quickly approved for their full suite of benefits. It adds up to <$2,000 cash/year, if she does all of their assignments, appointments and paperwork on time, buying her less than a month. And to make things worse, this month, her benefits were scammed out of her account, which is a common glitch for which there appears to be no real fix.

Last year, Ava had sought Social Security for long-documented health struggles (she has over 200 pages of records) that make it hard for her to maintain employment and income. Her 3-day notice to “pay or quit” and SSI denial came in last year on top of more bills: bad news on top of bad news. She is appealing the disability denial with the help of an advocate and a lawyer who will eventually pay himself out of the proceeds of her approval, whenever that finally happens. If she could make a similar deal with her landlord, she’d be okay.

According to the overdue Sheriff’s notice to vacate on her door, Ava was to vacate her unit with her things before Monday November 11th, Veteran’s Day. She’d have been more than willing to leave, if only she knew where she was going.

Solidarity in struggle

Before dawn on Tuesday, November 12th, peer advocate Vera C. took a bus to Santa Monica wearing a red jacket to identify herself when meeting Ava for the first time and as a show of solidarity with the tenant struggle. The same morning, activists were packing a downtown courtroom in support of a Filipina Housing for Juanita tenant who was facing her landlord. In October, Mohawk Tenants packed City Hall and got City Council to close an abusive “renoviction” loophole.

Requesting a Stay

Dressed in red, both Mohawk and Juanita supporters were successful in securing their immediate demands. Ava and Vera hoped they would be, too. At the self-help area of the Courthouse, Ava and Vera requested a 30-day stay of execution on the Sheriff’s notice to vacate, which had been posted the prior Wednesday, November 6th.

As it turns out, Sheriffs seem to be at least several months behind on eviction enforcement, basically granting an automatic “30+-day stay” for everyone. Indeed, Ava’s eviction is just one instance in a huge system that has limits. One limit is LASD’s physical ability to carry out long lists of removals on behalf of landlords. The “eviction machine” presents quite a logistical challenge, like Santa making it to all of the “nice” households in one evening. This sad fact morphed into a silver lining because the removals ahead of hers kept Ava inside over the holidays. It also reminded that no matter how lonely her situation felt, she was not alone in her struggle.

Not homeless enough

A staffer in City councilwoman Traci Park’s Westside (CD11) office was one of several people to say Ava’s not “homeless enough” for assistance, despite her having already been evicted. The U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department “HUD” defines four categories of homeless and considers Ava to be either literally homeless (Category 1) or imminently homeless (Category 2).

For the record, I consider Ava to be homeless, and I am what they consider “chronic” and “unsheltered”. As fond as I have become of Ava, I don’t want her outside with me, if we can help it. It is really frustrating when I get told there is assistance for people like her but not for people like me, and she gets told that there is assistance for people like me but not for people like her. It feels like there isn’t actually assistance for anyone.

Sheltered homelessness is increasing because of evictions.

At the same time sheltered homelessness is on the rise, the number of makeshift dwellings and tents is slowly going down. This is a consequence of “sweeps”, not an effective re-housing system, which would produce similar results without depriving people of their means to survive on the streets.

You can’t resist shelters that don’t exist!

Calling homeless people “shelter resistant” requires there to be an open shelter for them to resist, and on the Westside, there are none. When I was speaking to CD11’s homeless deputy, she made remarks about Ava’s perceived “shelter resistance”. But Ava is not wrong in her impression that congregate shelter will expose her to infectious disease, violence, and theft. Sleeping in a row of bunkbeds in a shelter with dozens of others does not get Ava any closer to securing affordable housing versus what she can access on the street through outreach.

Venice’s 154-bed, $8.6M Garcetti-era “A Bridge Home” (ABH) shelter shut down after operating for three years, and there was no plan in place to replace the beds before it closed. In this sense, CD11’s office staff seemed more resistant to maintaining shelter than Ava was in trying it.

Temporary accommodations

* Ramada Inn at 3130 Washington Blvd has 33 units that were supposed to be converted into housing by December 2024, according to Circle the News. However, the opening has been delayed indefinitely and it has actually been vacant since 2022. With nearly $20M spent so far on the acquisition and conversion, a new motel could have been developed for the cost.

* Cadillac Hotel at 8 Dudley Ave was operating as a County-funded Project Roomkey, but it has since returned to use as a regular hotel. The City and County may still be owed around $150M from FEMA under the Biden administration, but administered by the State, for Project Roomkey reimbursement.

* Marina 7 at 2435 Lincoln Blvd is an Inside Safe location which has open beds that are only accessible by targeted sanitation operations at encampments. Marina 7 also happens to be a residential hotel protected by a 2008 ordinance, LAMC § 47.70. It is supposed to ensure affordable rates for long-term tenants, but protections and programs mean little when the rooms are inaccessible to those in need.

Mayor Karen Bass was supposed to get a report about the status of residential hotels before the end of 2023 per Executive Order 6, but if the report was completed, it was never published. Capital & Main and ProPublica published an investigative series called “Checked Out” about these protected hotels which inspired a City Council motion for a report back about the status of these motels, but there has been no action by the City since August 2023 on the matter.

Venice Dell

A permanent housing project in Venice has been stalled for eight years, seemingly intentionally, by CD11 Traci Park, who ran on a “Not In My Back Yard” (NIMBY) platform. In December, the Coastal Commission cleared the project, only to have the Board of Transportation Commissioners “BOTC” railroad it the next day. City Council’s Transportation Committee, in a special joint meeting with the Public Works Committee last week, heard from BOTC that they voted not to approve the Venice Dell project, sited for a median parking lot called Lot 731.

Venice Dell was planned by former CD11 councilman Mike Bonin in an era prior to the passage of City Measure HHH as a 100% affordable deed-restricted project. Recent plans include 128 units, 68 of which were to be reserved for formerly homeless people. The agenda item heard by Transportation Committee on Thursday was about a transportation hub planned for a nearby parking lot, Lot 701, which BOTC have decided is a better fit for the larger Lot 731. The Venice Dell already included replacement public beach parking and even a boat launch with access to the original canal built by Abott-Kinney, plus much-needed affordable housing on top, but now it sounds like it may never get off the ground.

The question is if anyone will ever get to live in that space in a real affordable unit, or if it will only intermittently house people who wander through with little more than a sleeping bag and get shooed away by police and sanitation.

Ava’s formerly unhoused neighbor told Ava it was time to start packing up, so she would be ready, but how ready can one be for homelessness, especially in a community that is so hostile to the unhoused?

To be continued…

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The passage of County Measure A in the November elections committed an estimated $1 billion in additional sales tax revenue for homelessness services and affordable housing initiatives. Two bodies now exist to administer these funds, which will be available for collection on April 1, 2025 (no joke!) with the first tranche of funding entering government accounts sometime in June 2025. In approving a permanent source of revenue, voters chose the new Measure A and repealed Measure H, making permanent the increased sales tax along with changes to administration and oversight that will improve the management of funds.

The Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (LACAHSA), already envisioned by local government officials from the County of Los Angeles, City of Los Angeles, and neighboring officials, and the Executive Committee for Regional Homelessness Alignment (ECRHA), although slightly different in size and scope, are now essentially the two sides of a pretty penny. Some had feared Measure A wouldn’t pass based on polling.

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LACAHSA first met on May 17, 2023, but has essentially been a paper tiger with no funding. Now the tiger has teeth, with a planned 40% of Measure A revenues going its way and 60% going to ECHRA, which first met on February 20, 2024. If LACAHSA is the paper tiger, ECHRA is like the pen writing its notes. On both bodies sits Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who in February 2020, after being nominated to lead it by Board of Supervisors Chair Lindsey Horvath, said:

“Our expansive region has notably lacked a formal forum where key decision-makers from multiple levels of government can convene, craft unified homelessness response policies, and cultivate shared plans for allocating resources.”

Both LACAHSA and ECRHA have so-called leadership tables for intersectoral participation, with foundations such in as The California Endowment and Conrad Hilton Foundation having noticeable presences. Just how much money they might bring to the table to match taxpayer funding remains unknown, but it certainly is the aspirational goal.

The shifting sands of Los Angeles

Los Angeles as a region is severely underfunded on housing and homelessness, but ask most people, and they’ll tell you that money alone won’t solve the crisis. With an estimated roughly 40,000 people on the streets of the City of Los Angeles and an additional perhaps 35,000 spread across the County in other locales, the ability of government to organize and focus itself is in question.

LACAHSA plans to spend the next 6 months developing a strategic plan for the implementation of what’s essentially a so-called “opportunity fund" to keep people in their homes through preservation and at the same time develop affordable housing to get people housed. To get LACAHSA going, $6 million was loaned from the County of Los Angeles to it to support staffing up and administrative costs with planned repayment after the first Measure A collection in June. Statutorily, LACAHSA can’t spend more than 10% of its roughly $400 million on overhead.

“We’re gonna have to move different than other acronym agencies that we have….it’s showtime.”

At their last meeting, first Vice Chair and one-time City Administrative Officer for the City of Los Angeles, Miguel A. Santana, reported that the ECRHA and Leadership Table for Homeless Regional Alignment (LTRHA) boards were, in fact, created by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors (BOS) and clarified that the BOS determined the member composition for both, ECRHA and LTRHA. He further added that progress from both ECRHA and LTRHA will proceed even if changes in leadership occur within Los Angeles County and its cities. Board Member Jonathan Jager voiced an assertion that an expert in rental evictions (hopefully not a landlord...) should have a seat on the LTRHA. There’s some overlap between the groups.

In passing its first budget, it’s unknown how close it intends to get to this cap. A request for comment to interim CEO Ryan Johnson wasn’t immediately responded to, nor is there at present a list yet of eligible projects, what one might call a target list.

“As money comes in, we have to get the money out,”

Johnson declared at LACAHSA’s meeting on December 18 at the Metropolitan Water District Headquarters in Downtown Los Angeles.

LACAHSA itself lacks a “home” in that it doesn’t have office space staff yet, with Johnson noting he was taking

“meetings from his car.”

Apparently, the County of Los Angeles is unwilling to provide human resources or legal support to the new agency, so LACAHSA will have to use “search firms” to ensure that positions are adequately posted in accordance with law.

LACAHSA’s board members at least have again rejected a proposed stipend for their additional service, with Johnson noting that he at least

“wanted to give them the option.”

The body is co-chaired by energetic Mayor Rex Richardson of Long Beach, who stated:

“It’s important that we execute with urgency”

in fulfilling the mission of what he called a body with the

“potential to be the biggest social impact fund in America.”

It’s unclear if LACAHSA’s funding can be for operating costs such as janitorial services and security within affordable housing buildings. Headlines have noted the recent decline of such services in adaptive reuse projects on Skid Row. More importantly, Los Angeles City, at least, the epicenter, has, due to its fiscal crisis, actually cut City sanitation’s budget by $15 million last year.

The City also faces a dumping crisis, as highlighted in reporting by KCAL’s Jeff Nguyen, including in Pacoima, where an area has come to be dubbed “Produce Row” because of the dumping of food waste. The Los Angeles Times’ Steve Lopez, after several months of being camped out in the Westlake area, which includes MacArthur Park, is similarly at his wits’ end as to how to address “Yoshinoya Alley," which he claims is “ground zero” for the city’s fentanyl addiction crisis.

The lone critic of the signature program under the Office of Mayor Karen Bass, Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, has a problem equal to that of Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez. Blight isn’t just urban in Los Angeles; it’s a suburban phenomenon too, and it spans all reaches of the City of Los Angeles from end-to-end, excepting wealthy pockets where policing seemingly keeps a check on it. With the threat of criminalization on the horizon on top of the failed effort known as “LAMC § (section) 41.18” to keep the unhoused from setting up encampments in certain zones, it’s clear that it’s not only the unhoused who are contributing to the idea of a lawless Los Angeles, but rather all of us failing together to create the conditions in society for future success.

The only way we will be

Money isn’t the answer. Neither is blame. Rather, it’s the poor environment of civic engagement that’s holding back new efforts toward success. Richardson ended the LACAHSA meeting promising its members “Long Beach Pie” for their service, meanwhile in Los Angeles there’s not a single place outside of privately-funded philanthropic Missions on Skid Row where you can just walk up and get a meal. The same for housing. You can’t walk in to any shelters funded by the government and get a bed for the night.

Reportedly, a new walk-up health clinic is being setup in Skid Row, the “STAR Clinic,” backed by State funding. Located at 242 E 6th St. in downtown Los Angeles, it features 1,300 square feet of clinic space within a 2,400 square foot facility operated in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services and originally by the now-defunct Skid Row Housing Trust. It’s the collapse of this entity that has created perhaps the biggest vulnerability in the safety net in Los Angeles. But can LACAHSA, much less ECRHA, move fast enough to preserve this sizable chunk of single-room occupancy housing stock and keep them from turning into a complete blight under developer Leo Pustilnikov? It’s no secret where the money needs to go, but can it be delivered to the right places in time?

To be effective, as Barger noted at ECRHA on December 13 in the posh headquarters of the California Endowment:

“We have to avoid setting up for failure.”

Mayor Karen Bass for her part, who sits on ECHRA alongside others such as Redondo Beach Councilmember Paige Kaluderovic and Monrovia Mayor Becky Shevilin. After the meeting, asked what she thought the biggest gap was, Kaludervoic, whose city was recently highlighted for its success in The Los Angeles Times, stated that more reliable “data” was needed. The existing agency for delivering this information, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), is on the re-alignment chopping block in favor of the new “Homeless Response” agency currently under study.

To conduct the so-called “point-in-time”/PIT count, LAHSA relies on volunteers, with the next go-round set for January 21–23, 2025. The PIT count is mandated biennially by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), but the Greater Los Angeles region has elected to submit annual counts since 2016.

LAHSA has a controversial new Chief Executive Strategist, Kris Freed, to support its CEO, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, PhD, who, according to the report by LAist journalist Nick Gerda, was hired after the post was:

“open for about a week”

at

“$322,587 for a maximum of 29 hours per week.”

We’re not kidding!

It’s not even Kris Freed’s only job. In taking the position, the former LA Family Housing official wrote in a public post on LinkedIn:

“My role and commitment to my clients at The Impact Consulting Group and Freed’em Consulting will remain unwavering and steadfast.”

According to Nick Gerda’s report, LAHSA might not even be complying with state ethics laws with only its CEO disclosing conflicts of interest in an annual Form 700. Apparently they’re working on it, but at that rate we might as well be burning Benjamin’s in a bucket. For many years, in what’s almost an act of defiance to the so-called “Homeless Industrial Complex,” groups have formed as “mutual aid” organizations to take direct action to provide essential basics to those living on the streets.

Undoubtedly, at least as far as alleviating human catastrophe, such groups might make better fund recipients than pouring money down the same barrel. Even as Measure A promised reform, it’s not totally clear what exactly is changing.

Mayor Karen Bass at ECRHA questioned whether the spending would be evaluated quickly enough, with the requirement being only that it be done within 5 years, stating:

“That doesn’t sound right,”

and questioning the meeting purpose.

Mayor Karen Bass soon clarified:

“Just for the record, I’ve always supported a regional approach.”

Councilmember Nithya Raman said:

“I have been making efforts between the City and the County.”

If Measure H was fatally flawed by being temporary, there are no guarantees that making funding permanent will simply fix things. By far, the biggest weakness is that essentially there is no feedback mechanism required. Those served by the providers backed by the City and the County are all but unmonitored absent blowouts that attract other authorities, such as auditors and investigators; the entire system is built to be reactive, not pro-active.

No State law requires municipalities or providers to engage in any feedback process, such as lived experience bodies, to collect any information qualitative or quantitative on whether what they’re doing works. For their parts, Bass and Barger at least seemed to find some common ground, which considering that LAHSA, which is a joint-powers city-county agency, seemed promising.

Let them eat pie

Perhaps the City and County should just meet together, with representatives from the other cities pooling representatives in the new “Homelessness Response” agency were it to be created. At LACAHSA, Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson had promised “Long Beach pie” as a year-end celebration for board members listing off the types he had brought; none was available to the public.

For several attendees who had for consecutive meetings come to plead their case against an alleged slumlord in public meetings, it had to be a little let down. For sure, you could buy a lot of pie with $322,587. I’m not sure what Kris Freed is doing for that salary, but it better be good. Perhaps she could prepare a written report for public consumption!

LACAHSA will create several more positions, pulling in more than $100,000, including a Chief of Human Resources, a Managing Director of Investments, a Chief of Staff, and a Chief of Intergovernmental Policy. Surely staffing and infrastructure are needed, but how does this fit into the overall picture of current spending? Government in Los Angeles County assuredly is no finely tuned machine, but can resolving homelessness be done by anyone else more cheaply, who can deliver better results, faster?

Supervisor Holly Mitchell quizzingly asked LACAHSA:

"Is our current schedule realistic?”

within the planned 6-month timeline.

Solutions from near and far

The Los Angeles City Council Housing & Homelessness Committee, as assigned by Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, will now consist of Chair Nithya Raman, Vice Chair Ysabel Jurado, Curren Price, Bob Blumenfield, and Adrin Nazarian. The late Kevin de León was voted off, and Monica Rodriguez was thrown off. Along with Eunisses Hernandez’s District 1, it’s Jurado’s District 14 that likely has the greatest population of unhoused people. In a recent interview, Jurado told LAist journalist Makenna Sievertson,

"Folks have said on the campaign trail that we've funneled so much money to homelessness and we don't see... it getting better.”

In building her staff, Jurado has hired Steve Diaz, a former deputy director of the non-profit Los Angeles Community Action Network in Skid Row, to be her housing and homelessness director. Diaz himself is formerly unhoused and has in the past stated opposition to both overpolicing and gentrification in the area. Whether the new Housing & Homelessness Committee, much less Jurado alone, can move the dial on this issue promises to be a big test.

Leadership in Los Angeles is fickle. Criminalization of the unhoused won’t be the solution, and already the 2026 elections are in the distance. The implementation of City Measure ULA, which promised to be a mansion tax to help keep people in their homes, has both undercollected compared to estimates at $375 million instead of an expected $600 million to $1 billion, which has also resulted in delayed implementation of the homelessness prevention component.

There are no guarantees with Measure A, even as Mayor Rex Richardson boasted:

“We’re good for it!”

about repaying the $6 million County loan to LACAHSA and also acknowledging the current “alphabet soup” of agencies.

Getting out of this conundrum means getting serious about not just spending more but reigning in the current bureaucracy even if it’s uncomfortable. Judge David O. Carter, aged 80, can’t be the only doorstopper in Los Angeles willing to hold people to account for results. The LA Alliance case is back in session on January 7th with a full agenda that’s essentially steering overall governance.

Litigation has a lifespan. Assuredly, once the LA Alliance lawsuits expire in June 2027, the group that is fervently seeking to raise money with social media won’t outlive Measure A. Nor is the LA Alliance for Human Rights the watchdog that they bill themselves as; rather, it’s a temporary lawsuit pushed forward on behalf of business elites. Perhaps more of those elites should be joining the ECRHA and LACAHSA leadership tables and putting their money behind their mouths, because this holiday season the only mouths to feed aren’t on their Instagram. For what it’s worth, ECRHA and LACAHSA seem to be a step in the right direction, but to be successful, they should take some hard lessons learned from LAHSA, which shouldn’t slip the reform dragnet in 2025. We can only hope the electeds will get their heads screwed on straight.

Alarmingly, at least one promising, albeit expensive, project, the proposed Venice Dell 120-unit building, despite a lawsuit from LA Forward and the best efforts of advocates, remains stalled with the City of Los Angeles despite receiving approval from the California Coastal Commission. The building, which would be constructed on what’s currently a public parking lot just blocks away from the Pacific Ocean. The City of Los Angeles is still refusing to convey the land to developers Venice Community Housing and Hollywood Community Housing Corp.

In a statement to Los Angeles Times journalist Liam Dillon, the Mayor’s Office wouldn’t commit to specifically backing the project, saying only that:

“the mayor remains supportive of affordable housing being built in this area”.

Councilmember Traci Park said about the Los Angeles Board of Transportation declining to relinquish the lot:

“There is no lot to build it on.”

Really, Traci?

A request for comment to the Office of Attorney General Rob Bonta on if he would enforce the State’s Housing Accountability Act yielded the following response:

“We are aware of the project, but cannot comment on possible future actions.”

The act requires all municipalities to meet State goals. Perhaps all housing projects in LA aren’t equal. The project was first brought forward in 2016. If LACAHSA were to start asking people in Los Angeles which projects they wanted to see funded, it would surely be among the most popular. Former Councilmember Mike Bonin, who previously represented the area, argued on Substack last October that this essentially is a new form of racial “redlining” on the Westside, calling the opposition “disturbing.”

Meanwhile, Attorney General Bonta is now suing over:

“the operation of Cathay Manor, a 268-unit apartment complex in downtown Los Angeles that is financed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under a Housing Assistance Payment contract”.

Just how involved Bonta wants to get in this all remains to be seen, but for now, the balancing act of State, Federal, and Local powers continues for the future in the City of Angels.

USC whistleblower Zachary Ellison goes to all the meetings and hearings about the housing crisis in Los Angeles and Ruth @roofless reports on homelessness directly from the streets.

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🔗 Measure A homeless sales tax edges closer to the 50% majority needed for passage, poll shows

🔗 Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency

🔗 STATEMENT OF PROCEEDINGS FOR THE INAUGURAL MEETING OF THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE FOR REGIONAL HOMELESS ALIGNMENT

🔗 Barger Issues Statement on Launch of Inaugural Executive Committee for Regional Homeless Alignment

🔗 The California Endowment

🔗 Conrad H. Hilton Foundation

🔗 New owner cuts security, janitors at Skid Row homeless housing as tenants fear worsening conditions

🔗 Videos capture frustration with illegal dumping in Los Angeles

🔗 Column: The time for excuses is over. L.A.’s MacArthur Park needs a champion now

🔗 Resolving Encampments in Skid Row

🔗 Star Clinic and Housing for Health Office

🔗 How Redondo Beach brought its homeless numbers to ‘functionally zero’

🔗 LA's homelessness agency handles $700M in contracts each year. Just one employee must disclose conflicts

🔗 Kris Freed LinkedIn Post

🔗 Newly elected LA City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado sets her eyes on public services, housing, and homelessness

🔗 Ysabel Jurado is building her District 14 team. Here’s who’s on it

🔗 L.A.’s ‘mansion tax’ has collected $375 million. Where is the money going?

🔗 LA Alliance for Human Rights

🔗 LA Forward Institute and Community Members Sue Los Angeles Over Venice Dell Delays

🔗 Venice homeless housing development continues in limbo as councilmember declares the project dead

🔗 L.A.'s New Redlining: Connecting the Dots

🔗 Attorney General Bonta Files Lawsuit Seeking Dissolution of C.C.O.A. Housing Corporation and Transfer of Millions of Dollars to Legitimate Charity Providing Affordable Senior Housing

Illustrations made on Wombo’s free dream.ai app for iOS

Graphs made on free Canva app for iOS

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Los Angeles City council member Nithya Raman sat resolutely and declared in City Administrative Officer “CAO” Matt Szabo’s Homeless Strategy Committee meeting on December 9th to staffers from the Housing Department (LAHD), Housing Authority “The HACLA,” and Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) that she wanted:

“a map of encampments” with an overlay of outreach teams.

Moments before, Chief City Legislative Analyst John Wickham had questioned the arrangement in terms of “vertical integration,” a management science term for the combination of stages of production to address housing and homelessness through the two City housing agencies and the City-County joint-powers authority, LAHSA, at the center of it all.

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Raman soon ended the meeting, stating that they would reconvene again next year on January 7th. It was hardly a reassuring response given the more than 40,000 people who will spend the rest of 2024 unhoused in the City of Los Angeles. Makeshift shelters will almost certainly get bombarded with heavy winter storms between now and the first 2025 CAO Homeless Strategy committee meeting, and nighttime temperatures, which dropped briefly at the end of November before warming back up, are again dropping.

For many it will be a long, cold winter in LA on the streets.

LAHSA’s Commission, which meets Friday, December 20th at 9am at 637 Wilshire Blvd on the first floor, is comprised of five Mayor-appointed representatives of the City of Los Angeles and one appointed by each Supervisor of the five-member Board of the County of Los Angeles. Their finance committee meets this Friday, December 13th at 9am (in the Commission Room) and programs and contracts committee meets at 10:30am at 707 Wilshire Blvd on the 10th floor. Just weeks before, the agency’s responsibilities had been brought into question by County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath in putting forward a motion to study the creation of a new County agency for homelessness response. Implementation won’t occur until at least next year.

Can LA wait that long?

Block-by-block

The Los Angeles City Council had approved last Wednesday, December 4th, an additional $440,000 to fund a federally-ordered audit underway commissioned under Judge David O. Carter with the agreement of Mayor Karen Bass. Now Carter’s court is set to reconvene on January 7th, 2025, to take up the Los Angeles Alliance for Human Rights’ motion to hold the City of Los Angeles in non-compliance for failing to reduce the number of encampments. The LA Alliance had been stymied by the city’s claim to lack “block-by-block” data in lieu of summary data, showing only slight progress toward the development of interim and permanent supportive housing units. Mayor Bass’s top homelessness advisor, Lourdes Castro-Ramirez, recently stepped down to become President & CEO of HACLA after 1 year and 2 months.

Blocks away from City Hall, next to a fenced-in empty plaza, Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics loaded an elderly Latino man from a wheelchair in the streets. Bystanders had called for assistance, and LAPD officers came racing with lights and sirens, forcing a Waymo vehicle to the side. They couldn’t load his wheelchair into the ambulance from the side door, forcing the paramedics to again open the rear door. One of the LAPD officers went with him as another sped off to a new call, lights and sirens, again. His worn sneakers had sat on the wheelchair as his feet were visible in navy blue socks. Just how much money from LA’s “Homelessness Industrial Complex” hits the streets? That’s what Judge Carter had demanded to know only weeks prior, and yet here was anecdotal evidence that the so-called “Poverty Pimps” were again getting the better of the funding. The man thankfully hadn’t been struck by a vehicle.

However, block-by-block data does already exist, and it does show a reduction in the prevalence of “encampments.” Specifically, it shows a significant decline in the number of tents in 2024. Each year (except 2021, which was cancelled due to COVID-19), USC has counted unhoused peoples’ “dwellings” (tents, makeshift shelters, RVs, and vehicles) as part of the point-in-time “PIT” homeless count. Census tract-level data is publicly available for 2017 through 2020, 2022, and 2024. Additionally, Ruth Roofless obtained the 2023 dwellings data, which USC advised LAHSA not to release to the public, using the California Public Records Act, allowing us to analyze trends in the number of tents in the City of LA by council district and even by block.

This easiness and peril of mapping was readily illustrated by the emergence of an X account, formerly known as Twitter, claiming to do exactly this task. It wasn’t immediately clear who was behind the account and contingent website, with the operator claiming that the Los Angeles map was a “pilot” project. Advocates for the unhoused are deeply concerned that such records will be used to facilitate criminalization and increase targeted violence.

X owner Elon Musk recently stated:

“the word ‘homeless’ is a lie,”

calling it:

“a propaganda word for violent drug addicts with severe mental illness”

while attacking the “Housing First” strategy in response to reporting in the San Francisco Chronicle. The billionaire Elon Musk is a close advisor of President-elect Donald Trump with a potential cabinet post in a new Department of Government Efficiency.

Bed-by-bed

The sudden fixation on “block-by-block” results is curious, because the City doesn’t fund a single walk-up shelter. How are people supposed to literally “get off the streets” when there’s nowhere to go sleep indoors immediately? Additionally, Roofless secured census-tract-specific eviction data from the LA Courts, showing that dozens of homes in the City of LA are being vacated daily. And Westside Current has been reporting on Project Homekey, some of which have stayed vacant for years, which, despite having been purchased with State funds years ago, continue to be granted additional money by City Council. This all is simply not working.

For example, just last week, the Ramada Inn at 3130 Washington Blvd in Marina Del Rey received an additional $1.5M, this time from HHH funds. The 33-unit Homekey was purchased for $10M and received an additional $5M, totaling $16.5M. It was supposed to open as housing in December, according to Circle the News, but CD11 Councilwoman Traci Park's homelessness deputy Carol Williams said that date was “exaggerated,” and opening is now projected in 2025.

The issue of vacancy and eviction has not been addressed in the LA Alliance court, although property and business owners comprise most of the members of the Alliance. However, the scope of the audit prescribed by Alvarez & Marsal has expanded several times to include LAPD spending at the suggestion of intervenor Shayla Myers with LAFLA, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, on behalf of affected unhoused people, especially those on Skid Row. This also includes spending by the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health.

United to House LA…but not until next year

The oversight body for United to House LA, “ULA,” meets at 2:30 pm on Thursday, December 12th, in the Metropolitan Department of Water and Power chamber, where the scandal-plagued DWP Commission and newly-formed LACAHSA also convene. ULA’s prior meeting was supposed to occur after LACAHSA's first meeting since Measure A’s passage but was canceled. Recently, former City Attorney Mike Feuer, at the center of a scandal that included the DWP over rate-fixing as reported by L.A. TACO journalist Lexis-Olivier Ray, was hired by a prominent legal-aid nonprofit, the Inner City-Legal Center. The announcement was met with outrage.

This week in City Council, a report was received from ULA outlining this year and next year’s budgeted funds versus actual expenditures so far this year. The report reflected delayed implementation of ULA’s income assistance program for elderly and/or disabled people who have fallen behind on their rents. The rollover of 100% of this year’s budgeted $11.5M was clearly communicated in the attached slides. LAHD’s ULA dashboard shows that money has consistently been coming in from the “mansion tax” since its passage, with the most transactions coming from CD11 (Traci Park), followed by CD5 (Katy Yaroslavsky).

Mansion taxes were supposed to prevent displacement, but their program to keep vulnerable tenants housed went unfunded in 2024.

With both of ULA’s top-contributing districts being on the Westside, it makes sense for the property owners paying the “mansion tax” to want to see results. Many of their property transfers occurred a year or more ago, and they want to know where the money went. But expecting results in the form of less visible displacement is contingent on program implementation, not tax collection alone. Perhaps the FBI should be investigating just why exactly Los Angeles is so consistently so bad at getting results and where the money has gone.

ULA’s income assistance program to keep vulnerable tenants housed won’t begin until sometime next year. Meanwhile, without delivery of promised anti-displacement measures, evictions are overwhelming the Court and Sheriffs, with 1,453 unlawful detainers originating from within the City of LA over the Thanksgiving holiday between November 4th and 29th. A notice to vacate posted the first week of November that we have been tracking still hasn’t been enforced by LASD as of publication, indicating a delay of at least 5 weeks. Another 474 unlawful detainers were initiated on tenants just last week, over 90% of whom owe rent, according to LAHD’s dashboard. Is LA simply kicking people out faster than it should be for its own good?

Also scheduled for January 7th, 2025, is an Alliance hearing (the CAO Homeless Strategy meeting is later that day) where the Court will hear an update from Controller Kenneth Mejia and LAHSA on the recoupment of funds advanced to service providers under County Measure H. Measure H has now been replaced by Measure A, providing a permanent half-cent sales tax County-wide to fund homelessness reduction efforts. How much money LAHSA can claw back from roughly $45 million in accounted cash advances, much less the City’s budgetary allocation, is actually being spent in ways that benefit the unhoused, will be the question before the judge.

Meanwhile, those in the City system face a reported 20:1 chance of receiving permanent housing, even as the City plans to complete 3,000 units in the next 6 months. A study of the “Housing First” policy, which Alliance lobbies hardline against, found that only 11% of unhoused people who entered LAHSA’s “Coordinated Entry System” or CES were offered permanent housing within 12 months following intake. The findings of Controller Kenneth Mejia’s audit were perhaps even more concerning than the recent internal County audit that preceded it.

If it takes a year for the high-tech, federally required, overly engineered “solution” to locate a unit of housing for one in every ten qualified unhoused clients, is it possible the burden of the CES is the problem, and not the “Housing First” policy itself?

Some say:

“The purpose of a system is what it does”.

It does seem CES serves a purpose of bottlenecking demand for affordable housing. Have we simply created a system so complicated no one can understand it?

Ruth Roofless made a tool to locate affordable housing units and motel shelters within the City of LA, identifying projects that receive funding from Homekey, HHH, Roadmaps, Alliance, Inside Safe, and Measures H/A. I figured if the system of “matching” is so inefficient, people could do their own matching and seek the unit they want directly, rather than expecting an algorithm to eventually decide where they are best suited to live. After selecting a project, the new problem that arises for unhoused tenants lies in identifying the nonprofit and the person within it that is willing and able to take an application directly.

Going through LAHSA’s burdensome entry system, which is a federal requirement enforced by the Housing and Urban Development Department “HUD,” removes accountability to the unhoused tenant, which our neighbors are now visually interpreting as unaccountability to them as well.

Something has to change.

Curiously, LAHSA excitedly announced their new “bed-finding” tool in a social media blast over the weekend, but it appears that the resource was designed for service providers and is not “public-facing”, demonstrating the level of gatekeeping that has become acceptable or even required when it comes to administering homeless services, housing, and shelter. The last Homeless Strategy committee meeting included a disconnected discussion about “throughput” from shelter to housing sprinkled with whimsical euphemisms. “Unicorns” was the choice word to describe brand new but long-vacant HHH-funded permanent supportive housing units that have layered tenant eligibility requirements.

The Homeless Industrial Complex is a mindset.

Representatives from LAHD described difficulty matching unhoused applicants to these units because they must seek out prospective tenants with specific disability-related needs, sometimes layered with other requirements like domestic violence/trafficking survivor, veteran, and/or a family with a certain number of children. For example, a unit with a visual fire alarm would be best suited for a person or family member with a hearing-related disability, but they must also have the appropriate number of family members to utilize the unit’s bedrooms. The idea that it is this difficult to locate tenants for subsidized units in brand-new buildings when six unhoused people perish every day in the City of LA is a fairy tale. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Alliance for Human Rights continues to bill itself as the key watchdog despite providing no services other than a lawsuit that is down to one plaintiff. Multiple requests for the identity of that plaintiff made to the City Attorney’s office of Hydee Feldstein-Soto went quite unanswered.

Whether the City and County of Los Angeles can make this any better remains to be seen, much less President Donald Trump.

Writing in the Los Angeles Public Press, journalist Liz Chou wrote:

"Unlike most parts of the country, Los Angeles has significant funding to address homelessness that does not originate from the federal government.”

She added with a caveat:

“But federal funding remains a significant portion of the overall budget, and experts worry that a more conservative federal government might apply stringent requirements that complicate how those funds are used.”

State funding is also critical to addressing this crisis. Governor Gavin Newsom, even as he gives orders and money to “Trump-proof” California, will be termed out in 2026. More than any other issue, this may be the one that defines his legacy as a leader.

🔗 Dkt. 767 Motion for Order Re Settlement Agreement Compliance

🔗 HACLA Board Approves Employment Contract with Lourdes Castro Ramirez as President & CEO

🔗 Encampment Track 🚩

🔗 Elon Musk Twitter Post RE: "Homeless"

🔗 Broken Homes

🔗 Skid Row Nonprofit ‘Fighting to End Homelessness’ Hires Former City Attorney Mike Feuer, the ‘Architect’ of Anti-Homeless Law

🔗 LAHD Report from ULA

🔗 Housing First Study: TLS Programs in Los Angeles

🔗 Economic Roundtable: Los Angeles County Homeless Count Data Library

🔗 LA Alliance for Human Rights

🔗 ULA Ordinance

🔗 LA City Controller Audit - Homelessness Audit Pathways to Permanent Housing

Thanks for reading roofless! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

“Somehow at some point” parts 1 and 2 were originally published together by CityWatchLA in their newsletter on December 5th, 2024.

I’m Ruth @roofless and I write about homelessness and housing in the City of Los Angeles. I’ve lived on the streets here continuously for seven years and first experienced displacement in 2003. I write a Substack series with USC whistleblower Zachary Ellison about the legal landscape of landlessness in LA. Zach has made himself a fixture in the courtroom of U.S. Judge David O. Carter, where major settlements affecting the unhoused like LA Alliance, addressing our civil rights and compelling “bed” creation, are enforced. In another settled lawsuit overseen by Carter, veteran plaintiffs led by Jeffery Powers sued the V.A. over illegal leases and insufficient housing at the West LA Soldiers’ Home.

In part 1, I dove into the most recent Powers hearing and revisited a 2019 displacement of veterans from Echo Park which coincided with a near-cessation of veterans’ housing voucher awards. In part 2, I interrogate top-paid homeless advocates for aligning with gentrification goals over housing and healing and suggest a simple solution.

The Raid on the Lake

In March 2021, two years after the 2019 closure of the Billets cottages and just one mile away, tranquil Echo Park Lake resembled somewhat of a war zone. LAPD swarmed in helicopters overhead and formations of riot cops unconstitutionally placed dozens of members of the press including L.A. TACO’s Lexis Olivier-Ray and Spectrum’s Kate Cagle in flexcuffs. They brutally concussed a housed civilian, putting them in the hospital and broke one protestor’s arm. LAPD’s raid of Echo Park Lake, which happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, ultimately displaced around 200 unhoused people, although some temporarily made it into shelter through Project Roomkey at the downtown L.A. Grand Hotel, three miles away, while people nearby in Skid Row were passed over for those same rooms. LAPD’s overkill response cost the City around $2M.

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The closure was a violent, expensive and unnecessary show of force, decommissioning the entire park from all public access for two months, and arresting it behind rented chain link fences for more than two years. CD13 Councilman Mitch O’Farrell, whose district included Echo Park and Hollywood, was unseated in 2022. His loss was attributed to unsatisfactory leadership during the pandemic, including his brutal handling of EPL. His successor Hugo Soto-Martinez finally removed Echo Park Lake’s gentrification fences in May 2023. Some speculated that the rental fence was possibly due for return by then, anyway. It’s unclear just how many veterans may have been displaced in the EPL operation, but documented outreach regarding Economic Impact Payments conducted by National Veterans Foundation “NVF” on May 26th, 2021, just two months after the raid, shows that at least one unhoused veteran, Marvin, was found at EPL as soon as it reopened.

LAHSA’s lack of Authority

Heidi Marston, CEO of LAHSA at the time, made an appearance at EPL during the raid. She handed people cardboard boxes to aid in their moves to nowhere (or possibly serve as their new homes?). Knock.la’s Jamie Loftus reported Marston’s delayed reaction, quoting her regrettably musing:

“…it didn’t need to happen this way.”

If only the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority had exercised any actual authority, such as instructing LAPD to stand down, demanding Sanitation back off of their clients while outreach worked to find them housing, attending City Council during LAMC § 41.18 hearings, or opposing the Recreation and Parks Department’s plans to close the public park in a pandemic, things really could have ended differently.

A lot of people showed up in incredible ways to show solidarity with the unhoused of EPL in March 2021. But many people failed the community, too. Marston’s job as the top-paid homeless advocate in the region should have given her a little more confidence to robustly oppose the violence done to her clients rather than wishing things happened differently.

Interestingly, Marston had worked as an executive for the VA prior to coming to LAHSA as a Chief Program Officer just two months before the veterans were removed from The Billets. Marston had worked for the VA in different capacities since 2009 and for a period worked as an assistant to the VA Secretary in DC. Her transition to LAHSA and exit from the VA are both listed as occurring in February 2019 on LinkedIn. Did Marston bring the Gateways contract to LAHSA? If she did, she knew exactly what she was doing, because she would soon be rewarded with a promotion to CEO.

Displacements don’t happen in a vacuum.

Gentrification pressures had been growing for years in Echo Park, with developers exploiting the “substantial remodel” loophole to evict multigenerational families from rent-controlled buildings. The “renoviction” removal mechanism was finally addressed by Housing and Homelessness Committee and City Council in November, thanks to tenant advocacy by Echo Park’s Mohawk Tenants.

Young Mohawk tenant organizer Matthew Mata and his family pleaded not to have to relocate from Echo Park for his senior year of high school. Mohawk’s supporters packed City Hall dressed in red, with some describing through translators during public comment experiences of being threatened with eviction as many as three times in the past few years under the now-closed legal loophole.

The Billets should have been studied and replicated for its ability to accommodate veterans, who some consider to be among the most difficult-to-serve clients because of their complex needs compounded by warranted distrust of the system. By managing to convert the majority of participants into residents of permanent housing, despite post-traumatic stress, serious mental illness and substance abuse, The Billets seemingly overcame the challenge of “acuity” in homelessness services, at least when it came to LA’s veteran population. Acuity has since been contemplated in the LA Alliance for Human Rights v Los Angeles court hearings. Unhoused people “with serious mental illness” are considered inappropriate for City shelters in the settlement. Alliance was filed in March 2020, right at the onset of the pandemic, and settled in 2022. It is overseen by the same judge as Powers, David O. Carter, himself a Vietnam veteran and double UCLA alum.

At the most recent Alliance hearing, the flag-draped tent across from the new federal courthouse was similarly addressed by the plaintiffs, to justify their demand for an evidentiary hearing. It didn’t go over too well, but an audit of spending on homelessness was demanded by the court, which is currently being conducted by firm Alvarez & Marsal and expected to deliver answers by February 2025.

Conflicting understandings of “harm” in court

On November 13th, the VA said it will be irreparably harmed if forced to add 100 modular housing units on-site. Plaintiffs’ lawyers said unhoused veterans (not named plaintiffs, who are now housed) will die. The VA’s lawyers wanted to know which ones, and the plaintiffs’ lawyers pointed to a 2,000 “by-name list” of unhoused veterans who they allege are connected to outreach or services, as well as the flag-draped tent near the courthouse. The West LA VA “Soldier’s Home” currently accommodates only around 300 veterans in housing on its property, and it formally objects to the Court wanting the VA to add 100 more units on-site by February, which would increase its housing capacity to around 400.

Does the VA mean it can’t federally subsidize those proposed units and will be forced to pay “out-of-pocket” for operating them, so it won’t be a profitable venture for the VA? Is that really irreparable harm that can be compared with the physical, mental and mortal costs of homelessness?

The truth is of course murkier than that, as the VA is expressing reluctance to accept what is essentially a packaged deal to implement a controversial Master Plan at the Soldier’s Home which includes retail development. The shopping component, which will open the Veterans’ property in West LA up to the general public, has an expedited timeline of two years, placing it at a higher priority than permanent housing for veterans. The VA may experience irreparable harm if it swaps out one group of illegal tenants (currently UCLA, the Brentwood School, Bridgeland Oil and SafetyPark are occupying the VA on leases that were deemed void by the Court) for another set of leases which also does not principally benefit unhoused disabled veterans and their families.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the defendant in Powers, has a $400,000,000,000 annual budget. If the VA isn’t acting in bad faith by challenging the court’s opinion, it must substantially improve housing conditions for veterans.

The VA can, on its own initiative, take action to better accommodate veterans who live or wish to live at the Soldier’s Home at any time. It can open up Building 22, which once served as a dormitory for veteran families with children. It can identify funding from its own massive budget to replace the Pallet shelters with a more dignified product like a FEMA trailer (what happened to the >600 FEMA trailers Governor Gavin Newsom sent to Los Angeles to shelter unhoused people in January 2020?), 3D printed solutions (a local Culver City company has a promising design), modular homes, or anything else. The VA in West LA could invite Habitat for Humanity to build on-site, allow veterans who are able to build or fix homes for one another through the HUD’s Self-Help Home Ownership “SHOP” program (which grants $25,000 per unit for the creation, acquisition or improvement of “non-luxury” housing units through “sweat equity”). Instead, the experience for veterans who come to West LA in need of housing is consistently a story where the buck is passed to veterans’ nonprofits which receive grants yet have nothing to offer veterans. The practice of privatizing veterans’ housing is wasteful and only destabilizes and deprives veterans of their benefits.

The VA should, first and foremost, strike a deal with UCLA for use or acquisition of the dormitories it built at the VA on the C & H tract on Veterans Avenue, across from the cemetery. It may just find itself in compliance with the Judge’s orders for the creation of both temporary and permanent housing if it can use or acquire those existing dorms.

Rejecting the Master Plan doesn’t have to mean rejecting disabled veterans who are in need of housing and support. In fact, many veterans are themselves actively opposed to the Master Plan or components of it like the public retail mall. If the VA can unite with Veterans by supporting their housing needs, it may also be able to defeat the developers who have advanced so far on a land grab that may soon be impossible to undo.

The VA needs to do whatever it takes to help veterans, as they were expected to do to protect our country.

Additionally, to prevent deaths of veterans this winter, the VA should designate outreach of their own who has access to capital for troubleshooting solutions that directly benefit veterans and their families at and around the West LA VA, Venice and Skid Row. They should be able to book hotels, repair RVs, allocate safe parking spaces, upgrade tents and sheds, order medical devices and approve accessibility features as well as improve the old buildings, all from a discretionary account specifically for the purpose of facilitating literal longevity for veterans.

Thanks for reading roofless! Subscribe for FREE to receive new posts.

Originally published in CityWatchLA on December 5th, 2024. Stay tuned for part two or read the entire article here at the canonical link.

Illustrations made from prompts on Wombo’s free Dream.ai app for iOS.

Special thanks to those who sacrificed for our country, including my relatives who fought fascists in World War II, and the young unhoused veteran who spoke to me at length, condemning war and America’s violence on Veteran’s Day last month.

“Somehow at some point” parts 1 and 2 were originally published together by CityWatchLA in their newsletter on December 5th, 2024.

I’m Ruth @roofless and I write about homelessness and housing in the City of Los Angeles. I’ve lived on the streets here continuously for seven years and first experienced displacement in 2003. I write a Substack series with USC whistleblower Zachary Ellison about the legal landscape of landlessness in LA. Zach has made himself a fixture in the courtroom of U.S. Judge David O. Carter, where major settlements affecting the unhoused like LA Alliance, addressing our civil rights and compelling “bed” creation, are enforced. In another settled lawsuit overseen by Carter, veteran plaintiffs led by Jeffery Powers sued the V.A. over illegal leases and insufficient housing at the West LA Soldiers’ Home.

In part 1, I dive into the most recent Powers hearing and revisit a 2019 displacement of veterans from Echo Park which coincided with a near-cessation of veterans’ housing voucher awards. In part 2, I interrogate top-paid homeless advocates for aligning with gentrification goals over housing and healing and suggest a simple solution.

“There's one [unhoused veteran] across the street, one tent across the street from this courthouse today.”

Attorneys for a plaintiff class of unhoused veterans in Powers v McDonough pointed to the American flag-draped tent outside the new federal courthouse on First Street during a hearing on Wednesday, November 13th, two days after Veteran’s Day, objecting to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ motion to stay the district court’s October 11th judgment.

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Hours later, the patriotic tent was gone, and a new fence erected where the humble shelter stood for months. Obstructive panels of rented chain link blocked an entire Metro bus stop, attracting a ticket on 11/19 from the City’s Bureau of Street Services Investigation and Enforcement Division, as reported by L.A. TACO journalist Lexis Olivier-Ray. The occupant of the tent, presumably an unhoused veteran, therefore a member of the now-settled Powers plaintiff class, was nowhere to be seen.

A quote obtained by Olivier-Ray from Zach Siedl of Mayor Karen Bass’ office explained that an Inside Safe operation had indeed occurred on Wednesday, November 13th. But with the nearby L.A. Grand Hotel, a Project Roomkey-turned-Inside Safe whose fugitive owner is entangled in corruption with imprisoned former downtown councilman José Huizar, having completed a final “demobilization” months ago, it’s unclear where those affected by the operation ended up.

Inside Safe operations are “sweeps”, as evidenced by their inclusion on CARE/CARE+ Sanitation schedules, and the well-being of the displaced comes secondary to the stunning (in a good or bad way, depending on your perspective) “before” and “after” photos. Accountability at and after these operations is difficult. Olivier-Ray himself was recently handcuffed and placed in the back of a black-and-white LAPD SUV while observing one of these operations as media.

Veterans in LA are not strangers to displacement.

In 2019, 72 veterans were displaced in Echo Park when the VA was outbid on a cluster of cottages operating a safe haven program called “The Billets”. The VA was used to paying Gateways Hospital $1M per year for use of nine residential units on their property, which the VA secured in an annual competitive bidding process. The cottages, located on a residential street, were used for a transitional housing program ran by nonprofit operator Volunteers of America “VOALA”.

In 2019, a mystery bidder’s $1.4M offer topped the VA’s, and the veterans were told to report to Salvation Army’s shelter in Bell. The shelter is eleven miles away from Echo Park, in an old armory the City of Bell acquired in a 1985 trade with the federal government.

LA Times’ Gale Holland sympathetically covered The Billets’ closing at the time, but did not disclose the identity of the “mystery bidder”, which may not have been known.

It has since been revealed that the bidder who defeated the VA was in fact LA’s Homeless Services Authority “LAHSA”, which wanted 14 of Gateways’ cottages for a new family shelter. The project secured $500,000 in discretionary homelessness prevention funds from County Supervisor Hilda Solis.

Barry Lank wrote about the new shelter opening under operator The Whole Child for The Eastsider on October 9, 2019:

“The project was funded by $1.4 million from the Los Angeles Housing [sic] Services Authority, with a shortfall of around $500,000 being covered by Supervisor Solis’ discretionary Homeless Preventative Initiative funds.”

LAHSA and the VA are the last two entities that should be engaging in a bidding battle that takes 72 veterans off a therapeutic track for permanent housing. It is even more inappropriate that LAHSA were aided by County Supervisor Solis’ discretionary homeless prevention initiative funds.

A CPRA to the County CEO for clarification on how much discretion is allowed when allocating homeless prevention funds hasn’t delivered any materials so far, but it’s interesting to observe all of the main public advocates with access to resources for the unhoused instead aligning with gentrification goals of bringing in a younger crowd, and pushing older, disabled people out.

LAHSA is supposed to serve the general unhoused population as well as veterans who can’t or won’t associate with the VA, such as those who are unsheltered in LA anywhere off the VA’s West LA property and those with discharges other-than-honorable. Both LAHSA and the VA have access to federal subsidies through the City and County’s Public Housing Authorities “PHAs”, The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles “The HACLA” and the LA County Development Authority, “LACDA”, respectively.

Indeed, for six years prior to LAHSA’s acquisition of the cottages, the transitional “safe haven” program dubbed “The Billets” was operated under a “harm reduction” model in which 70% of participants exited to permanent subsidized housing with services facilitated by the use of U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department - Veterans Affairs Supportive Services “HUD-VASH” vouchers.

On the peaceful grounds of Gateways hospital, veterans had been able to keep service animals, have guests and use medical marijuana with a license. They enjoyed their “walkable” neighborhood and became regular patrons of a nearby coffee shop. They voluntarily graduated to permanent housing, an upgrade from the shared Gateways cottages, making room for more veterans in the program, and making good use of federal assistance.

When The Billets shut down, HUD-VASH awards seemed to stop as well.

Federal housing support for veterans slowed to a trickle in 2019 and has not recovered.

It used to be that LA City and County’s PHAs, The HACLA and LACDA, could receive referrals from LAHSA and the VA to get veterans permanently housed, as the PHAs manage federal subsidies in the form of Housing Choice Vouchers “HCV” (commonly called “Section 8”) and HUD-VASH vouchers. HUD-VASH data during the six years of The Billets’ operation shows both the City and County’s public housing authorities, The HACLA and LACDA, receiving several hundred vouchers per year while The Billets was in operation from FY13-18:

Combined HUD-VASH awards to The HACLA (City) + LACDA (County) by Fiscal Year, including Project-Based Voucher “PBV” awards

Data: HUD

FY • [CA002 + CA004 + PBVs]

08 • 840

09 • 385

10 • 525

11 • 300

12 • 800

13 • 775

14 • 847

15 • 755

16 • 586

17 • 816

18 • 678

19 • 0

20 • 500

21 • 0

22 • 500

23 • 0

The City’s public housing authority, The HACLA, received 250 HUD-VASH vouchers in the five-year period from FY19-23, an average of 50/year, with all of them coming in one award in FY22. In the same time period, the County’s public housing authority, LACDA, got 750 vouchers, or 150/year for those five years.

In 2019, the same year The Billets closed, Los Angeles’ award of HUD-VASH vouchers was zero for the City and County. HUD-VASH vouchers have barely trickled into LA’s housing authorities since.

For the 11 years prior, FY08-18, the City and County got an average of 700 combined vouchers per year. The City received zero vouchers in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023. For three of the four years for which City didn’t receive a HUD-VASH allotment, 2019, 2021, and 2023, the County also got zero HUD-VASH vouchers.

The loss of 500 vouchers per year for over five years is nearly equal to the current number of unhoused veterans believed to be on the streets of LA: 3,000.

The unavailability of HUD-VASH would have the effect of forcing veterans to access mainstream “Section 8” or rely on attrition, which is when a veteran loses or relinquishes a voucher, which can then be “recycled” by another veteran or family.

More realistically, it has the effect of flag-draped tents around the City…

Read or listen to Part 2 of “Somehow at some point”.

Originally published in CityWatchLA on December 5th, 2024.

Canonical 🔗

Illustrations made from prompts on Wombo’s free Dream.ai app for iOS. Graph made on Canva.

Special thanks to those who sacrificed for our country, including my relatives who fought fascists in World War II, and the young unhoused veteran who spoke to me at length, condemning war and America’s violence on Veteran’s Day last month.

Thanks for reading roofless! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved by a vote of 4-0-1 a motion to study the feasibility of creating a new homelessness response agency on November 26, right before the Thanksgiving holiday. As noted by Los Angeles Times journalist Doug Smith writing on the notable approval, the County Chief Executive Office under Fesia Davenport will need to produce:

“a feasibility report in 60 days, an analysis of which County and LAHSA programs would be absorbed by the new department in 90 days, and a fiscal and staffing plan in 120 days.”

A “friendly amendment” from Supervisor Janice Hahn to allow staff more time to complete the feasibility report was met with a lukewarm response despite “the holidays.” The move to restructure comes after a scathing audit from the County Auditor-Controller’s office under Oscar Valdez as well as a review of homelessness spending by Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia.

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In question are tens of millions of dollars in “working capital” advances made to service providers in 2017-18 from County Measure H funding. Similarly, questions remain regarding spending at the City of Los Angeles that have yet to be resolved, even as an audit approved by the City of Los Angeles in response to the LA Alliance for Human Rights v Los Angeles lawsuit filed under Judge David O. Carter.

The audit underway by firm Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) is now expected to issue a report no later than the end of February due to delays getting data from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). Under review, pending the audit findings, is whether LAHSA should be streamlined to have a narrower set of responsibilities limited to conducting the annual point-in-time count and managing the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) versus direct fund administration for service providers.

LAHSA has struggled with these tasks even as it’s obligated under federal guidelines to be responsible for the Greater Los Angeles Continuum of Care “CoC 600” under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (U.S. HUD). CoC 600 includes the entire County except Glendale, Pasadena, and Long Beach, which have their own CoCs under the supervision of their separate public housing authorities.

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated former NFL player Scott Turner to lead U.S. HUD. The extent of mismanagement by LAHSA left even former Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, now a member of the Board of Supervisors, openly wondering whether LAHSA had allowed funding in the past to be illegally comingled:

“Was it criminal?”

Expenditures of federal funds require full accounting.

Whether follow-up from the U.S. Attorney’s Office is the next step remains to be seen after Judge Carter singled out providers with outstanding balances. In response, Supervisor Holly Mitchell declared she was concerned that service providers were being "demonized.”

Apparently, after Measure H’s passage, service providers were given large cash advances that did not require repayment across multiple fiscal years. This was years before many of the same nonprofits received $250k in cash advances on contracts for operating Homekey sites they were to acquire. Undoubtedly, there has been mismanagement at all levels of government, which must be resolved so housing efforts can move forward.

The week prior, Judge Carter had held a hearing to overcome delays in fully funding the A&M audit. With Los Angeles City Council on recess until the week of December 2, Carter was irate, declaring that this was like:

“The Rocky Horror Picture Show”

The 1975 musical horror comedy cult classic is noted for its revealing takes on sexuality and a plot twist involving extraterrestrials. Carter, aged 80, who also referenced Groundhog Day (1993), a film about time travel, noted that LAHSA has also been accountable for State funding, declaring:

“The State had about $13 billion plus invested.”

None of this should have been news to LAHSA, which left Carter questioning how the mismanagement had gone on for so long despite prior auditing:

“What occurred here was these findings were made by an auditor/controller at the time, but it took a year and a half of your bureaucracy to get to this Board for any attempted correction, while all this money just continued to flow out, with no data.”

Several County Supervisors during their November 26 meeting had referenced Judge Carter in describing what’s been happening as:

“untangling the spaghetti”.

Thankfully to our knowledge or recollection, there are no spaghetti scenes in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which ends with an unnamed character, “The Criminologist - An Expert,” declaring:

“And crawling on the planet's face, some insects, called the human race... lost in time... and lost in space... and meaning.”

Whether any taxpayer funds have truly been lost to embezzlement remains to be seen. Auditing, in essence, is after all a form of investigation. LAHSA has been a significant delaying factor in completing the Alvarez & Marsal audit, as A&M’s Laura Collier explained to the Court:

“delays (in receiving requested data) and complexity coupled with its condition” have “required additional time and resources.”

Since being launched in March with Mayor Karen Bass’s approval, the A&M audit’s scope has been expanded several times, which has also increased its costs. The apparent move by the Los Angeles City Council to block additional funding was met with furor from Judge Carter, who declared that it:

"will not be compromised by a budget imposed by the City Council that limits the adequacy and sufficiency of this assessment.”

The pressure to fully fund the A&M audit left the City Attorney’s office sputtering, with Deputy City Attorney Valerie Flores promising:

“Over the lunch break and after the clarifications of this morning, the council president [Marqueece Harris-Dawson] will be scheduling the item regarding consideration of the $440,000 additional payment to A&M next -- well, the week of December 2nd.”

Advisor scapegoated

Whether LA City Council will swiftly approve additional funding remains to be seen, but resistance wouldn’t be well-received by the Court. Some within the City of Los Angeles have been resistant to the auditing of spending on homelessness, even asserting to Controller Mejia’s office that they lacked the authority. Last March, Judge Carter had read aloud LAist journalist Nick Gerda’s report, citing text messages from former Karen Bass advisor Mercedes Márquez that she:

does “not want to be anybody’s scapegoat.”

Cursed committee chair

For her part, Councilmember Nithya Raman, at the center of the City of Los Angeles’s response to the homelessness crisis, may have the most to lose politically from non-cooperation, having inherited her seat as Chair of the Homelessness and Poverty Committee and seat on the CAO’s Homeless Strategy Committee from Kevin de León, who filled it when Mark Ridley-Thomas was indicted. Is this City position cursed? Or is homelessness in Los Angeles simply an intractable problem? While the LA Alliance for Human Rights hardly has clean hands, declaring in a November 20 email that readers should:

“Follow the Money of LA's Homelessness Industrial Complex,”

billing themselves as:

“the region’s only organization holding the City and County accountable for the homelessness issue”.

You have to wonder whether political leadership is capable of turning the ship around. The Alliance seems to be relying on demagoguing on the issue versus providing any sort of best practices input that might actually improve governance on the issue. Undoubtedly, there is no single solution to this complicated issue.

CEO-Dr. Adams-Kellum ”clawing back” funds

Stuck in the middle is LAHSA CEO Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum, Ph.D., appointed by Mayor Karen Bass. The day before Thanksgiving, after appearing before the County Board of Supervisors, she wrote to Judge Carter, trying to assure him that the joint-powers authority of the City and County was on top of recouping funds from Measure H, which Measure A increased and extended indefinitely.

“Since the County audit, LAHSA has recouped an additional $3.8 million, bringing the total recouped in the past year to $6.3 million.”

Adams Kellum added:

“This reduces the outstanding balance to $44.5 million.”

LAHSA plans to clawback the funding through:

“Reduced Payables: Offsetting future payments to service providers against their outstanding balances”

and

“Direct Payments: Providers making direct payments to LAHSA."

It wasn’t immediately clear if the service providers, which now have a guaranteed funding source, have the capacity to repay these advances while still making payroll. Ironically, in many discussions, “expanding capacity” seems to be the top goal for these providers, referring to their staffing, not the number of people they are able to house.

Additionally, LAHSA plans:

“to improve financial management and oversight”

through “Dedicated Account(s)”, defined as:

“a separate interest-bearing account for cash advances”

and “Regular Reconciliation” on a “quarterly basis.”

While there are admittedly major accounting problems, the issue also goes back to performance. Why are so many still on the streets for so long, or stuck in shelters or motel rooms? How are cash advances to service providers supposed to translate to permanent housing for people on the streets when providers time and time again choose to expand their own staffing capacity with the funds?

Even grants that are supposed to be dedicated for the specific purpose of housing targeted populations haven’t been safe from abuse by nonprofits. For one micro-level example, a $2M State grant that was supposed to move people from the Los Angeles River into permanent housing eliminated the “sustainable housing outcomes” category from its budget. The funds were reallocated to increasing the staffing capacity of provider Ascencia, a Glendale nonprofit that was once affiliated with LA’s major nonprofit PATH. The multiplicity of service providers and the lack of clear financial controls have quite obviously become perhaps more than just problematic.

As part of the LA Alliance hearing on November 21, Judge Carter asked to hear from a number of individuals who were unsparing in their descriptions of what life is like on Skid Row. Speaking about developer Leo Pustilnikov, who recently acquired 18 buildings of single-room occupancy (SRO) buildings, one man described how security has been pared back since the acquisition:

“They had security in the morning and night. They want to keep the dope man out of there. But now this is what they're doing since he bought them, and you guys paid the money for these people to be in these places, you can be in there and they would never know you were dead because they don't knock on the door to go see the people with the psych, okay?”

This is hardly an exaggeration, which, much like trading war stories, veers into the graphic details of life in poverty. On November 5th, Los Angeles Times journalist Liam Dillion described the change in ownership, quoting from an interview with Pustilnikov:

“Instead of simply wasting money to create the appearance of safety, we are investing real money into creating a sustainable, safe and clean environment for tenants.”

What ultimately happens with one of the largest chunks of the housing for the most vulnerable residents in the city remains in doubt.

A woman described to the Court:

“On every single floor of the SROs and Skid Row are drug lords that are controlling the benefits that are given to these housed but unhoused people.”

Did Pustilnikov not know what he was getting himself into? A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Housing Department ("LAHD") stated that the City is “closely monitoring” the situation but has not concluded yet that the rollback of services has breached the contract under which they had been acquired at an astonishingly low price of $8,333 per unit last summer. Perhaps Leo Pustilnikov, who is famously press shy, needs a date before Judge Carter to explain himself.

So is a new Homelessness Response Agency as proposed the solution to this mess, or is there something different that needs to happen? LAHSA doesn’t have the same intersectoral governance model as the new Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (LACAHSA), but if we’re not abolishing LAHSA as some have desired, is this simply an administrative makeover?

LAHSA would still reportedly retain some response capabilities. Supervisor Janice Hahn boasted how she had called the agency on the weekend about an unhoused man, and they had in fact shown up and gone with their workers. She didn’t know what happened to him in the end. With so many soured on the existing system, wary of being institutionalized, does a rearranging of the deck chairs change the basic dynamic? Moreover, what will make it more capable of increasing the volume of housing or ensuring quality of service to the vulnerable and challenged population it seeks to serve in Los Angeles?

In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, one of the protagonists, Janet Weiss, asks the cross-dressing mad scientist, Dr. Frank-N-Furter:

"What have you done to Brad?”

To which he responds:

“Nothing. Why, do you think I should?”

After three or more hours of the County Board of Supervisors, it was clear that something had to happen. Chair Lindsey Horvath was clear on her mission:

“Change and structural reform is hard.”

With Measure G having just passed with the most razor thin margin possible, 51.6% to 48.4%, the future of a Board of Supervisors expanded from 5 to 8, with an elected CEO and an Ethics Commission, it was clear more change was coming. The illuminated name signs that the line of desks in the Board Hearing Room glowed. Several LA County Sheriff’s stood around, and lunch was delivered, which the supervisors, all female for the first time in county history, quickly ate before going back to work. Public commenters took their turns getting in their quick word on the matter, interspersed with others calling in; one made a lewd, harassing remark toward Chair Horvath, and she rolled her eyes. Business as usual.

A study by McKinsey & Company in March 2023 estimated that:

“more than 100,000 Los Angeles residents could be experiencing homelessness by the time that the city hosts the 2028 Olympic Games.”

The same study found that every day 227 people entered homelessness while 207 were exiting. Los Angeles is spending more money than ever before and yet getting the same results. The County’s new audit didn’t tell us anything most people didn’t already know; it’s a mess. LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s audit found that out of a $1.3 billion budget for 2023-24, $513 million had gone unspent. A spokesman for Mayor Bass disputes the findings.

Neither the City nor the County actually has a dedicated Chief Financial Officer position; the City Administrative Officer position is probably the closest thing, and yet it’s not the same. Such responsibilities are centralized under these positions without any actual leadership. Similarly, the ability of public agencies to leverage private financing and philanthropy effectively is also limited. Current efforts are ad-hoc at best. The path to meaningful governance reform has never been so revealing; California might as well be Transylvania, as Dr. Frank-N-Furter tells Magenta, after she declares:

"I ask for nothing.”

"And you shall receive it. IN ABUNDANCE!”

Let’s all hope that a new agency is in fact the policy solution.

🔗 L.A. County supervisors approve plan to study homeless services overhaul

🔗 LA County Board of Supervisors November 26 Supplemental

🔗 Following scathing audit, LA County supervisor proposes moving homeless services under direct county control

🔗 Nearly half of L.A.’s record homelessness budget went unspent, city controller finds

🔗 ANNUAL PERFORMANCE EVALUATION FOR YEAR SIX OF THE COUNTYWIDE HOMELESS INITIATIVE

🔗 The Rocky Horror Picture Show

🔗 Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority

🔗 LA Alliance for Human Rights

🔗 Dkt 828 TRANSCRIPT for proceedings held on Thursday, November 21, 2024

🔗 Dkt. 833 Letter re Update on Recoupment of Measure H Working Capital Advances

🔗 Under Legal Pressure, LA Mayor Promises To Publish Receipts On Homeless Spending

🔗 Federal Judge Says LA Misled About Homeless Encampment Promises

🔗 New owner cuts security, janitors at Skid Row homeless housing as tenants fear worsening conditions

🔗 The L.A. County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency

🔗 Homelessness in Los Angeles: A unique crisis demanding new solutions

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Finding housing in Los Angeles isn’t easy, much less finding the perfect units for potential tenants within a building.

At the City Administrative Officer’s (CAO) pivotal Homeless Strategy Committee meeting on Thursday, November 7, Assistant City Administrative Officer Edwin Gipson remarked that he felt like he was

“looking for unicorns”

in making placements.

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The real unicorn might be Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Authority “LACAHSA”, a new-ish body designed to comprehensively tackle the housing crisis. Hydra-like problems of housing unaffordability and homelessness are nothing new in Los Angeles, but LACAHSA’s novel multi-jurisdictional structure promises a new approach to building affordable housing, keeping people off the streets, and getting those on them housed.

The CAO’s meeting with a single elected, Councilwoman Nithya Raman, takes place in non-descript conference room Suite 1500 in City Hall East, attached to main City Hall by a bridge over Main Street.

By contrast, LACAHSA meets in the boardroom of the Metropolitan Water District Building on Alameda Street, with elected officials gathered at DWP’s usual chamber underneath elaborate lighting. The futuristic DWP meeting space was only sparsely filled with public attendees.

With 77,049 evictions originating from within the City of Los Angeles being processed through LA County Courts from February through December 2023, according to Controller Kenneth Mejia, the room could have been filled with those who were evicted many, many times over.

The despair is real, as several public commenters reminded LACAHSA of their housing struggles. Indeed, at one point, the board even discussed adding outreach workers to the meeting plan.

Councilwoman Raman was there, too, at LACAHSA (say it “la casa” like “the house” en Español) as a representative for the City of Los Angeles alongside Chief Housing and Homelessness Officer Lourdes Castro-Ramirez, representing the office of Mayor Karen Bass. Los Angeles County Supervisor Holly Mitchell sat nearby amidst representatives from other municipalities within the county in a meeting led by California Community Foundation President and CEO Miguel Santana and Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson, who stated that the LBC might as well be another county given its size and independent agencies, including its own health department. The crisis of the unhoused has bedeviled Los Angeles in a fiscal way that only the Los Angeles Police Department could rival, with people hitting the streets perhaps almost as fast as they come off them. Is LA doomed to simply repeat the same old mistakes?

As part of its work, the CAO’s office on November 7th again took up a continued item from its October 3rd meeting, now branded:

“Motion for the Development of the Comprehensive Work Plan for the Homelessness Strategy Committee” • CF24-1179

The measure by Nithya Raman, with a second from Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, was approved by City Council on October 29th with a 13-0-2 vote and involves an in-kind gift of 4 months from the California Community Foundation, The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, and Southern California Grantmakers:

“to develop a clear and cohesive map of the City’s homelessness operations, across departments.”

The evaluation will be led by Sarah Solon of HR&A Advisors, who serves as Principal, Inclusive Cities. With Solon having previously worked for the New York City Mayor’s office in both criminal justice and mental health, as well as for the ACLU. Asked for a comment about the scope of her work and goals for the project, Sarah Solon didn’t immediately respond.

Lived Expertise

Clearly, our first recommendation would be to implement CF19-1020, which we’ve campaigned for along with others in Los Angeles who wanted to see the City make good on its promise to create a Commission on Lived Experience with Homelessness. The motion, authored by former Councilmember Mike Bonin with a second from Harris-Dawson, was introduced on September 4th, 2019. CF19-1020 can be located in the City Clerk’s Council File Management System “CFMS” along with an 11-page report from the Chief Legislative Analyst office dated November 22nd, 2022.

Creating the commission is a basic move to get more feedback from those being served, but attempts to revive it before the November 18th expiration date faltered. This was despite a last-ditch attempt to move it forward with the recent endorsements of 9 separate neighborhood councils ranging from Palms to Reseda to Rampart Village. CF19-1020 received the backing of a similar Lived Experience Advisory Body, "LEAB,” within Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), who had stated that they too wanted to see Council take this step forward by engaging the expertise of people who live on City streets and in City-run shelters. We can only hope that this great idea will rise again to the top of the agenda, especially with recent news from the Controller about massive underspend of City Homelessness funds, which likely would have been detected sooner had the City been listening to the streets.

Meanwhile, LACAHSA, separate from LAHSA, was doing its thing on affordable housing like a finely-tuned machine. If LAHSA were a joint-powers authority between the City and the County, LACAHSA is modeled much more like the Metro Board, with representation from cities from across the County. Administratively led by Ryan Johnson, Interim Chief Executive Officer, an investments specialist with experience in New York City, Orange County, and Greenville, South Carolina; Johnson also served in the U.S. Army with the 502nd Military Intelligence Battalion. Johnson’s presentation on “Alternative Affordable Investment Models” states that:

“LACAHSA is able to unleash large scale production by creating investments that avoid the bond cap allocation.”

The bond cap allocation limits borrowing under a state ceiling by the California Debt Limit Allocation Committee (CDLAC) in order to manage limited public borrowing power. LACAHSA would take an end-run around state limits, promising to provide:

“a conduit for significant rehabilitation of aging affordable housing.”

Johnson’s presentation suggested that.

“the organization in partnership with philanthropy & private sector can create catalytic investment partnerships to leverage agency financing on [sic] 4-1 basis.” 

Asked how this would be accomplished, Ryan Johnson stated that:

“LACAHSA has been engaged with both philanthropic and private sources of funding prior to the passing of Measure A.”

Furthermore, Johnson plans to leverage:

“additional sources from my career in the non-profit and private sector.”

LACHSA’s investment models are seemingly still under consideration, but Johnson’s presentation stated under “Guarantee Programs” that:

“Government or Philanthropy can create pools of money designed to unleash private capital (equity or debt) by providing gap coverage”

and bridging

“the delivery of other government sources of investments or catalytic investment in underinvested communities.”

The presentation further suggested a

“Joint Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae Preservation Product”

to achieve its goal with a “July/August 2025 Launch” date set. Also on the table are “LACAHSA Social Mortgage Bonds,” for which:

“LACAHSA is the sole lender or risk shares with senior leader.”

In an email response, Johnson added that LACAHSA, unlike similar projects in the Bay Area and Charlotte,

“has the unique dual ability to issue bonds and a sustainably source of funding via Measure A.”

The presentation left at least one commissioner asking if this was really the solution that LACAHSA leadership promised and if the risk of such widespread lending was in fact perhaps greater than anticipated at the start. YIMBY somewhat?

Next on the agenda was a quick approval of hiring a General Counsel and Inspector General for LACAHSA at a recruiting and solicitation cost

“in an amount not to exceed in total, $450,000, for a term not to exceed eighteen months.”

Will turning affordable housing in Los Angeles County into a Wall Street model work to unleash the levers of capital? There are clearly no guarantees, even under the current effort to change zoning laws to promote density. In fact, as Los Angeles Times journalist Liam Dillon recently reported, at least one think tank thinks the proposed rezoning wouldn’t even produce enough housing to meet the state goal of 250,000 more units by 2030. Moreover, how do you get past the NIMBY effect? The story noted in “single family home neighborhoods” that:

“City officials had considered allowing changes…but reversed course after pushback from homeowner groups that protested the potential for traffic and parking problems.”

Financing and planning alone clearly can’t get Los Angeles out of this crunch, nor can more bureaucracy, even done with the best apparent intentions as LACAHSA has set out. If anyone knows of additional funding sources, please do let LACAHSA know ASAP.

Perhaps Edwin Gipson was right; developing housing in Los Angeles is a bit like “looking for unicorns,” much less getting clients, including the unhoused, into it!

Without even using the G-word, gentrification, the pushback against just about any project is common. LACAHSA discussed how in general the construction of new condominium units has stalled, but more broadly, even despite a so-called “mansion tax” under Measure ULA, the city just isn’t producing very much housing. In 2023-2024, according to Los Angeles City Planning, 22,623 units were proposed, of which 16,458 were deed-restricted to be affordable versus market rate. From these planned units,

“17,556 housing units were approved, of which 10,588 units (or 60%) were deed-restricted affordable units,”

per a report from journalist Kenneth Schrupp in The Center Square from October. Nevertheless, Mayor Karen Bass trumpeted on Instagram:

“Housing Permit Wait Time Slashed 75% Over Past Two Years,”

citing a monthly public progress report citing

“27,210 affordable housing units…being accelerated all across the City.”

Mayor Bass claimed that:

“Housing permit timelines that previously took six to nine months to secure now only take an average of 44 days,”

citing 335 pending applications of which 239 had received entitlements for the land they hoped to build upon.

Still, reaching a goal like 250,000 new units within even a four-year term as Mayor seems like a stretch, and Bass has two years left on her current term and then 4 more should she win re-election. At the current apparent breakneck rate, Los Angeles would produce 163,260 units, falling 86,740 units short of the state goal. How much more housing can be unleashed? And what about major projects that have been sidelined, such as Oceanwide Plaza or the Sears Mail Order building? Is density alone a goal considering the need to distribute population growth versus confining it to the South Park area in Downtown, much less Boyle Heights? Hitting these goals made not just about new construction, but also increasing affordability a priority, and that will require increasing wages.

It’s no secret that wealth has become increasingly concentrated at the top. Simply put, in Los Angeles, some have a great amount of wealth, and others have just about absolutely nothing left in their pockets. California Proposition 32, which would have increased the hourly rate to $17 immediately and $18 in 2022, narrowly failed 51%-49%, but such a wage isn’t even close to what it takes to afford housing in Los Angeles County. Opponents claimed that increasing the bottom wage rung would hurt small businesses, but really the rejection seemed more ideologically based. With Jot Condie, President & CEO of the California Restaurant Association, stating:

“It is important that policymakers hear the message being sent by the voters — stop using California consumers as guinea pigs for public policy experiments that make life more expensive for everyone.”

The apparent resurgence of conservatism in California reflects widespread dissatisfaction with the current order of things as well as specific grievances. 

Undoubtedly, it’s less expensive to keep people off the streets than to push them into living on them by being priced out. Is it any wonder that people are leaving California? According to Forbes Magazine in a recent report,

“The average cost of a single-family home in California is a shocking $737,677, more than double the national average.”

Even as the population of homeowners in California has slowly grayed out, the exodus to the Sunbelt and Pacific Northwest has continued. Demographics may be destiny, but the writing is on the wall: California isn’t quite for the young so much anymore. Where will the workforce needed to take care of and provide services to this aging population live? Assuredly, not in market-rate apartments! Housing additions like Accessory Dwelling Units (“ADUs” aka “casitas,” or “small homes” en Español) are increasingly popular, but the question begs: is the older Trump-voting population simply deeply out of touch with their own needs in wanting to deport migrants, who are critical to our economy?

Loathing the homeless and unemployed is one thing, but this generation, which has more buying power than any other, has a tight grip on finances, locally and nationally, in a way that is truly astonishing. Granting loans as LACAHSA would do for developers who would lend to underfunded millennials, Generation Y and Z, is a novel concept, but it doesn’t guarantee re-payment (see student loans). With the U.S. National debt approaching $36 trillion and the annual Gross Domestic Product closing in on $30 trillion, the fact is that you could shut down the entire economy for an entire year and it still wouldn’t pay off our debts. Moreover, the U.S. is increasingly leveraged to foreign governments to finance this extravagant living in a country that hasn’t seen a serious economic blowout since 2008-09. Wall Street has rallied around the election of Donald Trump, but will Wall Street rally around preserving old housing stock in Los Angeles? The ambitions of LACAHSA to be an investment agency might be grand, but in the larger scheme of things, even mighty Los Angeles can be just a small boat in a larger ocean. Previous attempts to preserve old affordable housing from demolition, like 2008’s LAMC § 47.71 Residential Hotel units have not been enforced. Will LACAHSA attempt to protect these buildings with enforcement? 

LACAHSA promises to bring together: Academic, Business Community, Faith Community, Homeless Service Providers, Labor Community, Persons with Lived Expertise, and the Veteran Community. But can it survive another administration under Donald Trump, who previously threatened to strip California of federal funds for housing and homelessness?

Los Angeles County Measure A thankfully passed with a surprising 58% support, with Los Angeles Public Press journalist Ashley Orona reporting that of the $1.1 billion expected to be raised, approximately $400 million will go to LACAHSA. She quoted LACAHSA Vice Chair Miguel Santana, declaring:

“We have now an ongoing permanent revenue stream that is not tied to any federal program or state program.”

LACAHSA was created in 2022 by the state legislature for the purpose of helping:

“ensure greater flexibility and reliability for affordable housing financing, among other tasks related to homelessness prevention.”

Orona noted the complexity, comparing it to a:

“house of cards.”

We’re not so sure about that totally, but there are still plenty of people with barely a tent to sleep in on the streets of Los Angeles, and many working poor are teetering towards evictions every month. Just where will the buck stop in America, much less Los Angeles? LA may not be doomed, but more work is needed.

🔗 CAO Comprehensive Homeless Strategy Committee

🔗 Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Authority

🔗 LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s 2023 Eviction Notices Table

🔗 Housing & Homelessness Committee Meeting Wednesday November 6th, 2024

🔗 Los Angeles rezoning plan won’t spur enough new housing, report finds

🔗 New market rate housing disappearing in Los Angeles, city reports

🔗 Mayor Karen Bass Instagram Post RE: Affordable Housing

🔗 Foes of raising California’s minimum wage declare victory

🔗 Why Are People Leaving California? Stats That May Surprise You

🔗 Planning for California’s Growing Senior Population

🔗 LA now has Trump-proof funds for addressing homelessness

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“keep talking about me”

19-year old Mohammad “Moe” (he/him) has enchanted the cat-loving Internet with a gut-wrenching rollercoaster ride involving his aloof ragdoll cat, Leo, as they dodge quadcopters and IDF tanks in Gaza.

In September, Moe’s cat, Leo (to whom Moe refers using both he/him and she/her pronouns, sometimes within the same tweet) was injured in his eye and leg while outside on the street during an explosion. Mohammad dutifully found a veterinarian to inspect and treat Leo’s injuries. She was tended to by Moe and made a full recovery, which she signaled by darting out the door and staying out for more than two days. Without his companion, Moe spiraled and the situation outside grew more violent, causing him a great deal of worry and loneliness.

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When Moe and Leo were lovingly reunited on 10/15, they soothed their invested followers with a string of sweet selfies of the two of them snuggling.

“ …😭😭😭❤️ Leo is back, thank God. Despite the death and destruction we are experiencing here in Gaza, I am now the happiest person on earth,

as if my soul has returned to me 🥹❤️❤️”

—@mo7medjbour “Mohammad in Gaza 🇵🇸” via X • 6:05am PST 10/15/24

“Don't forget me in your prayers”

A week ago, Leo and Moe were both starving, without access to food for humans or cat food. Then, Thursday night, they were saying final goodbyes, sharing this dystopian view of twin missiles illuminating a smoky sky with tank-tracks visible on the ground:

“If I die,

I am not a number,

I am a planet in itself,

I have dreams and ambitions that I wanted to achieve….”

—@mo7medjbour “Mohammad in Gaza 🇵🇸” via X • 1:49pm PST 10/24/24

Despite being stalked by an IDF quadcopter when he went out a few nights ago to check on Leo, as of the most recent updates, Moe and Leo are currently snuggled up together and still somehow managing to stay online. Mohammad requests bags of flour and winter clothing but admits he doesn’t know how he could even receive anything at the moment. He takes comfort in any words of support offered via X and wants as many people as possible keeping eyes on his precarious situation. He also wants people to compliment Leo, of course. 😻 Leo prefers Instagram to X and has her own profile there, leo.moe0.

#homelesswithaniphone

Researching, documenting and reporting systemic abuses is an essential job born out of struggle. Anyone with a smartphone and a mind for resistance can break into independent investigative reporting, as @Wizard__Bisan’s recent Academy-affirmed Emmy win demonstrated. Bisan uses her smartphone and fluency in English to show Americans what our government does with our federal tax money.

Bisan doesn’t go on long-winded rants about politics while safe and comfortable indoors, like many creators. Almost antithetical to TikTok and YouTube style, she doesn’t use hyperbole or clickbait. She shows people the parts of displacement that usually remain abstract: what she has been eating (usually plain flat breads when she can get some, dressing it up with corned beef when she was able to obtain a can of the SPAM-like ration) and where she will be sleeping. She takes us to the devastating aftermath of missile strikes and brings her audience along with her on endless evacuations.

Bisan’s manner is matter-of-fact and sometimes emotional. Her role as a reporter on devastation that she is also experiencing makes her a subjective but trustworthy narrator. Bisan has a way of appealing to a common humanity like a friend or sister, inspiring a desire to protect Palestine, even if just to protect her, personally. Only in her mid-twenties, she’s developed parasocial relationships all over the world through her savvy use of social media. But no matter how beloved she is, her audience is helpless to save her without freeing Palestine from occupation.

Witness protection

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has tracked at least 134 journalists that have been killed covering Gaza, often in their “PRESS” vests, nearly all of them Palestinian except six from Lebanon and two Israeli casualties. In addition, CPJ report 71 journalists have been arrested, with 43 of them still incarcerated as of October 30th, plus 41 are injured and two are missing. These figures are only those that have been confirmed and are therefore undercounted.

Unfortunately universal rules of war don’t seem to have helped journalists stay safe while immersed in Israel’s attempt to expand further into Palestine. Israel’s allies, the top one being the United States, seem content to look the other way as war crimes and clear-cut evidence of genocide and ethnic cleaning are unfolding before our eyes.

Exposing abuses committed by powerful people has always been dangerous, but press are intentionally targeted and murdered with an alarming frequency while reporting on Gaza, in violation of international law.

Wafa.ps

Despite the bleak situation for press covering Gaza, at the end of September, 11-year-old Palestinian student Wafa shared with co-hosts of an educational X Space @GazaGreatMinds her dream to be a top investigator one day. Her name happens to be shared with WAFA.ps, which lost one of their journalists, Mohamad Abu Hassira to IDF violence on November 7th, 2023. His home was struck by (a) missile(s), killing him along with 42 other members of his family. The news was confirmed by his colleagues at local WAFA.ps, as well as London’s The New Arab, and Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate.

Palestinian people call their murdered loved ones martyrs, elevating them in death to people who died not simply because of their ethnicity or proximity to militarized colonizers—but because they hold valuable information and/or unshakable spiritual convictions. Martyrs are witness to unbelievable, unspeakable things. They die with a message which survives through their loved ones.

California Genocide

Last week, the President formally apologized to survivors for nearly 1,000 Indigenous people who were confirmed to have been killed and buried at boarding schools across America. This horrific discovery confirmed long-standing claims made by Indigenous survivors of America continuing to engage in ethnic cleansing long after they colonized the continent, which was denied for generations. Indigenous peoples’ testimonies got scientifically proven in recent years with the discovery of 65 graves that prompted a vindicating apology in which Biden describes genocide as horrific and shameful, but stops short of naming it:

“…the United States was established and began expanding, entering treaties with sovereign Tribal Nations.  But as time moved on, respect for Tribal sovereignty evaporated, was shattered, pushing Native people off their homelands, denying their humanity and their rights, targeting children to cut their connection to their ancestors and their inheritance and their heritage….

…the federal government mandated the removal of children from their families and Tribes, launching what’s called the Federal Indian Boarding School era.  Over a 150-year span from the early 1800s to 1970…”

The purpose of our education system is supposed to be for learning words, history and culture, but even the President admits that it still does better at avoiding, erasing and actively destroying those things. He proceeds to defend denial, stating that most people still aren’t aware of the California genocide, managing to do so without as much as saying the “g-word”:

“One of the most horrific chapters in American history.  We should be ashamed.  A chapter that most Americans don’t know about.  The vast majority don’t even know about it…

…The Federal Indian Boarding School policy and the pain it has caused will always be a significant mark of shame, a blot on American history. 

For too long, this all happened with virtually no public attention, not written about in our history books —“

—President Joe Biden speech • Gila Crossing Community School in Laveen Village, AZ • 10/25/24

President Biden is claiming there was no one paying attention to extermination, and that no one is reading about it in history class, where pupils are exposed to primary school propaganda. This gives cover for past public policies, mandates that were produced, pondered, passed and put into practice by psychopathic politicians:

“What’s happening [in Palestine] is not genocide. We reject that,”

—President Joe Biden speech in the Rose Garden • Politico video • 5/20/24

Armenian Genocide

The President has recognized Armenian genocide in official statements. So has the Governor of California, on this year’s Genocide Remembrance Day, April 24th:

“On April 24, 1915, the Ottoman Empire began its systematic genocide of Armenian people, a minority group that had long been treated as second-class citizens. The Armenian Genocide began with the forced deportation and murder of hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders and ended with the deaths of 1.5 million men, women and children. It was the first genocide of the 20th Century.”

—California Governor Gavin Newsom • 4/24/24

Born out of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, California’s Genocide Remembrance Day was introduced by then-Representative of D46 (San Fernando Valley) Adrin Nazarian, who is Armenian. The State Assembly passed AB1801 unanimously in 2022:

THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS:

Section 1.

The Legislature finds and declares that Genocide Remembrance Day would be a day for all to reflect on past and present genocides, but especially those that have felt the impact of these atrocities and groups that have found refuge in California, including, but not limited to, the Holocaust, Holodomor, and the Genocides of the Armenian, Assyrian, Greek, Cambodian, and Rwandan communities. Genocide Remembrance Day would be observed annually on April 24, also known as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, during the week the state of California traditionally recognizes Genocide Awareness Week.

—AB1801 published 10/3/22 • Approved by Governor Newsom 9/22/22 • Introduced by Assemblymember Adrian Nazarian • 2/7/22

Peter Burnett, the first Governor of the State of California, probably would have rejected accusations of carrying out genocide against Indigenous people in 1851 because the word didn’t exist until 1948:

“In 1851, California’s first governor, Peter Burnett, told the Legislature to expect war ‘until the Indian race becomes extinct.’”

—Jill Cowan and Tim Arango wrote in The New York Times • 6/19/19

Why did we only name genocide after the Holocaust, long after the Armenian genocide and California genocide of Indigenous people occurred/started? Not to detract from the sentiment of Adrin Nazarian’s AB1801, which notably includes language acknowledging that genocides (plural) are presently occurring in the world, but how are we expected to address or prevent genocide(s) when the only options we are given are “remembering” and “reflecting”? Now that we have the language, why do we allow the President to gatekeep genocide designation, like he did in his speech in the rose garden at the beginning of May of this year, shortly after the second official Genocide Remembrance Day in California?

Our President and Governor want to be the ultimate arbiters over what does and doesn’t constitute genocide, and what gets published in history books. I guess they’ve decided, 170 years after extermination was a public policy in California, that it’s finally okay to acknowledge:

“It’s called genocide. That’s what it was, a genocide. No other way to describe it. And that’s the way it needs to be described in the history books.”

—California Governor Gavin Newsom, as quoted by The New York Times • 6/19/19

What do you think did more to convince the Governor to confront the genocide of Indigenous people in California: facing the fact that the first person to hold his position of power sanctioned extermination, or the fact that forensic evidence was finally discovered that shows that it continued for over 100 years, and even occurred during his own lifetime?

“…the near-annihilation of the California Indians was not the unavoidable result of two civilizations coming into contact for the first time. It was genocide, sanctioned and facilitated by California officials.”

—Benjamin Madley in The Los Angeles Times Op-Ed • 5/22/16

Freedom isn’t finite

To say the American economy has a “butterfly effect” on Gaza, where our relative comfort comes at the expense of freedom and security of people on the other side of the world, excuses our culpability. We are the free ones and they are painfully aware of their oppressors’ apathetic ignorance. Yet Palestinians endlessly search for humanity and connection in their struggle, finding motivation within themselves to learn English and participate in social media, often using the challenging language of their difficult oppressors.

A few months ago, a co-host of @GazaGreatMinds requested a small favor of his audience. He wanted voice memos of birds. His neighbor noticed the birds in Gaza had stopped singing.

I didn’t even have to go anywhere. Songs of goldfinches, endangered yellow warblers, house sparrows and the nearly-extinct least bells viero are sometimes drowned out by leaf blowers and helicopters, but they always come back and resume their silly sounds, along with honking mallards, hooting owls’ overnight back-and-forths across the concrete river channel, and the summer screams of a circling red hawk that nests in a tree above me.

He was very appreciative, thanking me, “landless lady” personally, as I appear on X.

Last week he was urgently pleading for anyone to:

“Do something for God’s sake.”

Freedom isn’t something you can gain by taking from someone else. Freedom is like fire. One flame can light an infinite number of additional flames and not lose anything by doing so. Americans aren’t using our freedom to liberate others, and it’s making us less free.

Gaza’s canaries went quiet months ago and no one saved them. In a matter of weeks, our skyline could be unrecognizable. In a matter of days, we, too could be evacuated to nowhere, digging loved ones out of gravel and pleading for mercy.

Who would save us?

Ruth is unsheltered in the City of LA and challenges every displacement, which is why she feels connected in struggle to Palestinians, who frequently must rebuild their homes, like she has had to due to sweeps. She writes about homelessness and local corruption and hosts X Displacement Spaces every Sunday at 7pm PST for landless people.

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The City of Los Angeles is in deep trouble, and all the finger-pointing in the world won’t solve it, much less presentations and proclamations. Los Angeles City Hall is a world away from Agoura Hills where developer Izek Shomof was recently cited on October 21, for violating Los Angeles County building codes in converting outbuildings for residential occupancy. According to electronic records provided by Shomof’s brother-in-law whistleblower Patrick Wizmann, this wasn’t even the first time that one of most powerful figures in LA had been found to be in violation of County building rules. After first being identified on February 5, 2024, LA County Public Works issued an additional “notice of violation” writing that they are:

“actively working with the property owner to bring the specific structures with unpermitted occupancy use conversion, back into compliance.”

After all, compliance is a process, and it can be costly to resolve issues.

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Shomof, one of Los Angeles’s most powerful developers, wrote a self-promoting memoir Dreams Don’t Die last year. According to one source, it slightly exaggerates his role in founding the LA Alliance for Human Rights. The 501(c)(3) non-profit’s primary service is litigation, having “successfully” forced the City and County into settlement to ostensibly meet 60% of the housing needs of the unhoused in each City Council District. Now though, even Alliance seems confused about what to do next, as they still have the City and County engaged in regular hearings, and housing is still out-of-reach to so many; with many more falling out of housing each month. The connection between money, power, housing, and elections has never been more clear in Los Angeles as we close in on November 5. We all get to make choices.

Both Izek Shomof and former business partner billionaire Naty Saidoff have recently given downtown Councilman Kevin de León’s re-election campaign $900 each, and in Saidoff’s case his spouse as well. Saidoff and Shomof engaged in litigation over three downtown properties in 2012, with Shomof prevailing and later writing about the dispute in his book. Dreams Don’t Die completely omits former Councilmember José Huizar, who pioneered the so-called “adaptive reuse” model of re-development, which allowed for the conversion of office space and old hotels in the city’s historic core into residential units. Adaptive reuse created hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions in wealth for owners of historic buildings practically overnight. Shomof became the so-called “King of Spring Street”, a bold claim for someone who is not a politician, let alone mayor, considering City Hall itself is at 200 North Spring Street in Downtown LA.  

LA Alliance’s Murky Origins

The LA Alliance didn’t just sprout up overnight. In fact, the first so-called meeting of the LA Alliance was held on May 13, 2019 in Palm Court, the beaux-arts style ballroom of a Shomof adaptive reuse property. The Alexandria, located at 210 West 5th Street off Spring Street, is one of the biggest rent-controlled residential hotels in the City after The Cecil Hotel. Formerly Hotel Alexandria, it was first built in 1906 for $2M, constructing an addition that included Palm Court in 1911, according to LA Conservancy. Shomof’s conversion into rental units occurred in 2005, 99 years after its original development by the Bilicke-Rowan Fireproof Building Company. Today it is directly across the street from The Last Bookstore, where Dreams Don’t Die was released.

Then-Mayor Eric Garcetti was slow to warm up to LA Alliance, but the unhoused people of downtown were not completely without representation, even if they were not formally invited by Alliance, which insisted at the time that it included unhoused community members. If Skid Row had a mayor, it would have certainly been the late General Jeff Page, legendary Skid Row activist, who was, according to one source, all but locked out of the initial Alliance hearing, only to meet with presiding Judge David O. Carter outside and become friends after taking a walk together. Perhaps this can be considered the first act of “locking arms” as Mayor Karen Bass has sloganed as part of her signature Inside Safe initiative to get people off the streets.

Corruption runs deep in LA

Multiple LA Alliance settlement agreements haven’t yet resolved homelessness in Los Angeles and are set to expire in June 2027. An “evidentiary hearing” over a planned reduction in shelter-system beds didn’t occur as planned this Friday, October 25, with Judge Carter calling off the affair. The hearing had been insisted upon by the Alliance, frustrating all involved parties including the City and County, who made multiple legal filings to the ever-expanding Alliance docket, which is under the jurisdiction of California’s Central District. While the Alliance itself may not be corrupt, its path has paralleled the exposure of significant corruption in Los Angeles. The City’s longest corruption case to-date began November 7th, 2018 when the FBI raided the Boyle Heights home and Spring Street offices of three-term downtown councilman José Huizar. 

Huizar now sits in a Federal prison cell in Lompoc, having been sentenced to 13 years for racketeering. His shoes were filled by State Assemblymember for the 45th district and 50th president pro tempore of the State senate Kevin de León, who now faces a re-election challenge from Ysabel Jurado. Incumbent de León has the political upper-hand, even winning the financial support of Izek Shomof, the Spring Street developer and self-proclaimed “king” who has been one of his biggest critics, chastising de León for withdrawing support for a proposed “Life Rebuilding Center” at the historic Sears, Roebuck & Company Mail Order Building, which both Shomof and Alliance have heavily promoted as a key strategy to addressing Los Angeles’ homelessness emergency. Sometimes, things just converge!

At City Hall on Friday, October 25, Karen Bass could be seen alongside Kevin de León, who once had hopes of running for Lieutenant Governor in 2026, honoring the late Richard Alatorre. Former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who also represented CD14 prior to Huizar, was present. Villaraigosa is now running for Governor of California again in 2026, in a long-shot bid. It was truly a momentous occasion for politicking with only dignitaries and gadflies present. Unbeknownst to the Council, yet another scandal had been forming right before their eyes as Los Angeles Times journalist Dakota Smith would soon report with the help of colleague David Zahniser. The preceding presentation honoring groups for providing food security had included World Harvest, now the subject of an investigation in regards to Kevin de León for making political donations after receiving $1.91 million in discretionary funding from his officeholder account. The group had even gone as far as to feature his image on their vehicle for weekly food giveaways.

Political ties with developers

Izek Shomof had previously donated to State Assembly members Miguel Santiago and Wendy Carrillo who had both sought to represent CD14 before faltering to Jurado, who has the endorsements of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party as well as the Democratic Socialists of America - Los Angeles (DSA-LA) chapter. Shomof and his family have previously donated to politicians such as former City Council President Nury Martinez, Gil Cedillo, José Huizar, and even Huizar’s ill-fated attempt to install his wife Richelle Huizar as his successor. So as Kevin de Leòn has stated in multiple debates with his challenger Jurado that the solution to Los Angeles’s housing crisis is to go vertical in Downtown Los Angeles, you have to really wonder what he means. Shomof’s book goes as far as quoting Kevin de León making an inflammatory statement about putting the unhoused on 747s to Israel to work on kibbutzes, and yet he also represents himself as the best possible candidate on homelessness, all while attacking County Supervisor Hilda Solis including writing a letter to Judge Carter for failing to address the crisis in his district, which includes Skid Row, the nation’s largest concentration of the unhoused. 

Latino politics in Los Angeles have never been more conflicted as Los Angeles Times journalist Gustavo Arellano documented in his 4-part series, writing in billing the series questioningly as:

“That’s when I asked myself: How did Latino politics in Los Angeles get to this moment?”

In previously interviewing Izek Shomof about the Life Rebuilding Center, he described how he had:

“told Shomof his proposal was too good to be true.”

With Shomof smiling in response, remarking:

“It’s true.”

The Sears building is still empty, and not a word has been said about it in the race for Council District 14 even as its husk shadows over Olympic Boulevard, renamed after the 1932 Summer Olympics. Were the proposed Life Rebuilding Center ever to come to fruition, even at a reduced bed number of 2,500, it would be the largest such facility in the system, and likely more akin to a warehouse or hospital than housing or a comparable shelter. 

The project had previously faced tremendous community opposition, and after a closed meeting with Shomof, even de León had to accede it wasn’t palatable to the Boyle Heights community. Asked for comment about his position on the proposal and the donation, a longtime spokesman for Kevin de León didn’t respond. An attorney for Izek Shomof didn’t respond to a request for comment about his issues with LA County Code enforcement or his donation to Kevin de León. The Life Rebuilding Center, which has its own website and is still featured on the webpage of the Shomof Group as well, and the LA Alliance for Human Rights webpage still has quotes from Shomof associates. The linkage between the developer and the Alliance is clearly still strong, even as evidence suggests the idea of suing the City over homelessness may have preceded Shomof’s backing. Izek Shomof is no longer a visible, public leader in the organization.

In 2019, a group which closely resembled the roster of LA Alliance member-plaintiffs called DTLA Alliance for Human Rights, represented by Elizabeth Mitchell for Spertus, Landes and Umhofer, unsuccessfully attempted to intervene in a settled 2016 civil rights lawsuit brought by unhoused plaintiff Carl Mitchell. Counsel for DTLA Alliance was confidentially funded by a roster of downtown business interests that belong to the Downtown LA Industrial Business Improvement District “BID”, which is administered by Central City East Association. CCEA describes itself as:

“the principal advocate for property owners, businesses, employees and residents”.

Bad faith settlement negotiations

This week, Alliance had sought to compel testimony from Mayor Karen Bass and County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath. The City’s response read:

“Plaintiffs’ attempt to call high-ranking ‘apex’ witnesses, including the Mayor and any Council Member, who lack unique, first-hand knowledge of relevant facts, nor have Plaintiffs attempted – much less exhausted – other less burdensome and intrusive ways of obtaining the information they seek.”

The County’s response read:

“Plaintiffs made no effort to ground this request in any provision of the Roadmap Agreement or County Settlement, because none exists.”

The County added:

“Plaintiffs cited to a single news article that has nothing to do with this case or the County Settlement at all.”

LA Alliance has previously argued through attorneys Elizabeth Mitchell and Matthew Umhofer that the municipal government acted in “bad faith” in failing to meet the needs of the homeless population and in dealing with Alliance perhaps more specifically, and they may not have been totally wrong. Elizabeth Mitchell previously worked in the City Attorney’s police litigation unit for over a decade, resigning just days after the FBI raid on Huizar’s home and office, before taking a position in private practice with SLU. Mitchell didn’t respond to a request for comment on where this is all now going, despite responding to questions regarding one of her plaintiffs who had seemingly disappeared in the middle of the years-long legal saga.

The biggest stumbling block to addressing the crisis of homelessness in Los Angeles City, much less the entire County, just might be the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), which in legal terms is almost beyond oversight and isn’t party to the settlements with LA Alliance despite being their chief vendor. So the City and County spend money by allocating it to LAHSA, and yet have little to no ability to hold it accountable for performance through its subcontracted providers. The audit being conducted by Alvarez & Marsal under Judge Carter’s oversight has now been officially ordered to completion before January 15, 2025; and it’s both a performance-based and forensic audit. Yet despite there being stumbling blocks in terms of missing invoices to account for spending, particularly in 2019, according to Chief Deputy City Controller Rick Cole in an interview at City Hall there are no signs of “fraud” yet that would require investigation, despite such recordkeeping being required by the city’s Ethics Commission. According to Cole, it will take multiple years for the City of Los Angeles to address its fiscal crisis.

Missing money, unclear audit results

The question everyone seems to want to know isn’t just where the money went, but why Los Angeles’s performance at both levels hasn’t yet reduced the number of people on the streets. Answering this question correctly is more complicated than it seems, but the A&M auditors are reportedly at work. Their audit has now been formally expanded to cover costs both associated with the Los Angeles Police Department as well as County Services such as mental health. Giving the Court the ability to oversee LAHSA more effectively would require a change in state law and approval by the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom. To date, he’s shown little appetite for getting into the details of this policy despite having given a sweeping order to clear encampments. The Governor’s press release from August 9 states:

“Since Governor Newsom took office, the state has invested over $40 billion to boost affordable housing, and additionally, more than $27 billion to address homelessness.”

That’s real taxpayer money, with results in debate. Meanwhile voters are being asked to approve LA County Measure A this November. 

Where did all the money go? Prior State efforts to audit their spending stalled because there wasn’t enough data about outcomes to audit. According to one source, asked about the City’s fiscal crisis:

“this didn’t happen overnight,”

but rather has been years in the making, and is integrally connected with State and Federal spending. Formally, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has oversight of LAHSA. Asked whether Los Angeles was running out of money for homeless shelters, Chief Deputy Controller Cole demurred on the question. Los Angeles’s fiscal crisis is no secret, with Controller Kenneth Mejia issuing public warnings of an approaching cliff.

There’s one positive update. According to another source, the City has now clawed back $70,000 from service provider Hope The Mission over the so-called “Ramengate” scandal, where unhoused people were being given Ramen noodles alone at one City-operated shelter site. The only reason this was discovered was a report to the Controller’s Office of Kenneth Mejia, but they’re actually overwhelmed with more complaints than they have staffing to investigate. Additionally, the Controller lacks sufficient power to effectively conduct oversight of Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program. Clearly, something has to change, including up to new legislation that would allow for government to effectively increase accountability that at present stops with an 80-year old U.S. District Judge, who served in combat in Vietnam, and people still seem to think they can outsmart.

Soldier’s Home Stalemate

This hasn’t been the case yet in the West LA Veterans hearings in Powers v McDonough, which seemingly parallel the separate LA Alliance hearings topically on calendar. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is now appealing Judge Carter’s order to build thousands of new temporary housing units for veterans on its property, according to the report by Los Angeles Times journalist Doug Smith, who wrote:

“the appeal threw confusion into Carter’s initial plan to get 106 modular units installed on the campus* in the next 90 days.”

Veteran advocates object to the term “campus” because the West LA VA property has been illegally occupied by the University of California, Los Angeles and Brentwood School for decades, essentially turning the National Soldier’s Home into a private property. The educational institutions’ leases do not directly principally benefit veterans as the West LA VA Leasing Act requires, nor do they help with veterans’ housing and health struggles. Addressing the housing and homelessness crisis has never been more seemingly frustrated by powerful interests unwilling to even sit and work on real solutions. 

Judge Carter was left exasperated. With former Los Angeles Times journalist Gale Holland describing how in Court at the VA, he had remarked:

“Are you going to go back on your word or keep your word?”

Adding:

“I truly believe veterans are going to die.”

The reality is that people die on the street of Los Angeles with increasingly regularity. So even the VA rejected a proposed settlement with the wealthy Brentwood School that would have included a lump sum payment of $5 million dollars because it wouldn’t control the funding. They also wouldn’t even agree to spend existing funding on housing, claiming that it would take away resources from their medical services. The VA claimed to Holland to have housed 1,854 veterans in 2024, and more in Los Angeles than everywhere else, arguing:

“The court exceeded its legal authority.”

UCLA’s baseball stadium, shuttered on the Judge’s orders would reportedly cost $7 million dollars to raze. UCLA doubled its proposed rent increase to $600,000 annually. The WLA VA Hearings much like the LA Alliance Hearings have seemingly already reached a stalemate.

🔗 Dream's Don't Die by Izek Shomof

🔗 LA Alliance for Human Rights, et al. v City of Los Angeles, et al.

🔗 Community shuts down proposal for homeless resource center at Sears building

🔗 Life Rebuilding Center Website

🔗 FBI Raids home and offices of LA City Councilman Jose Huizar 

🔗 The Powerful Legacy of General Jeff Page, West Coast hip-hop pioneer and ‘Mayor of Skid Row’

🔗 Shomof Group Webpage

🔗 State watchdog agency is investigating donations to Kevin de León’s reelection campaign

🔗 The story of Latino political power in Los Angeles

🔗 Power Y Glory Latino Politics in Los Angeles

🔗 Column: Can a giant, empty Sears building help solve homelessness in Los Angeles?

🔗 Governor Newsom orders state agencies to address encampments in their communities with urgency and dignity

🔗 Governor Newsom cleans up homeless encampments in Los Angeles

🔗 Homelessness in California: The State Must Do More to Assess the Cost‑Effectiveness of Its Homelessness Programs

🔗 VA appeals judgment ordering thousands of housing units built on its West Los Angeles campus

🔗 VA appeals landmark ruling ordering it to build housing for homeless veterans

Ruth “Roofless” has lived outside in the City of Los Angeles continuously for over five years. She attends public meetings about homelessness and exposes widespread programmatic corruption from within.

Zachary “Obama” Ellison is a whistleblower journalist who is writing an investigative journalism series about Los Angeles on politics, investigations, and media. 

Ruth and Zachary have teamed up to collaborate on a series covering the LA Alliance lawsuit and more. We hope to expose the inner workings of the government real estate development world and the impact felt by the people residing there.

Illustrations made with Wombo’s free Dream.ai app for iOS

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