Landless in Los Angeles

“Leadership in L.A., someone is going to have to fall on a big, fat grenade to really change the way housing is produced,”

read the quote from

“economist and co-director of the RAND Center on Housing and Homelessness,”

Jason Ward, in the Los Angeles Times story by journalists Doug Smith and Liam Dillon.

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Repeating the quote outside the courtroom of Judge David O. Carter, himself known for colorful language from his time in the U.S. Marines, suddenly didn’t seem like such a good idea. Most especially, in the presence of the U.S. Marshals Service, which staffs the courthouse entrance. If anyone has tried to jump on the “grenade” though in Los Angeles, it’s been Judge Carter, and he’s taken the blast from trying to tackle the issue.

Only minutes before, Judge Carter had threatened to get the U.S. Attorney’s office involved if the audit launched by firm Alvarez & Marsal didn’t get to the bottom of a hold-up in producing invoice data from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) to Los Angeles County to provide to the auditors. The audit was approved by Mayor Karen Bass and City Council last March. The Mayor said at the time,

“We’ve reaffirmed our commitment to transparency and accountability,”

promising that financial data would become even more transparent within a matter of weeks. Despite the optimism, things haven’t proved so simple at getting at why LA has failed so badly in addressing the crisis of the unhoused, at least in terms of official numbers and spending. Admittedly, the numbers can be more complex than they seem; some people are getting off the streets, but others are landing on them.

Controller Kenneth Mejia had now produced the website promised by the Mayor, so the City and the County found themselves in court again with LAHSA, an independent joint-powers authority, in response to a settlement agreement with LA Alliance for Human Rights. Counsel for LA Alliance, Matthew Umhofer and Elizabeth Mitchell had spent the morning of Wednesday, October 16, before Judge Carter demanding an “evidentiary hearing.” At one point, LA Alliance showed pictures of First Street between the U.S. Federal Courthouse and Los Angeles City Hall from 1984 and 2024 showing encampments to highlight their argument that not only had the City, County, and LAHSA failed to address the crisis, but to seemingly try to drive a wedge between the governmental bodies. County outside counsel J. Mira Hashmall from the firm Miller Barondess wasn’t impressed, shooting back that they needed:

“evidence, not pictures,”

that the government was acting in “bad faith” again, as Mitchell and Umhofer had previously argued. 

Immediately after taking office in November 2022, Mayor Karen Bass had declared homelessness an emergency, launching her signature Inside Safe program to address the crisis. Intervenor Shayla Myers from the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles ("LAFLA") was equally unimpressed with Alliance’s strategy, accusing Umhofer of having:

“misstated the City’s position,”

in regards to their proposed bed plan.

Judge Carter wasn’t impressed with the legal fireworks over the plan, which would seemingly reduce the number of available shelter beds by 2,500 from the 8,663 total as of June 30.

Carter resolutely declared:

“The bottom line is, I don’t think it’s in anyone’s interest to reduce beds.”

The City and County, under the now-expired Freeway/Roadmap agreement, had an elaborate funding strategy that incorporated State funding. The City, under increasing financial pressure, has become reticent to promise continued funding for the system, especially with unclear and uncertain Federal, State, and County funding. 

The deeply troubled bottomline for maintaining an expensive and undulating re-housing system through LAHSA has been fraught with invoicing problems. Past uninvoiced spending totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, particularly after the passage of Measures H and HHH, when Mayor Eric Garcetti faced increasing “point-in-time” figures and authorized new programs, including A Bridge Home, seems to be the focus of concern. Investigation to-date has revealed that a significant portion of this spending may have gone to non-reimbursable “sworn” Los Angeles Police Department (and possibly Los Angeles Fire Department) overtime as well as to dozens of nonprofit service providers. So who could help track down the missing invoices? 

To begin addressing this question, we attempted to contact four prominent Garcetti-era officials; only one responded: former Controller Ron Galperin. The former Controller, in an email response, noted that his position:

“does not work for the Council or Mayor,”

but rather is:

“independently elected.”

Galperin further stated:

“In my role as Controller, my office did report on City spending (including, of course, homelessness-related). The office also issued reports and conducted audits - on matters such as [City Proposition] HHH, City properties available for housing development and homeless, mapping of dedicated affordable housing…”

A prior report from Galperin in 2019 criticized LAHSA’s outreach efforts as reactive and goals went unmet. During the Garcetti administration era, homelessness worsened in the City of Los Angeles, going from an estimated 22,993 in 2013 to an estimated 41,890 in 2023. Garcetti stated that solutions to the problem were beyond the reach of the Mayor’s office in exit interviews.

We did not hear back from former Deputy Mayor for City Homelessness Initiatives Christina Miller, who now works for the Hilton Foundation, along with former Deputy Mayor for Homelessness Jose “Che” Ramirez, who lists himself as a “Senior Advisor” to Mayor Karen Bass, and Brian Buchner, former Chief of Homelessness Operations & Street Strategies, who now serves as an Assistant Inspector General for the LAPD, Office of Inspector General. Buchner now teaches at the University of Southern California in their Online MS in Criminal Justice program, and famously, per reporting from former Knock LA journalist Jonny Peltz, worked to organize meetings for billionaire entertainment mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg with city leadership to discuss homelessness. Out of the five members of the Board of Supervisors, only Hilda Solis declined to meet with Katzenberg.

According to current LA City Council President, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Katzenberg:

“lobbied him about mobile healthcare stations,”

per the report and met with almost the entire City Council and other officials.

The City of Los Angeles has subsequently heavily invested in a street medicine program, piloted by Keck Medicine of USC, which received a $4 million contract per USC’s press release, describing a “fireside chat” between Mayor Karen Bass and USC President Carol Folt.

The latter is quoted as saying:

“The homeless population is probably something that everyone in this room thinks about every morning that they wake up.”

—USC President Carol Folt in a “fireside chat” with Mayor Karen Bass

The audit ordered by Judge Carter, which now may not be delivered until January 15, 2025, may not be fully comprehensive, despite the expanded scope covering LAPD costs and services from the County of Los Angeles, most notably mental health services. It seemed for every step forward, there were two backwards.

The Alvarez & Marsal auditors, led by Managing Director Dianne Rafferty, suggested that due to the complexity of auditing such a large-scale endeavor, they would only have “low-to-medium confidence” in its findings, despite costs approaching $4 million dollars. And it’s not even a fully forensic audit! Comparatively, this is a drop in the bucket of past spending, much less future spending, with the Times report suggesting a revised draft proposal to reach a “functional zero” level of homelessness that would cost:

“$21.7 billion to end homelessness in a decade in Los Angeles, two-thirds of which is unfunded.”

Rafferty had joined via videolink for the morning's hearing, barely speaking as the hearing turned into a municipal back-and-forth over invoicing between City, County, and LAHSA. The meeting didn’t feel very productive at the end.

Later that same day, City Council’s Homelessness and Housing Committee met in Room 401, which is smaller than the body’s chambers. Councilmember Kevin De León, who was recently allowed back on the committee after being removed over the Fed Tapes scandal, and Monica Rodriguez, who represents part of the San Fernando Valley, were no-shows. Committee Chair Nithya Raman, Bob Blumenfield, and Imelda Padilla presided over the overflowing meeting with a number of critical items, including invoicing on the agenda as well as tenant rights. Many people were unable to enter from the exterior of City Hall’s public entrance on Main Street. Powerwashers cleared the sidewalk across Main Street at City Hall East.

A letter had been sent to service providers indicating that payments would be less than hoped for to provide critical homelessness services, which created panic among Hope The Mission employees. These service workers and staff showed up en masse to plead for a higher interim shelter “bed rate” to sustain their organizations. Ken Craft, the CEO of Hope The Mission, did not appear himself, but around a dozen of the seventeen public commenters were there to plead for more funding, citing stress about high rents and living precariously from paycheck to paycheck. It is not currently clear who sent the letter about bed rates or the reaction of other service providers who would presumably be affected, like the Weingart Foundation, Salvation Army, Volunteers of America, Harbor Interfaith Services, The People Concern, Special Services for Groups, 1736 Family Crisis Center, Safe Place for Youth, or U.S. Vets.

Many in the crowd inside and outside were wearing red to support Echo Park’s Mohawk Tenants, whose building had been purchased by a corporation seeking to displace them within 60 days. The public commenters who were not there over payments for services were there for a City-wide block on “renovictions"—evictions for substantial remodeling—a loophole in the current eviction policy that allows for the removal of longtime tenants if the new owner wants to make major physical changes to the building. They hooted and hollered when Bob Blumenfeld proposed an emergency amendment that would protect them from displacement immediately while the city embarks on the legal journey that will be required to close the loophole for good. The measure passed unanimously. Delayed cheers and applause rang out when the message reached the tenants who were locked out of the meeting, some of whom were overcome with exhausted relief. Mohawk tenants gained the upper hand to stand their ground and stay put—a critical fight in a larger struggle to remain housed in Los Angeles. 

Not too long into the next discussion about service provider invoicing, the meeting lost quorum when CD6’s Imelda Padilla got up and left, with Chair Nithya Raman apologizing to an angry gathering of Hope The Mission staff for the scheduling conflict. The pink elephant in the room was Measure A, the countywide ballot measure that would permanently extend a half-cent sales tax to fund homeless services passed under Measure H. Quixotically, members of the LA Alliance have openly opposed County Measure A, which is seen by most service providers as critical to continuing to provide the current level of homelessness services.

In an email on October 11, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit wrote:

“The County’s insufficient accountability structure and inability to account for existing budgets and performance demonstrate that the County has not earned the trust of Angelenos with more money.”

Asked whether opposing Measure A with such wide support from providers was helpful, attorney Elizabeth Mitchell didn’t respond to a request for further explanation. The LA Alliance’s settlement with the City of Los Angeles expires on June 13, 2027, and with the County of Los Angeles on June 30, 2027. What happens next is anyone’s legal guess.

Somehow it seems unlikely that the elites of Los Angeles will step in to make up any funding gaps. After the November 2022 Mayor’s election, billionaire Jeffrey Katzenberg had openly criticized fellow billionaire Rick Caruso, telling Vanity Fair:

“You just pissed away $104 million on a failed campaign, why don’t you put that towards the homeless on Skid Row?”

Caruso, in response, told The Wrap:

“We can’t combat the same old problem with the same old measures that don’t work.”

Caruso’s homelessness plan called for 30,000 interim beds in the first 300 days, without having any clear and specific plan for implementation. 

One measure on Skid Row that famously failed was an effort in 2017 to create a separate neighborhood council for the gritty area southeast of Downtown Los Angeles’s rebuilt core. Speaking with one resident and advocate about the measure, the answer was a clear “Yes” to renewing the effort. The 2017 effort was led by Jeff Page, known as General Jeff, who passed away in 2021, with Los Angeles Times journalist Gale Holland recalling how Page had fought an election battle and then a legal struggle to secure representation for the area.

Page had told Judge Carter:

“I don’t believe the voices of Skid Row have been heard.”

—General Jeff Page to U.S. Judge David O. Carter

The election ended with accusations of fraud after voting was changed from paper ballots to online, in a place where many lacked access to computers. After General Jeff’s passing, urban forester Katherine McNenny challenged the election results until getting a final “No” from higher courts.

If there’s one thing that fixes social problems, it’s greater democracy; feedback is an essential accountability measure. It’s why we’ve been pushing for the city to implement CF19-1020, because if there’s one thing “poverty pimps” and the “nonprofit-industrial complex” are strangely resistant to, it’s open dialogue. CF19-1020 previously passed City Council 14-0 in 2020 and was analyzed by the Chief Legislative Analyst’s office in 2022. Real estate developers and non-profit allies may have acted fraudulently to undermine the Skid Row effort, and it’s still unclear to many if the law was followed, but with the civil rights of the unhoused rolling backwards over the past five years, it feels necessary to demand this representation once and for all.

Ironically, the report in the Los Angeles Times quotes current Councilmember Kevin de León describing General Jeff as a “gentle giant” before recounting how he had “in minutes” run off a gadfly dressed in a Klu Klux Klan hood and robe. Now, De León is being sued by the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) over alleged anti-Black harassment and failures to respond to public records requests in regards to his communications about their:

“Black-led membership organization.”

A copy of the full filing wasn’t immediately available from LA CAN attorney Shakeer Rahman, but in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, the lawsuit alleges that De León has engaged in:

“a bizarre campaign that has included antagonizing and harassing members of... (LA CAN).”

Asked for comment on the lawsuit, De León’s office did not respond, which isn’t unusual for his office, which is viewed as among the least responsive. 

The task of repairing homelessness policy, much less actually addressing the crisis through a legal battle between non-profit and private interests with municipal governance, won’t be easily realized. One thing is clear though: we’re not working well together and getting to the breaking point where something just might have to change. Fixing the safety net to keep people off the street, getting those off the streets who want to get off, and putting a check on corruption isn’t anyone’s single problem; rather, it’s a collective issue, and that requies great transparency.

Disturbingly, this week, even after both the ACLU SoCal and First-Amendment Coalition sent letters to the LAPD in support of his right to closely film and report on sweeps of the unhoused, LA Taco journalist Lexis-Olivier Ray was detained by LAPD for 45 minutes in the back of a vehicle after being searched. The Mayor’s office had previously sought to intervene in his defense.

About the ordeal, Ray said:

“I'm still in shock,”

writing that he:

“Will have more to say later.”

We’re glad Lexis-Olivier is free! Journalists should be free to report on this issue in LA. 

🔗 Los Angeles’ $22-billion homelessness problem gives leaders a choice: Double down or change strategies

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

🔗 Dkt. 775 City's Proposed Bed Plan

🔗 Dkt. 785 Plaintiff's Position Concerning Proposed City Bed Plan

🔗 RonGalperin.com

🔗 Karen Bass Inside Safe Emergency Order

🔗 Los Angeles Controller Releases Scathing Audit of City's Homeless Outreach

🔗 Garcetti leaves office proud of administration but acknowledges specter of homelessness endures

🔗 How much power does LA’s next mayor have to solve homelessness?

🔗 LA Mayor's Top Homelessness Advisor To Resign

🔗 CHE: Community Homelessness Experience

🔗 Brian Buchner - Faculty Webpage

🔗 Mayor Garcetti’s Chief of Homelessness Operations Moonlights as Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Event Planner

🔗 Linked through mission, L.A. and USC bring medicine and housing to the homeless via Street Medicine

🔗 LA Alliance for Human Rights Webpage

🔗 Jeffrey Katzenberg Stirs Pot From 2022 LA Mayoral Race, Says Rick Caruso ‘Pissed Away’ Millions

🔗 Caruso’s Plan To Tackle LA's Homelessness Crisis Rests On Authority He Will Not Have

🔗 Skid Row Neighborhood Council

🔗 The powerful legacy of General Jeff Page, West Coast hip-hop pioneer and ‘mayor of skid row’

🔗 Shakeer Rahman Twitter Post RE: Kevin de León Lawsuit

🔗 Lexis-Olivier Ray Tweet RE: LAPD Arrest

🔗 L.A. TACO Investigative Reporter ‘Detained’ While Filming Encampment ‘Sweep,’ Released Without Charges

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“The City of Los Angeles is undoubtedly going broke,”

warned Controller Kenneth Mejia on September 26 in social media posts on Instagram and X, formerly known as Twitter:

“In the last year, the City has spent HALF its RESERVES,”

he wrote, noting that:

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“Just ONE year ago, the Reserve Fund was historically strong, at $648 million.”

Controller Mejia cited three reasons for the impending financial crisis:

“1. Lower revenues (short $222 million)

2. Higher labor costs, starting w/ a $1 billion raise for LAPD over four years

3. Record level liability payouts.”

—LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia on X

This last Wednesday, October 2, 2024, the City Controller, who won in a landslide victory, was testifying before U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter in another LA Alliance for Human Rights hearing for the lawsuit launched by the City’s business interests. The suit had been filed with the secret backing of real estate developer Izek Shomof, a shadowy figure also known for proposing a mega-shelter in Boyle Heights in the abandoned Sears, Roebuck & Company Mail Order Building. 

The project has stalled due to community and political opposition. To assuage the concerns of the LA Alliance that the City and County hadn’t been transparent enough about its spending on homelessness, Controller Mejia’s office created a dedicated website cataloging spending as part of the legal settlement.

For the calendar year 2024, according to the Controller’s website, the City of Los Angeles, in response to the Alliance settlement concluded on June 14, 2022, under Mayor Eric Garcetti and former City Council President Nury Martinez. Along with Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program and 2020’s Freeway Agreement, which is much like the LA Alliance settlement, as the deals locked in spending by both the City and County of Angeles to meet the crisis of the unhoused. We’ll be the first to admit, as journalists, one whistleblower, and one unhoused, that the legal landscape here has become exceedingly complicated and difficult for laypersons to understand, but the dollar signs are unignorable. 

City of LA’s Homeless Programs:

* Roadmap (“Freeway agreement” with LA Alliance)

* 5-year LA Alliance settlement

* Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe

Between those three programs, the City of LA has spent in a year:

$138,457,260.75.

This still pales in comparison to spending on the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), which according to Mejia’s accounting is far and away the biggest slice in the City’s budget, as he explained last Saturday night at a fundraiser for DSA-LA Council District 14 candidate Ysabel Jurado. How much of the spending on homelessness is simply ending up in LAPD coffers is unknown. Mejia’s presentation to Judge Carter was clear, though, that the costs have been enormous. Carter, in executive-like fashion, slowed the youthful controller down to make his point, asking,

“How much money is hitting the streets?”

—Judge Carter

Carter then clarified he wasn’t the Mayor, before dismissing the officials, saying to them respectfully,

“You have a city to run.” 

Seeing dental and vision items in Mejia’s accounting for one Inside Safe location, Carter was excited, and who could blame him with the City apparently finally making progress in managing its finances? The hearing, convened in the glass cube-shaped First Street Courthouse in Downtown Los Angeles, just a block away from City Hall, featured a presentation from auditors Alvarez & Marsal that suggested the City is still far away from having a full accounting of spending going back to Garcetti’s mayorship. The amount unaccounted for is potentially into the hundreds of millions and is without proper invoicing. How much of those funds may have been pilfered (and by whom) is also unknown, at least at this point, an unsatisfactory answer.

Between City Hall and the Federal Courthouse, with the old Times Mirror building in between, homeless encampments still line the street. One features a U.S. flag, synonymous with someone who has served in the U.S. military, and the man looks the part. Fencing had gone up around the awnings of the old building, abandoned since The Times fled to El Segundo under billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. Later that same afternoon, Carter would again convene an “Injunctive Relief” hearing for the West LA Veterans Affairs “campus”, more correctly known as the National Soldiers’ Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers.

The two judicial affairs, separate but in some ways related, have in some ways become spectacle with the colorful veteran jurist, himself a U.S. Marine with combat service in Vietnam, one day declaring to the audience,

“Do you know why Marines believe in God? They believe in God because they’re afraid of dying.”

One observer described the judge as a “quote machine.”

Carter would repeatedly show a picture of a U.S. Agency for International Development camp in the Republic of Georgia, explaining that he helped build it for refugees spilling over from South Ossetia and wondering why the same couldn’t be done in Los Angeles. Judge Carter was serious; he wanted results, and he wanted them sooner rather than later. 

Jurado’s rival, current District 14 Councilmember Kevin de León, had made a grave mistake, perhaps even worse than the University of California, Los Angeles, which would see its Jackie Robinson Stadium closed by Department of Veteran’s Affairs security on Judges’ orders. UCLA, as of October 3, has yet to make a proposal for what was described in the Judges’ opinion as an “exit strategy,” with the goal being to ensure adequate housing for veterans will be constructed on land that is rightfully theirs.

Whereas UCLA had simply failed to come to the table, De León had rather come to Court with ulterior motive. Carrying over a “spat,” as Judge Carter called it, from his first debate with Jurado, not with his opponent, but rather from social media with LA County Supervisor Hilda Solis over the County’s progress on homelessness. Unlike Brentwood School, which at least seems to be trying to negotiate a resolution to preserve some usage of their facilities built on the Veteran’s land, De León didn’t take the hint. Even after being scolded, he continued to campaign openly in the courtroom despite the judge’s admonishment to be on-point. 

In reference to the Co-ordinated Entry System (CES), which promises to do exactly what A&M’s auditors flagged as most problematic, the coordination of housing, care and services for the unhoused, De León instead resorted to finger-pointing. Writing to the Judge night prior:

“This is not merely a failure of system design but of moral judgment, compelling us to question the County's commitment to equitable service delivery.”

De Leon’s argument was just divisive.

If other elected officials, such as new Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Councilwoman Nithya Raman, Controller Kenneth Mejia, and County Supervisor and LAHSA Commissioner Lindsey Horvath, were there in good faith trying to solve the problem together. The LA Alliance previously successfully argued that the City and County were acting in “bad faith.” De León stood out like an unruly politician even as he told the story of how his staff had helped “Miguel,” who was unsheltered in Eagle Rock. Undoubtedly, Los Angeles County is not meeting its goals on homelessness, with an officially counted 75,312 people on the streets, of whom 2,991 are veterans, a significant 23% decrease from the preceding year. How that goal is met, though, will require more competence and cooperation, not grandstanding in what some have called:

“ The Nation’s Capital for Veteran Homelessness”.

Also present, lawyers for oil company Bridgeland Energy had already announced plans to appeal Carter’s ruling, so even as some have alleged that Carter is failing, he can be seen fervently seeking to negotiate temporary and permanent housing for veterans. At one point, Carter even yelled across the courtroom at VA officials that he wanted veterans off the streets before the “winter rains.” Carter chided Plaintiff’s expert witness Steven Soboroff to get to work figuring out how to get the upscaled housing goals for the campus* met quickly. At the end of Wednesday’s hearing, the third such day across two weeks beginning on September 25, Carter summoned fellow Plaintiff’s expert witness, developer Randy Johnson, and Soboroff back to his chambers for further discussion on how to get things moving.

Two months after running a piece about the “speakeasy” at Dodgers’ stadium, the site of another baseball-related displacement, the Los Angeles Times had erroneously reported that a proposed “Town Center” would feature a hotel complete with a “hotel bar” in it’s headline, to the consternation of many in the veterans community. Times journalist Doug Smith was apologetic, noting that he wasn’t personally behind the story’s widely questioned header.  

Carter’s opinion had all but ordered the VA to simply figure out where to come up with money from their budget to complete the project. Noting that when the VA fails to meet the needs of veterans to keep them off the street, the cost so often is simply transferred to the City and County. The challenge is scalability while avoiding the “mission creep” of past illegal leases.

The truth is that no one to date has come up with a perfect model for what the re-housing system should look like for the veteran population, much less for the unhoused in general in Los Angeles. This is deeply problematic, as the recent scandal opened up by investigative reporting in the Westside Current from journalists Jaime Paige and Chis LeGras on Project Homekey has exposed. Finding that dozens of facilities acquired at significant cost to the State were sitting inexplicably empty, followed by widespread outcry.

Developing the WLA VA to meet the needs of veterans housing is a huge task, and although court was again in session today, it’s unlikely to be quickly resolved. There are still significant questions over the planning on whether the new construction will be mixed-use development or stand-alone facilities, according to one source in the courtroom. Neighbors are also concerned.

As Paige and LeGras described, Governor Gavin Newsom had received $3.5 billion in federal funds distributed from 2021 to 2024 in 3 rounds, with $550 million going to LA County to acquire housing. Only to see 1,583 of 2,157 units going unused.

Another Westside Current investigation found that the point-in-time “PIT” count used to arrive at approximately 75,000 was erroneous. The countywide figure is potentially an undercount, with Paige and Legras writing:

“According to an exclusive, months-long investigation by the Westside Current, as an estimated 139,151 homeless people, both locals and newcomers, occupy streets, sidewalks, beaches, parks, playgrounds, and other public spaces throughout the County.”

It’s important to distinguish the PIT as simply a snapshot of homelessness “on any given night.” The Current cites an annual estimate by Economic Roundtable. According to Ruth Roofless’s investigation, extrapolation methods and the tradition of including a phone survey component to detect “hidden homelessness” mean LAHSA’s PIT number, which USC has calculated since 2017, could even be an overcount.

Even worse, according to reporting in the Los Angeles Times by journalist Anna Scott, Project Homekey, which is overseen by the California Interagency Council on Homelessness, “Cal ICH," has been a grave failure. With one contractor being accused of embezzlement in court, its former CFO stealing money from the homeless and instead:

“spending it on personal extravagances, including tickets to the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, jewelry and rent for a Beverly Hills mansion.”

Just how much money could potentially be clawed back?

This is a taxpayer's worst fear, and recent polling has suggested a diminishing appetite to allocate funds to what critics have termed a:

“homeless-industrial complex.”

County Measure A, which proposes to permanently extend funding approved under County Measure H, a quarter-cent sales tax set to expire in 2027, may not pass with voters this November. Long-time Los Angeles Times journalist Doug Smith, this time correctly writing about the estimated $1 billion in revenue, writes:

“Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. opposes the measure, contending it is a special purpose tax put on the ballot by groups that will benefit from it.”

The strange truth is that simply throwing money at the problem, even ostensibly for 60% services as Measure A promises and 40% housing, isn’t going to solve the problem. Mayor Karen Bass, who has arguably seen some success with Inside Safe despite it’s high cost, actually seems to have at least the right idea with the “locking arms” solution. It takes coordinated, ongoing direct action to get results. The time from motel room to permanent housing clearly has to go down; what people want is certainty, as well as treatment, services and quality of life in care.

Certainty is on the ballot with Measure A because it makes the ¼ cent sales tax revenue a permanent source of funding for affordable housing. If it fails, many people in several housing and shelter programs will likely be displaced. One exception is Inside Safe, because it does not rely on the County for funding like A Bridge Home and Pallet Shelters, the State like Homekey, or the federal government like Roomkey, Inside Safe is more financially resilient to defunding that could happen at the County level if Measure A fails.

Homeless Commission Stalled

For Inside Safe to succeed in the long run, though, Bass has to refine the approach and amplify it in addition to creating better cost controls. Most importantly, it’s beyond evident that the accountability mechanisms here are completely broken. That has to change! For example, for months now, we’ve worked to advocate for the renewed creation of a City-specific Lived Experience Commission on Homelessness, first proposed in 2019 by now-Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson and former Councilmember Mike Bonin with unanimous 14-0 Council approval in 2020. Ironically, the City has never even implemented this basic measure to give the unhoused a voice in City governance, despite its relatively low cost of only $50k, as estimated by the Chief Legislative Analyst (CLA) report.

Instead, Measure H, like Proposition HHH before, has solely relied on a citizens-oversight model in which the unhoused and formerly unhoused are essentially overseen by political appointees and service providers. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) has such an advisory body, and they support the creation of a separate body just for Los Angeles City to help dial in its efforts. LAHSA’s Lived Experience Advisory Board (LEAB) wrote in their January 2023 letter of support for CF19-1020:

“With over 300,000 constituents in every council district, perspectives from individuals with lived experiences from every corner of Los Angeles is necessary to properly address homelessness.”

This is a simple step forward.

It’s still too difficult to report waste, fraud, and abuse, much less criminal misconduct, in Los Angeles in relation to these programs. In response to Inside Safe, Ruth roofless created her own whistleblower hotline to monitor displacements related to the program: (818) 600-1846. The Controller’s Office recently created such a program, but more needs to be done to roll it out to the public so that when problems occur they’re quickly flagged, much like what happened in the recent so-called “Ramengate” scandal where food funds were being diverted. A dedicated line should be created specifically to monitor homelessness response. It needs to be well-publicized beyond the Auditor-Controller’s office so that everyday citizens know how to report, as well as those being served. This appears to exist as a “grievance” process, but it needs to be crystal clear, and complaints need to be responded to swiftly and correctly. Otherwise, there will absolutely be more corruption in Los Angeles County with this much money involved. 

Most importantly, if Alvarez & Marsal are truly unable to determine where previous spending went, further investigations, including ethics and possibly criminal, need to be launched for complete accountability. It’s all fine and dandy to move forward together, but no one should be wrongfully walking off with public money. Los Angeles still has to submit a proposal to the LA Alliance on how it plans to create enough bedspace to meet demand for shelters, much less permanent housing. The next hearing to address this is scheduled for October 8 at 9:00 am, with a full hearing including Mayor Karen Bass to follow on October 16 at the same time.

The post-trial injunctive relief hearings in Powers v. McDonough regarding the West LA VA/Soldier’s Home resume today, Friday, October 4, and are ongoing as of publication.

Speaking on Wednesday, Judge Carter openly chastised the mindset that nothing can be done to address this crisis. Officials from the former administration of Eric Garcetti should be subpoenaed if needed so that A&M can complete their expanding audit. The County is now under scrutiny too. Most significantly, this includes Mark Ridley-Thomas, who figured prominently in this policy debate. Journalist Meghann Cuniff, writing in the Los Angeles Public Press, quixotically described how Ridley-Thomas remains free pending appeal despite having been convicted of bribery and fraud. Per his spokesperson, Ridley-Thomas, who has a 3.5 year federal prison sentence:

“has maintained his priority policy focus on the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles.”

Ridley-Thomas now argues that instead of committing a crime, he was simply receiving "gratuity” from the University of Southern California (USC), which took over the task of LAHSA’s Greater LA homeless PIT count in 2017. Judge Carter suggested that if the numbers need to be “spot checked,” volunteers from both USC and UCLA should be summoned. 

On this most important issue, Los Angeles simply can’t afford “business as usual.” Collectively, government, including LAHSA, an independent joint-powers authority, has to do much better. 

At the most recent City Homeless Strategy Committee meeting, convened under the City Administrative Officer’s authority, Ruth Roofless again called in as the only person to give public comment. This is undoubtedly the most important City meeting that very few know exists, much less the press regularly attends, but it’s truly significant. Noting their date with the judge with certitude, CAO Matt Szabo, Councilmember Nithya Raman, Deputy Mayor Dr. Etsemaye Agonafer, and John Wickham from the CLA’s office are charting the financial future of Los Angeles. The group meets next on November 7 at 2:00 pm in City Hall East, Room 1500.

The most recent “Report of the CLA” to be presented to the City Council, dated September 27, notes,

“The instruction to develop a transparent funding formula for interim housing bed rates includes a more permanent and robust increase to the interim bed rate that is supposed to supplement the 10% interim increase that was approved in January 2024”

We are only left wondering how much it will cost in 2025 to address the human crisis on the streets of Los Angeles and what happens next. One thing is for sure: the unhoused of Los Angeles are not seeing the changes needed to put an end to the “emergency,” declared by the City’s authorities.

🔗 Kenneth Mejia Post on X: RE Reserves Spending

🔗 Kenneth Mejia Post on Instagram: RE Reserves Spending

🔗 LA Alliance for Human Rights

🔗 Dreams Don't Die: The Story of a Man on a Mission to Inspire a Generation of Dreamers

🔗 Community Shuts Down Proposal for Homeless Resource Center at Sears Building

🔗 Alliance Settlement Program, Freeway Agreement - Roadmap, & Inside Safe (2024)

🔗 Auditors probing LA’s homelessness spending describe poor accounting and inconsistent care

🔗 Under pressure, L.A. agrees to provide 6,000 new beds to clear homeless camps under freeways

🔗 UCLA baseball stadium ordered to close until land is used to serve veterans

🔗 The secret’s out on the ‘hidden’ Speakeasy under Dodger’s Stadium pavilion

🔗 Letter from LA Councilmember Kevin de Leon

🔗 Vets are pushing for a ‘Town Center’ on L.A.’s VA campus. But what is it? And will it have a hotel bar?

🔗 EXCLUSIVE: After Spending $550 Million, Over 70 Percent of Los Angeles County’s Project Homekey Homeless Rooms Vacant

🔗 Economic Roundtable Data Library 2007-2024

🔗 Ruth Roofless’ EXCLUSIVE HC23 unreleased USC PIT dwellings and CD totals

🔗 Nonprofit helped conceive California’s homeless housing program, then left string of failed projects

🔗 Your guide to Measure A: Sales tax to fund homelessness programs

🔗 CF19-1020 Commission on Lived Experience with Homelessness

🔗 City Controller - Report, Waste, Fraud, and Abuse 

🔗 AUTHORIZATION TO RENEW FRAUD HOTLINE AND INVESTIGATIVE SERVICES AGREEMENT WITH THE LOS ANGELES HOMELESS SERVICES AUTHORITY ALL DISTRICTS 

🔗 LAHSA Grievance Support

🔗 Why isn’t Mark Ridley-Thomas serving his sentence? 

🔗 CAO - Los Angeles Comprehensive Homeless Strategy

🔗 CF23-1348: Interim Housing Bed Rate - Practice Standards and Scope of Required Services

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$100/hour for 10 continuous years

One of the Los Angeles Police Department’s many overtime sources amounts to 88,353 hours, or 10 continuous years of 24/7 overtime at $8.36M. The account, earmarked for housing and services for homeless people, seems to keep replenishing, only to get diverted away from the intended unhoused recipients again.

At a generous rate of $94.62 per hour, LAPD siphons OT from an account conspicuously called:

“Other Homeless Services-Interim Homeless Housing ‘IHHS’”.

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Are LAPD service providers?

4,390 sworn officers (including eight Lieutenants and 535 Seargeants) out of LAPD’s total 8,799 sworn officers, or half the entire force, billed for overtime out of this homeless services account in the eight-month period from July 1, 2022 to February 12, 2023:

Then-Chief Michel Moore detailed the use of two identical databases within the Department’s On-Line Overtime System “OLOTS” for the specific purpose of tracking sworn overtime funds related to City shelters and “results” in an April 12, 2023 report titled:

“A Bridge Home Fund Allocation and Usage”. • CF22-1042

Moore’s April 2023 report follows on a September 7, 2022 report called:

“Release of Remaining A Bridge Home Funds”. • CF22-0600

In the September 2022 report, Moore (on behalf of LAPD) “respectfully requests the transfer” of $5M in “unappropriated balance” from “Police Department ABH Account” into the “Department’s Overtime Sworn Account”, alluding to another $1M for:

“shelter interventions beyond the ABH funds”.

That’s in addition to the remaining $4M from:

“…the total eight million dollars in ABH funds”.

If you’re counting, that is over $9M laundered to LAPD with nothing to show for it except a matrix that claims 221 people were “housed”.

LAPD doesn’t have access to housing resources to distribute to the unhoused people they frequently incarcerate.

LAPD could certainly afford to rent hotel rooms or apartments, the type of use this money was clearly earmarked for. “Interim housing-homeless services” could have meant purchasing an entire motel to get the most housing out of the finite fund, but somehow, this money got into the wrong hands.

Who is LAPD working for?

A table attached to item #5 on LA City Council’s agenda from Friday, September 20th, 2024 spells out an LAPD overtime system wherein each of the 15 Council Districts are annually allotted thousands of homeless-policing hours. The most recent formula LAPD used to allocate shelter-related hours for each district is as follows:

IHHS = $8,360,000 / $94.62 per hour = 88,353 hours Citywide

27 ABH * 1,000 hours each = 27,000 ABH hours

= 0–4,000 hours per CD, depending on how many ABH in CD

88,353 total hours - 27,000 ABH hours = 61,353 remaining hours

/ 15 CDs

= 4,090 hours per CD

Each CD gets 4,090–8,090 hours, for a total of 88,353 hours.

This funding apparently has been available for LAPD to use as they see fit for several years, with LAPD fulfilling its obligation to the City by regularly submitting reports to City Council detailing their spending from the IHHS account.

Mayor Eric Garcetti’s legacy “A Bridge Home” homeless shelter initiative is finally winding down as leases on many of the properties are expiring. That means LAPD are now being paid generous overtime to “secure” locations as benign as a Metro park-and-ride lot, where A Bridge Home’s Aetna Street location, operated by The Salvation Army, stood from August 2020 to August 2023 per CF19-0563.

The shelter itself operated for three years, then remained on-site but decommissioned for several months. A three-month-old Google Earth image of the lot clearly shows that there is no ABH:

On the aerial view, the footprint of the shelter designed by City-contracted Lehrer Architects, whose president Michael Lehrer sat on the Board of Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, is clearly visible:

But from the recent street-level view, it is clear that the trailers and umbrellas have been gone since at least July:

A small red-and-white sign on the inner fence on the G-line (formerly Orange line) park-and-ride lot on Aetna Street reads:

“NO USING THE BUILDING AS A BATHROOM

NO SLEEPING

NO LOITERING”

Of note about the sign: it is not an ABH Special Enforcement Cleaning Zone “SECZ” (“sexy zone”) or LAMC § 41.18 (“sit/lie”) sign, as City ordinances do not apply on Metro property since Metro is County jurisdiction. LAPD do have a contract to police the Metro system and seem to have exploited their role in ABH by taking over this lot through patrolling. The sign appears to have been placed by LADWP, who are located directly across Aetna Street. They installed the power and water hookups, visible with green guards around red pipes, which were not there before ABH.

After ABH de-mobilized, but before it vanished, the Aetna husk sat, fenced, until still-perfectly-usable bunk beds, functioning washer/dryers and large temporary trailers got hauled off, presumably to be stored or disposed of. Double chainlink fences were installed during the Inside Safe operation in the same area last year. The fences, rented from United and Herc, make the sidewalks on Aetna Street virtually unusable because the temporary outer fence, redundantly running parallel to the permanent one, blocks the sidewalk with protruding “feet” that are held in place by large orange sandbags.

Councilwoman Imelda Padilla won disgraced Council President Nury Martinez’ CD6 seat in a special election after the Fed Tapes fallout. Her district has not hosted a single ABH, not even an empty one, for more than a fiscal quarter now. Yet it looks like LAPD is still getting paid for 1,000 “interim housing homeless services” overtime hours completed in CD6 because of the Aetna ABH location being there. Salvation Army’s Aetna ABH appears on LAPD’s list of 27 ABH locations in their most recent quarterly IHHS overtime report, which billed for the last quarter of FY23-24, April 7th–June 29th.

1,054 IHHS overtime hours and 44 details were reported as being used by LAPD’s Van Nuys division in Q4. Van Nuys division includes another ABH (Van Nuys) outside of CD6’s boundaries, and each ABH gets 1,000 hours per quarter, meaning they should have only used half of that for two ABH, and 250 hours for one ABH, since Aetna was closed.

But since each district gets 4,090 additional hours annually, it is possible LAPD are still within their self-imposed guidelines regarding usage of the funds, which they decided don’t have to be used at ABH necessarily, but anywhere there is a “nexus of crime and homelessness”.

Interim Chief Dominic Choi’s July 16th FY23-24 Q4 report also presents resources deployed to CARE+ and Inside Safe operations, with Van Nuys division claiming eight sergeants, 25 details and 82 officers. It is not clear how many hours this consumed or at what expense.

FY23-24 Budget Recommendations

R.34 What’s in a name?

Police Department Sworn Overtime or Homeless Services and Interim Housing?

It appears CD13 Council member Hugo Soto-Martinez proposed a more accurate name for the IHHS slush fund during the FY23-24 budget recommendation process:

“…to change the title of the Unappropriated Balance Line item relative to Sworn Overtime related to Interim Homeless Housing Sites from ‘Sworn Overtime - Interim Homeless Housing Sites’ to ‘Police Department Sworn Overtime and Other Homeless Services-Interim Homeless Housing Sites.’”

—CF23-0600-S34 CD13 Hugo Soto-Martinez

However, renaming the account is essentially surrendering to LAPD’s scheme of diverting funds dedicated for helping homeless people over to the department which punishes us for our inability to access housing. It is true that re-naming a slush fund may legitimize it to the point of no longer technically being a slush fund, but renaming it after the police who shouldn’t be touching it in the first place is an open invitation for LAPD to continue to abuse discretionary funding…and vulnerable people who rely on that funding for their shelter.

Ruth is an unhoused woman in the City of Los Angeles who investigates and reports on corruption affecting homeless people. She challenges all displacements and hosts a weekly displacement-themed X Spaces as @rooflesser at 7pm PST on Sundays, batteries permitting! Come talk or listen!

Illustrations made from prompts in Wombo’s free dream.ai app for iOS

Graphics made in free Canva app for iOS

Thanks Zachary Ellison for proofing

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Newsom on the News, MRod: “a noose”

At the beginning of August, Governor Gavin Newsom materialized under I-5 to help Caltrans abate an unremarkable pile of litter. Taking the “sweep” assignment literally, he was filmed flourishing an actual broom before tossing it atop a modest trash heap, where it landed next to a sun-faded American flag throw pillow. Later, he’d grandstand to a FOX News reporter and espouse:

“I’m not the Mayor of California.”

—CA Governor Gavin Newsom

Notably, there were no unhoused people around to illustrate his points or respond, making the Governor’s words ring hollow in the empty, concrete cavern. If he was trying to prove that encampments are indeed proliferating, it would have been useful for him to show the news some actual homeless people as proof. But all he could point to as evidence that he wasn’t just ranting and raving about nothing was his medium mound of garbage.

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“This is an indictment of Counties.”

Gavin Newsom was adamant that this specific trash proved a point: local leaders are incompetent, or at least irresponsible with State grants. In April, the State auditor couldn’t determine if $24B spent on homelessness under Newsom’s supervision was wasted. Maybe it would have been more effective if the cash was simply thrown into Caltrans’ gigantic garbage compactors, like the important possessions of unhoused people all too often are during Caltrans’ “clean-up” operations.

A long-standing member of City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee (and Homelessness and Poverty Committee under prior Mayor Eric Garcetti), CD7 Councilwoman Monica “MRod” Rodriguez, during an HnH meeting less than a year ago, unflinchingly compared funding long-term subsidies to “a noose”, meaning funding them would be setting the City up for failure, since it would have to come up with the money every year to prevent displacement.

During this week’s Housing and Homelessness Committee meeting, MRod made reference to

“a gun to our head, with all these obligations that we’re trying to meet”

— CD7 Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez

when discussing whether to pay outstanding balances due to nonprofit motel operators without first verifying service delivery. She went on to threaten “receivership”, referring to the fall of the Skid Row Housing Trust (colloquially called “The Trust” to differentiate it from Skid Row Housing, which is another nonprofit housing operator downtown) at the expense of the City. Once encompassing one-third of the City’s Single-Room Occupancy “SRO” stock, the last 1,000+ units that remained of The Trust was purchased by developer Leo Pustilnikov at an unbelievable price of only $8k/unit, according to Liam Dillon’s reporting of the sale in LA Times.

At Friday’s City Council meeting (agenda), item #5 (CF24-1041/CF23-0600-S43/CF22-1042) diverted $8.36M specifically designated for:

“Other Homeless Services-Interim Homeless Housing”.

These funds were directed to LAPD for 88,353 overtime hours at rate of $94.62/hour. A table attached in the agenda spells out a system wherein each of the 15 Council Districts are allotted between 0 and 4,000 LAPD OT hours on top of a base amount of 4,090 OT hours per district. The variable amount is based on the number of A Bridge Home “ABH” congregate shelters in that particular district, with a total of 27 ABH in the City.

LAPD stood by, hands on guns on hips, as council unanimously approved this item, which was actually just a quarterly report about the expenditures. The directing of funds for this purpose was initially passed as a budget recommendation, with Hugo Soto-Martinez and Eunisses Hernandez dissenting. Why doesn’t Monica Rodriguez see increases to LAPD’s massive budget as threatening as the firearms she compares outstanding invoices to?

MRod raised some valid issues about the San Fernando Valley getting fewer Inside Safe operations compared to the rest of the City, and the map below, which highlights Inside Safe Operation #22 at Paxton/Bradley may illustrate her point:

Paxton Street

There’s no denying the existence of a fairly large unhoused population that dwells in tents and makeshift shelters, but primarily in “oversized” vehicles on Pacoima’s Paxton Street, which runs parallel to Fwy 118 and interchanges with I-5 to the west, running into Fwy 210 to the east. Paxton’s intersections on Glenoaks Blvd and Bradley Ave have typically been places where unsheltered people post up in permanently parked vehicles, much to the annoyance some of CD7 MRod’s vocal housed constituents:

Pacoima’s unhoused people, their vehicle dwellings and “encampments” are prolific in their ability to generate news segments and headlines like:

* 7/12/24 Homeless family of autistic boy slapped in Pacoima uplifted by community | KTLA5

* 2/28/2024 Pacoima Homeless Encampment Brings Three-Way Conflict Business Owner Clashes with Councilmember Rodriguez and RV Occupants | San Fernando Valley Sun

* 3/27/2022 Pacoima Residents Plead with City to Cleanup Homeless encampment | NBCLA

* 6/23/2021 Homeless Pacoima Man Creates a Decorative Encampment Makeshift home next to 118 Freeway could be removed under Caltrans’ “clean up” procedures | San Fernando Valley Sun

Just a few years ago, neighbors and media took a warm liking to a lovable little landscaper and gardener who made a whimsical shelter-sculpture up on the embankment of Fwy-118 at Glenoaks Ave. Jose Fuentes was said to be 64 years old at the time FOX11 took notice of the structure, which he claimed to have inherited from a man who passed away. He gradually added: a green toy slide, a boogeyboard, American flags, retaining walls, a white picket fence, and more. He and his artistic assemblage had an advocate in neighbor Nathaniel Padilla, owner at Tacos el Canelo:

“People love it.

I have people climbing up the mountain to go give him gifts like he’s – like he’s baby Jesus, almost.

I have many people that come out and ask me questions about: ‘What’s going on? What is this? Is this, like, a memorial?’

No, it’s not. It’s just a creative man at work.”

—Nathaniel Padilla, owner at Tacos el Canelo to FOX11

Point-in-time

Pulling from LAHSA & USC’s annual point-in-time “PIT” homelessness count “HC”data going back to 2017, the three census tracts around Paxton Street (#1042, 1043, & 1044) had over 50 adults ages 24+ living outdoors “on any given night” in 2023, by far the most since 2017. But by the beginning of this year, it was back down to less than 20:

Volunteers counted nearly 80 RVs in 2022, plus around 50 “makeshift shelters” (tarps, shopping carts, umbrellas and pallet assemblages that are not tents or vehicles) for a total of over 150 dwellings belonging to unhoused people. By the most recent HC, which was conducted in January, that number had returned to the 2020 level of around 80, but with a higher proportion of RVs than tents:

CA-based nonprofit firm Applied Survey Research (ASR) did Long Beach’s 2003 and LA’s 2005 and 2007 PIT Homeless Counts “HC”, using a different method of calculating, but arriving at a similar figure of almost 60 unhoused adults across the three census tracts in 2007, so it can be said with reasonable certainty that least a dozen people have been living at Paxton Street along Fwy-118 on a fairly permanent basis for the past 20 years or more, with a sudden increase in tents, and then oversized vehicles corresponding to the progression of the pandemic.

It would appear that something worked to bring 2024’s counts of dwellings and adults back down to roughly one-third and one-half of 2023’s all-time-highs, respectively.

Are pilot programs performing?

MRod claims to have pioneered techniques like “Paxton pilot project”, criminal former-County Supervisor/State Assemblymember/CD10 Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas’ LAMC § 41.18 Standard Operating Procedure “SOP”, “Street Engagement Strategy”, Encampment to Home/“Street to Home” and “RV to Home” pilots on and around Paxton Street. She even wrote a letter to LA Alliance for Human Rights Judge David O. Carter on March 13th about the perceived successes of these multiple pilot programs.

Paxton encampments were additionally studied from January to June 2023 as one of the focuses of a report by abt Associates, which was funded by the Conrad Hilton Foundation. In 2021, LAFH published a report about the Paxton/Bradley Project Roomkey intervention for City Council’s HnP Committee:

OUTCOMES

Totally cleared area was fenced off and remains clear today (1 yr later)

61 people engaged with LAFH

* 25 moved into permanent or safe housing

* 22 Still engaged in IH and successfully transitioned from Airtel [Roomkey]

• 14 working on RRH plan

• 8 matched to PSH

Other: 2 deceased, 1 incarcerated, and 11 disengaged

—LA FAMILY HOUSING 4/8/21

So, while Paxton Street had been the focus of around half-a-dozen or more pilot programs since 2019, none of them – besides Project Roomkey – appears to have actually moved people indoors and then stayed accountable to them. Inside Safe remains unique in that it seems to have taken seriously the commitment to not further displace around 50 people originally from Paxton St. for over one year...

State homelessness programs like CA Department of Social Services “CDSS”-funded Roomkey, Housing and Community Development “HCD”-funded Homekey and Business, Consumer Services and Housing “BCSH”-funded Encampment Resolution Fund “ERF” Grants, all struggled to retain participants due to limited shelter durations and lack of connections to longer-term subsidies.

If even the CA Auditor can’t be sure the State isn’t the problem, all of the Governor’s finger-pointing might be a distraction. The State can’t prove anything good or bad without access to data held by the City and County. But there’s nothing stopping any member of the public from doing their own performance audits using the information obtainable by records requests and reports such as the Statewide Homelessness Assessment (FY18-19, FY19-20, and FY 20-21, released in 2023). And the available information doesn’t show that State spending has directly resulted in many placements into housing or shelter, much less permanent placements that were retained.

Community Audit

Several groups of unhoused people and their advocates, including Valley (CD6)-based Aetna Street Solidarity and Westside’s Fairfax Mutual Aid, Mar Vista Voice and Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid, in additon to South Bay Mutual Aid & Care Club, Food for Comrades and LA Street Care, did a community-led performance audit of Inside Safe, which they released at the beginning of July. If communities of advocates and unhoused people are managing to gather enough data to perform their own audits, it’s hard to believe the state can’t do the same.

State demands “results”

When Newsom pressed local leadership about a perceived lack of “results” generated by $144,090,602.15 in recent grants made to LA from the State’s Encampment Resolution Fund “ERF”, it was quite ironic considering his own struggle proving success or even confirming failure of location-based homelessness initiatives. After his long day of frolicking amongst orphaned bicycle parts on Paxton Street and Remick Avenue, the Governor vowed to stop funding Cities and Counties that do not produce the “results” he wants to see.

Perhaps the Governor chose to provoke Pacoima because he’s considering whether or not to approve several pending applications for more State Encampment Resolution Fund “ERF” grants, including from CD7.

Governor Newsom has never been able to prove ERF or his other favorite programs Homelessness Housing, Assistance, and Prevention Program “HHAP”, CalWorks, etc. produce “results”, either. The April attempt by the State Auditor to evaluate five grant programs, all overseen by Cal ICH (the State’s Inter-agency Council on Homelessness) couldn’t be completed because there wasn’t enough data about outcomes to audit. The inconclusive report could not determine if ERF spending is an effective way to address homelessness. It recommends tracking spending and outcomes going forward:

“April 9, 2024

* Cal ICH Has Not Consistently Tracked and Evaluated the State's Efforts to End Homelessness.

* Two of the Five State-Funded Programs We Reviewed Are Likely Cost-Effective, but the State Lacks Clear Outcome Data for the Other Three.”

— 2003.102.1 CA State Auditor Grant Parks

Importantly, it is still unclear what exactly the Governor considers to be acceptable “results” for encampment resolutions. Is he surprised one-time grants aren’t affording sustainable, permanent housing outcomes?

It remains possible that unaccountable spending on homelessness is making things worse.

Perhaps getting defunded by the State would be a blessing in disguise for LA.

Comparing data (when it exists) and outcomes (when they are known) from the State’s operations to the City’s, we see parallel initiatives that could be consolidated. to maximize benefits to participants and better prevent displacement.

Over a year ago, in July 2023, the 22nd Inside Safe operation took place at an encampment in the same general area of CD7 where Gavin Newsom was demanding “results” just last month. We can see that 50 people came inside from this location at the initial event in July, and 7 additional people moved into interim shelter in three repopulation efforts that occurred throughout December.

All but 7 out of 57 Paxton Inside Safe participants have been tracked to an indoor outcome or known outdoor location.

While Newsom was lamenting that local re-housing efforts are ineffective, he may have been implying that they simply push unhoused people into State jurisdictions, such as under freeways, where Caltrans does encampment resolutions. But we can see from the City’s data that only 14 out of 57 people from the Paxton Inside Safe operation (#22) have exited to outcomes other than housing. Of the 14 exits, four of them were incarcerated and one was institutionalized in a medical or psychiatric facility. That means only seven people were unaccounted for at Paxton, and if the people brought in by the three repopulation efforts had actually been displaced from Inside Safe and then allowed back in (as re-entries), it leaves zero.

Roomkey to Inside Safe

Inside Safe is designed to resemble FEMA-funded COVID-19 emergency-era program, Project Roomkey, which wasn’t for permanent housing, although about 20% of participants did secure housing. Roomkey wasn’t a sanitation-led program, but the majority of Inside Safe operations are. The first exception was a targeted effort to absorb “legacy” Project Roomkey guests so they didn’t end up back on the streets.

Inside Safe activation prevented displacement of Roomkey “legacy” guests.

As of March, at least 25% of Inside Safe’s 2,549 participants were referrals or transfers, with many coming from State programs that were set to end, like Roomkey “Legacy”.

About a quarter of Inside Safe participants came from outreach referrals and targeted efforts to transfer participants in/out of Augmented Winter Shelter Program “AWSP” and other interim programs, which are supported partially or entirely by the State. In that way, it’s not fair to compare Roomkey and Inside Safe, because Inside Safe is mitigating displacements that Roomkey’s demobilization would have otherwise caused, while also trying to resolve “encampments” through interim shelter that eventually leads to permanent housing.

While Roomkey did not set out to resolve unsheltered homelessness using permanent housing and ultimately displaced most participants, many of the “legacy” guests absorbed by Inside Safe are the ones that have moved out to Permanent Supportive Housing “PSH” or subsidies. Inside Safe appears committed to retaining participants for longer than Roomkey did so permanent housing outcomes can be realized.

Despite many flaws, the Mayor’s Inside Safe program is producing better results and is more transparent than State programs. Because statuses are tracked, it is possible for even motivated people living on the streets to request data and analyze outcomes for individual operations so as to refute the empty criticisms the Governor made in Pacoima at the beginning of August.

Inside Safe is being funded by the City’s Homeless Emergency Account “HEA”, which was not a grant from FEMA like the ones that funded Roomkey. The HEA was worked into the City’s budget by the Mayor’s Executive Order 2. It was initially resourced with $300M, securing an additional $180M to keep it operating another year. But since then, the City has received reimbursements from the County and incorporated State grants into its operation, making Inside Safe more sustainable.

Encampment to Home

Nonprofits receive generous funds, but motels and unhoused clients are lucky if they get allocated resources as intended.

State-funded motel shelter programs called Encampment to Home, initiated by individual Council district applications for Encampment Resolution Fund (ERF-1, etc.) applications, are supposed to be way less of a spectacle, but that doesn’t mean smooth or successful operations. Despite excessive planning of an ERF-1 operation in CD4, all of the funds for housing were removed from the budget so a nonprofit could increase its capacity:

“The master leasing of housing options is being eliminated thus removing all funds from the sustainable outcomes category.”

—CPRA CD4 communications with the State about CD4’s $1.8M ERF-1 grant

So while it has placed unsheltered people in some of LA’s highest buildings like LA Grand, which recently demobilized for the last time, and purchased historic The Mayfair Hotel, Inside Safe isn’t glamorous, but it is a hot topic. Unless and until it drops the remaining 1,000+ people in its contracted motel rooms like hot potatoes, as all interim programs eventually do displace their “legacy” clients, I challenge anyone who calls the Mayor’s “aircraft experiment” a total failure, and point to the many fatal flaws of the 27 Garcetti relics called “A Bridge Home”…

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“The VA is doing everything possible to help veterans and their families remain in their homes…”

—Veteran Sarah Kallassy in a video that appeared on the US Department of Veterans Affairs’ official YouTube channel three weeks ago.

On Friday, September 6, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter’s decisive opinion in Powers v. McDonough firmly reiterated the legal foundations that grant disabled veterans the right to housing on Veterans Affairs property and the right to not have their benefits counted as income for the purposes of receiving federal housing vouchers. In the 125-page decision, Carter, himself a Vietnam combat veteran, chastises the West LA Veterans Affairs Medical Center “WLAVA” for not making enough “HUD-VASH” (Housing and Urban Development Department-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing voucher) referrals to The HACLA, the City’s Housing Authority. Most importantly, Judge Carter declares “void” leases made to the University of California, Los Angeles, the Brentwood School, a parking company, and an oil drilling operation.

In response to the ruling that these leases did not “principally benefit” disabled veterans, both UCLA and Brentwood School issued statements to Los Angeles Times journalist Doug Smith that they were in fact legal; both stated that they were reviewing the opinion. The decision sets up a September 25th hearing for “injunctive relief” that will develop an “exit strategy” for the voided leases. Carter ordered the VA to immediately begin planning for the construction of an additional 1,800 permanent housing units for veterans requiring medical care, including those permanently disabled, and 750 temporary units. Carter sets a timeline of 6 years for the completion of new construction and 12–18 months for temporary units. Controversially, Carter also ordered the “active construction” of a project known in the VA’s 2022 master plan for the sprawling property as the “Town Center,” which would include retail and grocers, as well as a “Wellness Center.”

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Los Angeles’ Westside VA property, once known as a National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, houses around 100 buildings and is presently home to hundreds of veterans, many of whom are living in inadequate temporary shelters deployed in response to “Veterans Row." Veterans Row was a makeshift tent community on San Vicente Boulevard that was previously ignored by the VA. Sadly, two veterans died on the WLAVA’s version of downtown’s Skid Row.

Now that the veterans are on WLAVA property, they no longer live

in a place not meant for human habitation

as the HEARTH Act of 2012 defines “Category 1” homelessness. They are also no longer unsheltered, having upgraded patriotic tents for “Pallet Shelters.” But, as Carter describes, they have experienced fires as well as rodent problems in their inadequate tiny sheds. The shelters were supposed to be temporary solutions when they were first introduced two years ago, but they remain, and the City intends to spend $33M on 500 more, according to the 18th Homeless Emergency Report draft.

Powers v. McDonough, filed by Public Counsel, lost over half of its plaintiffs due to skepticism about whether it would produce meaningful results. In the end, five plaintiffs, all disabled veterans representing a plaintiff class of unhoused veterans, prevailed against the VA. In a footnote, Carter stated there is a

pattern throughout this case of corporate and agency leadership hiding behind their employees

in reference to both UCLA and the VA led by U.S. Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough. McDonough is an appointee of President Joseph Biden and former Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama. Carter described some recent improvements by VA staff in services. The judge castigated a pattern since the 1970’s of management

infected by bribery, corruption, and the influence of the powerful and their lobbyists.

The lawsuit advanced through the court fairly quietly after simmering since November 2022. The timing of their filing comes one year after LA County Sheriffs displaced the unhoused, homeless veterans from their flag-adorned tents on the VA's outer sidewalks into “tiny houses” on-site. Veteran advocate Ryan Thompson (@nhdvs) and local activist Sennett Devermont highlighted in Instagram videos (@alwaysfilmthepolice) the case of one former plaintiff who, after being swept into pup tents and then tiny homes, was expelled for minor reasons and denied even the right to sleep in her car on the VA’s parking lots at night. The former plaintiff was subsequently separated from her daughter, who was moved to a facility in Lancaster, and this traumatic family separation was directly caused by the lack of accessible housing options at the WLAVA.

Carter’s opinion highlights the essential nature of access to the WLVA’s medical facilities and how traveling great distances, including from the VA’s facilities in Lancaster, is most certainly prohibitive to healing. The tiny shelters, operated by nonprofit Step-Up On Second, are being used for an average length of a year or more when the VA’s initial intention was for them to be used:

“for no longer than sixty to ninety days”.

The result has been the use of private process servers to evict those who don’t fully comply with program rules. We believe at least one veteran passed away in a tiny shed.

In last month’s trials over the VA, which started August 6th, there was no jury. Instead, advocates for each side, high-level federal employees, former County department executives, and ex-City commissioners took the stand to present “expert testimony” to Federal Judge David O. Carter, including real estate developer Randy Johnson as well as Steve Soboroff, known for developing Playa Vista, as well as leading Los Angeles’ Olympic Committee in 1984 and serving as President of the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners. Judge Carter oversees another questionable major case relating to homelessness, LA Alliance for Human Rights, which dominated headlines for years, much like his OC lawsuit, Orange County Catholic Worker, that came before it. The fall of nonprofit housing provider Skid Row Housing Trust into receivership linked the two cases through Soboroff’s former position at the Weingart Foundation, which had been keeping “The Trust” afloat.

As expert witnesses, Johnson and Soboroff and any associated business partners will be precluded from bidding on contracts that may result from the order to develop the 388 remaining undeveloped acres, as well as any land that may be recovered from the current, now terminated “Enhanced Use Leases” (EULs). Thompson expressed concern about the 6 years given by Judge Carter for the completion of housing construction on the property, which includes the existing Medical Center and developments on approximately 1,000 acres of prime real estate. Carter writes in the ruling, noting that the veterans have in essence been denied what is rightfully theirs, in reference to a quote from President Abraham Lincoln:

“They have borne the battle.”

The battle clearly isn’t over. For starters, the VA, which only recently completed an environmental impact statement (EIR) in 2019 for its 2022 Master Plan, faces tremendous environmental issues in relation to its close proximity to the 405 freeway as well as prior usage as a landfill for radiologic medical waste. The 562-page EIR, completed in compliance with the National Environmental Quality Act, factored less into the ruling than may have perhaps been expected given the concerns expressed by Thompson, among others, about housing quality and safety on the grounds. 

For example, Carter ruled, after testimony from Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, that VA Buildings 401 and 402, one completed and one nearing completion, can be immediately occupied, despite a “hold” due to fears of potentially explosive methane emissions, writing: 

The Court fails to understand how some unhoused veterans are precluded from moving into buildings that are ready for occupancy because they fall within the 1,000-foot radius, but other veterans can remain in existing housing that falls within the same radius.

Ferrer had allowed veterans to remain in existing buildings while a monitoring plan was developed. The ruling doesn’t touch on any sound or air quality issues related to proximity to the freeway, where presently tiny homes sit in close proximity. Whether a new EIR will need to be completed in relation to the newly ordered housing remains to be seen, but clearly remediation must be considered. Clearly, not all housing is equal!

The VA’s prior Master Plan had called for 1,200 new permanent units. Carter’s ruling expands upon that and also seeks to, at least seemingly, increase the units to 1,800 permanent units in total. During the interim, the VA has failed to meet the demand for housing by the estimated 3,000 homeless veterans in Los Angeles.

LA has been termed by some to be the “nation’s capital for veteran homelessness,” and the cost has been born by the City of Los Angeles, along with other municipalities and the County of Los Angeles. According to Inside Safe data, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s signature operation to provide temporary shelter in motels, as of March 2024, had placed a total of 62 veterans. The results were 11.5% of those individuals reaching permanent housing, nearly 20% returning to homelessness, and 4.9% dying. 

At least one successful veterans housing program in Echo Park, known as the "Billets,” was in fact outbid in 2019, and turned into a homeless shelter under a different operator at greater cost. According to Los Angeles Times journalist Gale Holland, the 72-bed program was terminated because:

“Other applicants were better able to meet VA’s funding criteria, which is designed to ensure resources are utilized in the most efficient manner possible.”

Residents were moved to a 500-bed shelter in the City of Bell despite objections from Volunteers of America, which operated the site in conjunction with Gateways Hospital. The site now appears to be used for private residential housing.

Veterans are able to apply for HUD-VASH vouchers, but Carter writes in his ruling:

“in practice, however, the HUD-VASH tenant-based voucher program in Los Angeles is rife with problems.”

Reports have emerged that these vouchers, which up to 50% of veterans struggle to use due to discrimination and lack of housing supply, are even being sold illegally at some sites. In response to a California Public Records Act request, the Los Angeles Police Department declined to provide records regarding arrests, citing “ongoing investigation.” LAPD PIO didn’t respond to a request for comment prior to publication. It’s unknown if federal law enforcement has joined LAPD in probing the misuse of this program. It’s no surprise though! For example, as Carter discovered regarding the misuse of the VA’s parking lots, during which $13 million was skimmed and two individuals were sentenced to prison, cash is king. Some have suggested simply giving cash to veterans, which would be more quickly translated into payment for potential landlords.  

Carter also discovered that the VA had shortstaffed the HUD-VASH program. His ruling orders them

to provide at least 25 referrals to public housing agencies per week

and to reduce program dropouts, known as "skips,” by

50 percent within one (1) year of this order.

The judge also said he wants the VA to increase outreach efforts and banned any further leasing of the VA’s properties for programs that do not

principally benefit veterans and their families.

UCLA, outside of issuing free sports tickets to the VA, pays $300,000 annually to rent at the WLAVA since 2011 after the prior ruling; before that, they paid only $56,000 annually. The Brentwood School pays $875,000 annually for its lease. Brentwood School even generously donated 20 tents to the VA for use on asphalt that reached burning hot temperatures during the summer! The Brentwood School only grants usage of its facilities, including baseball fields, a swimming pool, and tennis courts in the early morning and late in the evening. The oil company paid only a small fraction of its revenues to an external nonprofit for veterans. 

The offices of Mayor Karen Bass, City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto, Councilmember Traci Park, and Katy Yaroslavsky did not respond to a request for comment on the opinion. Park and Yarsolavsky’s districts border the West LA VA. Park previously stated in 2023 that it’s the

responsibility of elected officials to collaborate on solutions and ensure that the city's thousands of homeless veterans have a secure and stable home.

A representative for LAHSA, the independent agency that oversees homelessness efforts across Los Angeles County, referred questions to the VA because

they are the best resource for detailed comments and insights on this matter.

The White House, through its All Inside initiative, has sought to reduce veteran homelessness by 25% by 2025. Bass has directed funding with the Mayor’s Fund to a partnership with U.S. Vets.

Whether the VA will be able to comply with the full ruling remains to be seen. Carter opined that VA has adequate funds, citing their $407 billion budget, which must be approved by Congress, in writing that it was not an

undue financial burden.

Carter also described how Brentwood School previously sought a carve-out to permit their lease, spending

nearly $1 million on lobbyists.

Both UCLA and Brentwood School’s leases expire in 2026; what happens next remains to be seen. Judge Carter, now 80 and a double alum of UCLA, will undoubtedly remain on the bench to oversee the ruling and is in otherwise good health, having taken a 6-hour tour in blue jeans and sneakers last month of the property. Carter declared during the proceedings, according to Doug Smith of the Los Angeles Times to a plaintiff’s expert witness:

I’m going to make a tough decision in a while, and you’re going to help me.

▶️ The bottom line up front on avoiding foreclosure | The BLUF

🏛️ Dkt. 302 Post-Trial Opinion; Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law

🔗 VA must build more housing on West L.A. campus, and UCLA and Brentwood School leases are illegal, judge rules

📝 VA West Los Angeles Campus Master Plan

📝 VA West Los Angeles Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement

⛺️ INSIDE SAFE participants sheltered, stressed. Success?! Not yet. By roofless

📊 Demographics of Inside Safe Participants Data Set on Ruth’s Google Drive

🔗 In gentrifying Echo Park, the VA is forcing these homeless veterans to leave

🔗 Parking Lot Operator Sentenced to Nearly 6 Years in Federal Prison for Bribery Scheme that Defrauded Department of Veterans Affairs

🔗 Traci Park Celebrates New Veterans Housing at West LA VA

🔗 Finding housing for homeless veterans

🔗 Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass announces new partnership to help homeless veterans

🔗 VA’s illegal leases on West L.A. campus pose a tough choice for a federal judge

Special thanks to Ryan Thompson, Karen Drives, Don P. Garza, and Dr. Lee.

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 #LAAlliance lawsuit. 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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“i barely survived”

With a combined 12M views, at least five sets of YouTube creators separately challenged themselves to survive a night in the WORST-rated hotel in Los Angeles. Many of them left before morning.

The unpretentious, internet-infamous haunt’s green-painted inner and outer facades are contrasted by an ominous red neon sign which loudly names the “1-star” Motel. Like the curious young YouTube creators, who all depicted a 1-star rating in their video thumbnails, I won’t be referring to the specific motel or owner by name for legal reasons.

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Gen-Z seem to have discovered a viral element amongst strange stains on “meme motel” mattresses, but I don’t have anything nasty to say about the place. Many of my unhoused neighbors have stayed at this motel on-and-off over the past decade or more, when they could afford it. The owner is my neighbor, and I don’t think he’s a bad guy (for a property/business owner). He lives on-site with his family and a long-term tenant or two. He wants us in his vacant rooms, but not for free.

1-star*

1-star is the real average of around a dozen reviews for the motel on Yelp. To gauge the extent of the narrators’ hyperbole, (and calibrate accordingly) Google Maps rates the motel 2.7 stars out of 5, on average, based on around 80 total reviews. So this is a real 1-star motel on Yelp, but a 2-star motel on Google, where approximately 7 times more people chimed in. And if you round 2.7 stars up, it’s a 3-star establishment!

🏚️ “Worst Motel” playlist • 👀 12M views total (5 videos)

* ▶️ i spent a night at the worst rated motel... • BENOFTHEWEEK • 5.7M views

* ▶️ Staying At The Worst Reviewed Hotel In My City (Los Angeles) • Brennen Taylor • 3.9M views

* ▶️ Staying at the WORST Rated Motel • Jake Webber • 2.1M views

* ▶️ Staying at the WORST REVIEWED HOTEL in LA • Marlin • 72k views

* ▶️ Staying at the WORST Reviewed Hotel in My City! • SAVONTE • 15k views

Last June, over a dozen of my neighbors were offered to stay at this motel for free through the State-funded, location-based “Encampment to Home” ERF-1 program, which targeted unhoused people living along CD4’s stretch of the LA River wash. It was easy for “River people” to quickly accept the offers, proceed to check-in and make themselves at home because they had slept in those beds before on purpose, and were possibly the only people who would gladly do it again.

Securing accommodations already known and frequented by the targeted population is extremely valuable in my experience.

As an unhoused person living within the targeted area, I should have benefited from this blessing. I was skeptical the first time I heard of the initiative to house River folks (my friend Kathleen was the first to tell me). Despite the obnoxious, squeamish young YouTube creators’ “detestimonials”, no one who stayed in the motel through the program had any complaints about their accommodations.

“I couldn’t even talk to my neighbor.”

—🔊 Audio interview (length: 12:08) of displaced River dweller

Grievances included isolation due to not being allowed to talk to neighbors or have family visit, being misunderstood by caseworkers, and being unable to access vouchers or subsidies through the program. There were also complaints that medical care and mental healthcare were not accessible. I personally have no complaints about the hotel shelter because I never stayed in it, as it closed before I ever got in.

A part of me wanted to see these investments turn out to be our saving grace.

In July, some of my unhoused neighbors were still settling in, but as summer turned into fall, they were thriving. But, like with our local Project Roomkey in 2020, I wasn’t one of the lucky ones who went inside right at the beginning.

I figured I could claim a recycled room as soon as someone moved into housing or I may get in another program as it felt like several similar programs were operating alongside each other: Project Homekey, Inside Safe, Roadmap, etc. The River Re-Housing funds were dried up by October. By November, the operation had wound down, with the chosen ones trickling back to where they started—outside, with me.

Despite all the obvious issues in the unpretentious green building, by far the biggest grievance I heard from former participants was resentment about being unexpectedly removed in December, and wanting to move back inside as soon as possible. They blamed themselves for not being able to consistently afford the ≈$100/night retail rate and constantly fell into arrears.

“There was an issue.”

CD4 senior advisor Sarah Tanberg admitted the Encampment to Home motel closure was botched, but blamed it on the motel owner. In an email dated 12/12/23, Tanberg said the displaced participants would be offered motel rooms again ASAP, then she went on an extended leave. The Inside Safe contract had been signed one week prior, so she may have thought they’d be invited inside again by outreach, but no outreach was seen until the second week of January, and they had no motel rooms to offer.

12/12/23

I wanted to get back to let you know I've received your requests. We will get back to you soon, hoping to have some documents to share with you and I will acknowledge there was an issue with the [motel] and [service provider] due to a miscommunication with the [motel] owner. Our team is working to get these folks matched with motel/ shelter rooms that are amenable to them ASAP

Will follow up soon

The City blamed the motel owner for a miscommunication, but it doesn’t make sense for him to self-sabotage his business. After hosting River dwellers for six months at a cost of $300k, he had signed a year-long Inside Safe contract at the beginning of December 2023, something I’d been personally advocating for. This $600k Inside Safe contract award didn’t feel like a victory, though, since it didn’t help anyone avoid displacement.

I later realized Zachary Millett in the City’s General Services Division, Real Estate section accidentally used a bad phone number on the contract. But when I got his real City cell phone number, he never wanted to talk to the owner of the motel or I. He always had to go and hasn’t responded to email…to be continued…

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🇻🇦 Citius, Altius, Fortius – Communiter.

🇫🇷 Plus vite, Plus haut, Plus fort – Ensemble.

🇬🇧 Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together.

— New* Olympic Motto (in Latin, French and English)

*In 2021, “together” was added to the end of the 1897 version.

With the swoop of famous Scientologist actor Tom Cruise, born in Syracuse, NY, and the passing of the flag to Mayor Karen Bass in Paris, France, a bevy of public officials, including Interim Police Chief Dominic Choi and Los Angeles City Council President Paul Krekorian, had traveled to ostensibly prepare for the games. The man in the middle, Chairman of LA28 Casey Wasserman, seemed confident, even as an exposé in the Daily Mail dogged his reputation over his alleged philandering, which was quickly met with denials as to the alleged activity.

They didn’t quite work, with famous pop singer Billie Eilish abandoning his public relations firm over the affair but still performing at the “hand-off” of the torch to LA, a very ceremonial occasion. Most people in Los Angeles didn’t care. They just wanted to know how the city, which hosted the Summer Games in 1932 and 1984, would be able to address such problems as traffic and, most importantly, the crisis of the unhoused, who line the streets, washes, and freeway underpasses. LA would, in fact, be breaking the record as the first triple-host City, but at whose expense? And what about those on the streets of the famed, now summer-gamed city?

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A world away, a gavel came down in a courthouse. It was the final move in the transfer of 29 properties that formerly comprised the Skid Row Housing Trust, casually called “The Trust," and Leo Pustilnikov, principal of SLH Investments among other entities and principally known for luxury real estate development, was coming away with 17 of them in total. A grand acquisition in Los Angeles was quite easily secured at low real estate pricing. In fact, a truly capitalistic haul in one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets for housing, with future plans unknown even in court.

According to the LA Times report by journalist Liam Dillon, in the hearing, Judge Stephen Goorvitch noted:

No formal opposition emerged to the sale

and, in an emphatic quote,

To put it in colloquial terms, something is better than nothing...

But I think this is a good something.

City officials backed the deal. Skid Row, the heart of extreme poverty in the USA, is home to an estimated 4,400 people experiencing homelessness, 2,695 of whom are unsheltered. In DTLA, where the average 2-bedroom apartment costs $3k/month to rent, will Pustilnikov follow laws that control rents on these buildings, protect them from demolition, and give tenants rights, such as relocation assistance, in the event of displacement? What incentive would he have to comply with unenforced municipal codes when it’s unlikely the City would try to retake properties they were willing to give away for practically nothing?

Decades ago, Skid Row had around 15,000 housing units in residential hotels or “boarding houses” (🇫🇷 garni in French), but half were demolished due to code violations in the 15 years leading up to LA84. Of the 6,000 or so that remained, one-third, or 2,080 units, were for a long time, controlled by The Trust, and recently two receivers, before 11 were sold to nonprofits and the final 17 buildings were secured by Pustilnikov at an impossibly low price of $19 million, net $10 million. If only low-income locals could access such spectacular deals as developers with portfolios like Pustilnikov.

So even as Wasserman appeared confident on NBC before the closing ceremony in Paris, the hard reality of life on the streets remained. Los Angeles may be able to host a “traffic-less” Olympics, but will it do anything in the end to alleviate persistent housing issues? Are things going any better in Paris or other twice-hosting Olympic cities? Paris is a lot like Hollywood in that it has long been a magnetic destination for ambitious people from all over the world to come seeking plentiful work, only to be run into the ground with little to show for their labor. In France, they have ended up living in 🇫🇷 zonards and 🇫🇷 bidonvilles, which are makeshift settlements on vacant public land made out of salvaged materials.

Plenty of Hollywood hopefuls end up in tents on the Boulevard, under the LA28 Hollywood sign, sometimes moving to Skid Row, but many of the people under highways and on sidewalks were legitimately housed in LA at some point before getting evicted or displaced. The idea of the chaotic-bad single male who came here from elsewhere is a trope that dates back to the LA32 era of hostility toward “Okies” and “Arkies” escaping the dust bowl from other states. The Great Depression was an era of expatriation during which mass expulsions of Mexican-American families occurred. Former OC Senator Joseph Dunn estimated there were approximately 1.8 million removed in the 1930s, the majority of whom were born in America.

Public sentiments against “others” gave police convenient covers for carrying out racial “removal” operations, such as a pre-LA32 raid at La Placita Park at the plaza near Olvera Street. On February 26th, 1931, at 3pm, the plaza was barricaded. Approximately 400 people were confronted by authorities from LAPD, the Border Patrol, and other jurisdictions who traveled to assist with the large-scale raid! They were forcibly transported to Mexico after they failed to produce satisfactory documents, and millions more got word of this thanks to cooperation from the complicit mainstream media (LA Times), Chambers of Commerce, and labor unions (The Fed). Many people voluntarily moved themselves, hoping to avoid the additional trauma of being “rounded up” in this terrifying manner before being indefinitely displaced into a strange, unfamiliar place.

The PR approach was strategic because forcibly transporting that many uncooperative people would have been unbelievably expensive, and they would have returned. But scaring people so deeply that they expelled themselves was cheap in comparison, and it worked better. Plus, the press must have felt important when the police handed them exclusive raid announcements to print. This was bad practice, though, as reporting the things that police want to happen as if they are gospel is working for the State. Journalists should challenge things that are wrong, especially if they can be changed, and simply accepting and announcing things on command isn’t great work.

The Greaser* Act in 1855 and Operation Wetback* in 1954 terrorized and removed the same population. But the Olympian hypocrisy of pretending to be apolitical in the name of sports while carrying out brutal sweeps introduced the use of sportswashing as a distraction, an excuse, and a cover-up. For this strategic reason, the Mexican expulsion of the early 1930s remains a relatively obscure event in history. LA County Supervisor Hilda Solis got an official apology while she was in Congress, and it was delivered while she was US Secretary of Labor, even though The Fed aided in the repatriation campaign. A memorial was installed at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes on the 81st anniversary of the La Placita raid in 2012. But the next President of the United States, Donald Trump, made promises that sounded exactly like everything the State of California had admitted was wrong and apologized for, to no one’s surprise. *slurs

The last LA32 cottage still stands in the plaza at Olvera Street! You can visit the La Placita raid memorial and the red-and-yellow painted souvenir shelter on foot, bicycle, scooter, etc. from Union Station during the day. Do you think it looks more homey than a Pallet Shelter?

Prior to 2024’s French Olympics, Paris last hosted the Olympics exactly 100 years ago, when the IIIVth Olympiad was held there. The 1924 Games in Paris featured a prototype for an “Olympic Village” where athletes and coaches would stay together.  8 years later, the Xth Olympiad was hosted in Los Angeles, which was then known as a remote

suburb of Hollywood.

People were languishing in cardboard shacks in many of the same places where encampments still persist today, albeit with colorful dome tents, tarps, and RV’s more so than salvaged boards and corrugated metal.

Anti-Olympics protesters took to Sacramento, chanting:

Groceries, not Games!  Olympics are Outrageous!

in objection to the $1 million State loan that enabled LA32. Despite the housing precarity and prevalent hunger affecting Angelenos, LA ran with the idea of an Olympic Village and, at a price of $400,000, constructed a development of 600 14‘x24’ two-bedroom cottages in Baldwin Hills, which were auctioned to VIPs as souvenirs (starting at $140 unfurnished, including free international shipping) following the event. From then on, it became an official requirement for all host cities to develop Olympic Villages as athlete accommodations, causing some of the biggest Olympic injuries in the past century.

For example, an abandoned village is still intact in Berlin from 1936’s “Nazi Olympics," where one cottage now serves as a shrine to Black American gold-medalist runner Jesse Owens. It’s taken nearly 100 years for an attempt to turn at least part of it into public housing to be considered. In a more recent example, Rio’s 2016 Olympic village displaced organic, thriving multigenerational communities like Vila Autodromo with parking lots and hastily erected 31 dangerous housing towers full of gas leaks, faulty alarms, “construction sites," wet plaster, faulty pipes, and rife with crime.

The tendency of athletes to “grin and bear it” and the media to take a generously forgiving approach when covering the Games does no one any favors except the top executives of the IOC themselves. The Olympics’ refusal to be political is problematic because it is an unhealthy fantasy. Pouring billions of dollars into a utopian tradition for the benefit of a handful of people who are so out of touch with reality that they orchestrated an elaborate international party using mostly volunteer labor during the Great Depression and then declined to join in the boycott of the Nazi Games because the Nazi’s had been “good sports” in the past is a good gauge of their priorities. This also puts political pressure on poor international athletes to make trips they can’t afford to try to keep their nations in the good graces of Olympic Hosts.

So what does this all mean for LA28? First, many have already expressed deep concerns, especially within the unhoused community, who fear institutionalization. Some have speculated that the Sears Mail Order Building in Boyle Heights, with developer Izek Shomof’s proposed “Life Rebuilding Center,” is back in play. Shomof, who last December published an effusive memoir, Dreams Don’t Die, through Simon & Schuster, partly to promote the project, clearly is not out of the picture. A successful developer of real estate on downtown’s Spring Street and beyond, Shomof recently bought the former headquarters of Union Oil from the San Francisco-based Swig firm at bottom-barrel pricing as a “re-development play," with The Real Deal journalist Isabella Farr reporting that it was a 47% loss for the firm as the downtown real estate market has cratered over the last decade. A lawyer for Shomof did not respond to a request for comment, and Pustilnikov famously takes pride in being shy.

All of which makes you wonder: if empty residential buildings can be obtained so cheaply in Los Angeles, how are so many people still on the streets? To be fair, Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program, centered around the usage of existing motel properties, has reported some minor successes. No one thinks that Los Angeles is out of the proverbial woods yet on homelessness, despite turning its nose at Governor Gavin Newsom’s Executive Order N-1-24 to clear encampments, including the potential use of arrests. If the French Revolution was stirred by the rabble’s disgust at the aristocracy, how long until Los Angeles again experiences significant unrest, like that in 2020 over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis or the beating of Rodney King in 1992?

This summer in France, ahead of the Olympics, activists sabotaged rail lines and phone lines, leading to one arrest. LA’s neighboring Long Beach, in the wake of Newsom’s edict and the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling concerning Grant’s Pass, Oregon, has already declared that it plans to use fines and even arrests to remove

its most problematic encampments.

Callousness is not likely to solve the problem of encampments. In Los Angeles, in a video posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, by People’s City Council activist Adam Smith, LAPD’s officers working in conjunction with the Department of Sanitation in Skid Row cleared encampments running over a reportedly “disabled houseless” man’s property with the sports utility vehicle. 

Asked for comment, LAPD Media Relations did not respond. Sent to the Office of Inspector General, it was forwarded to the Complaint Section:

for determination of any potential appropriate action.

The Mayor’s Office of Karen Bass did not respond to a request for comment on the video, nor did Councilmember Kevin De León, who, according to a report by Los Angeles Times journalist David Zahniser, has now funneled more than $600,000 from previously formed statewide campaign committees to save his council seat. De León faces challenger Ysabel Jurado in the November election, having barely survived the primary, burning his bridge with the powerful Izek Shomof, with the latter criticizing the former in his book for having spurned the proposed “Life Rebuilding Center” in Boyle Heights. 

What happens next with the Skid Row properties now under the ownership of Leo Pustilnikov just might be anyone’s guess. Some have speculated that he’s unlikely to want to keep the properties as low-income housing in one of the cities most economically challenged areas, with encampments lining the streets that allegedly devalue properties, although hard proof of that has yet to reveal itself. According to reporting in The Real Deal, the price per unit of The Trust buildings works out to $8,333 each for 1,200 of them at a net $10 million dollar price tag, another bargain-basement price. Pustilnikov and Shomof are well-known long-time business partners. As part of the total deal cost of $19 million, he will:

receive $9 million back to cover renovations and repairs.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation had considered buying the entire portfolio for $53 million, but balked at the repair costs, according to The Real Deal report, and moreover:

Eleven of the trust’s properties, mostly those newer and in better condition, have already been sold to nonprofit landlords.

Pustilnikov had sought a partnership with a nonprofit provider to continue services to the low-income residents, many of whom struggle with mental and other health issues, but that fell through in lieu of continuing public services to the residents. Shomof previously told Los Angeles Times journalist Gustavo Arellano about homelessness in Los Angeles and his proposed “Life Rebuilding Center”:

I’ve been in L.A. for over 50 years, and I’ve seen homeless here that long...It’s time for it to be corrected once and for all.

Undoubtedly, LA28 President Casey Wasserman lives a world away from Skid Row. No one will be running over his belongings with a vehicle, but just how far will the Olympic planners go to put a face on Los Angeles for prestigious visitors? The sight of the unhoused is something that has long been a troubling issue for the city, even as it is home to long-established media and fashion industries that are, in essence, anodyne, inoffensive. Seeing may be believing, but not always in Los Angeles!

The Olympic Motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (“Faster, Higher, Stronger”) was augmented in 2021 to “Citius, Altius, Fortius – Communiter.” (“Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together.”) But the Olympics are not bid on or decided together. It is an, obligation forced upon us that has consequences experienced by the most vulnerable among us. If the unhoused are the canaries in the coalmine of the City of LA, what does it mean when they are unsafe to exist in public without fear of arrest? We don’t have to accept LA28, which is wholly indifferent to those it will displace. 

Asked for comment on the Games’ position toward the unhoused, a representative for LA28 did not respond. Nor did representatives of Council President Paul Krekorian or Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, both of whom traveled to Paris for the games, but after all, it’s just another long, hot week in August in Los Angeles. LA28 is scheduled to host it’s Opening Ceremony on:

July 14, 2028, with the Games running through July 30, 2028, and the LA28 Paralympic Games will kick off August 15, 2028, and close August 27, 2028.

In the group press release announcing the dates, CEO Casey Wasserman said:

LA is an ambitious city of endless possibilities and the Games will reflect our community.

Moreover, with pride:

Los Angeles will provide the perfect backdrop to host the biggest cultural, sporting and entertainment event in the world.

📝 How New York City Won the Olympics

📝 Empire on the Seine: Surveillance, Citizenship, and North African Migrants in Paris (1925–1975)

📖 Dreams Don't Die by Izek Shomof

▶️ Twitter Video of LAPD from Skid Row posted by Adam Smith

🔗 Who’s going to the Paris Olympics? Plenty of L.A. politicians

🔗 French police arrest ultra-left activist over pre-Olympics railway sabotage as new incident hits phone lines

🔗 Casey Wasserman, 50 - the married LA 2028 Olympics chief and music mogul behind Billie Eilish and Coldplay - is a 'serial cheater' who slept with a string of female staff

🔗 Billie Eilish Dumps Casey Wasserman After Scandal Over Extramarital Affair

🔗 Casey Wasserman promises 2028 Los Angeles Olympics will show 'the best of what L.A. is' 

🔗 Sale of massive Skid Row homeless housing portfolio approved by judge

🔗 Leo Pustilnikov to acquire 17 Skid Row buildings in LA for $10M

🔗 More Housing and Services in Skid Row

🔗 Kevin de León faces a tough reelection bid. But campaign money isn’t a problem so far

🔗 Swig finds new bottom with DTLA office sale at $94/sf

🔗 Homeless people will face fines, possible arrest in Long Beach crackdown, city official says

🔗 LA28 ANNOUNCES OFFICIAL DATES FOR THE LA28 OLYMPIC AND PARALYMPIC GAMES

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

“Turn it into a homeless shelter!” went out as a popular cry as soon as the abandoned Oceanwide Plaza towers sandwiched between Flower and Figueroa Streets gained attention after being visibly graffitied overnight last Groundhog’s Day. Billionaire former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso had another vision, wanting to turn it into

workforce housing, which is sorely needed for our teachers, firefighters and police.

Caruso similarly concluded that it would be economically unviable to complete, having evaluated the project previously after its abandonment in 2019 following the developers and investors going bust after spending $1 billion on the project.

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Now a mystery buyer has emerged with an estimated $500 million bid and an estimated $800 million needed to finish the building, which was supposed to be only $50 million from completion when contractors brought it to court the first time construction halted. The truth is that Oceanwide Plaza is a terrible model for a homeless shelter. Much like Izek Shomof’s proposed Life Rebuilding Center at the Boyle Heights Sears building, it would be a mega-shelter, an “institution” in every sense. Now as Mayor Karen Bass, victorious over Caruso, heralds a slight statistical drop in the annual count of the unhoused, we ask:

What is the model for success here in Los Angeles to address this crisis of the unhoused? 

In fact, Rooflesser, herself unhoused, during the first City Adminstrative Officer’s Homeless Strategy Committee meeting held since March, asked this very question, only to be told curtly at the end of her comment that her “time had expired”.

The convening of this group, comprised of City Administrative Officer Matthew W. Szabo, Chief Legislative Analyst Sharon M. Tso, CD4 Councilmember Nithya Raman (who also chairs the City Council’s Homelessness and Housing Committee), and Lourdes Castro Ramírez, Chief Housing and Homeless Officer for the Office of the Mayor, is where the proverbial rubber hits the ground.

Even more than the Federal Courthouse, much less the Chambers of Judge David O. Carter, where the so-called LA Alliance hearings have taken place to great attention, this meeting of bureaucrats and one-elected is critical to guiding the City’s progress, including in coordination with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority ("LAHSA"), the regional planning body to address the declared emergency crisis, as a joint powers authority ("JPA") with the County of Los Angeles. Following Governor Gavin Newsom’s executive order 24-1-N, subsequent to the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the unhoused could be swept away, even incarcerated, no matter the availability of beds, the pressure was clearly on to demonstrate that short-term success could in fact generate some long-term results after a flurry of spending as part of the Mayor’s Inside Safe program and Proposition HHH, approved by city voters in 2016. 

The City and County’s settlement with the LA Alliance for Human Rights, a business lobby group registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, despite appearing to engage in little actual charitable giving. It was founded in large part by Shomof, has been principally represented in court by the law firm Umhofer, Mitchell & King LLP, with partner attorneys Matthew Umhofer and Elizabeth Mitchell leading the legal charge. Needless to say, they don’t like our questions and comments about the group, which has successfully argued in court that the government has acted in “bad faith” in dealing with seeking $6.4 million in legal fees from Judge Carter, coming away with $725,000 in closed session from the taxpayers for having successfully litigated the case they voluntarily initiated. For $600,000, an entire motel in Rooflesser’s neighborhood was supposed to host Inside Safe for the entire year of 2024, but since it never got off the ground, it will likely be forced into foreclosure.

Clearly, the firm is not happy with us reporting this or creating even a little chaos in the courtroom by having whistleblower Patrick Wizmann enter our reporting into evidence, much less suggesting that Shomof, the so-called “King of Spring Street” has engineered a sort of coup d’etat. Having previously emailed with Mitchell only to get a negative response, this time following the Supreme Court’s ruling regarding the City of Grants Pass reversing prior restraint, Newsom’s imperial directive to clear encampments, and the response from the City and County that essentially they could go kick rocks, as they say, running away. Rooflesser and Zachary Ellison took the only path available, letting Mitchell know publicly on LinkedIn that we disagree with her assertion of “bad faith” and that we’re not sure the LA Alliance truly has the best intentions toward the unhoused. 

Soon, our LinkedIn profiles were checked by a brand manager for the law firm, and our comments were swiftly deleted from the platform for some digital silencing, law firm style! How conveniently we were disposed of with a few clicks! Promptly, the firm heralded an award to Umhofer and Mitchell from the publication Lawdragon for having “been recognized by Lawdragon as 2024 Leading Civil Rights & Plaintiff Employment Lawyers” because, as the firm claims on their website:

At the time we filed the lawsuit, three or more people were dying on the streets of Los Angeles every day…[and] the judiciary had a critical role to play in solving this crisis.

This number actually doesn’t seem to have gone down; in fact, according to a recent report from The Guardian, the numbers are likely going up as the fentanyl crisis spreads among drug users and more people under pressure from increasing health costs and mental illness rates end up on the streets. 

The high-powered opioid is now so present in street drugs like heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and fake pills, meaning that among the 2,000 unhoused people who died in the nation’s most populous County according to the report by journalists Sam Levin and Will Kraft, the rate is now

an average of nearly six deaths a day of people living on the street or in shelters in the nation’s most populous county.

This is no time for self-congratulating victory laps. We agree with former Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin, himself the target of intense criticism for his empathy, that, as he recently wrote about Governor Newsom, so many critics like the LA Alliance have

made it sound like public officials were to blame for homeless encampments because they refused to displace people, not because they failed to house people.

Moreover, as Bonin notes about Newsom,

Like so many other public officials who promote sweeps, his goal is not to solve the problem; it is to make it appear as if he is doing so.

Rooflesser and Zachary Ellison both tried to bring our best listening abilities to yesterday’s Homelessness Strategy Committee, but the two words we heard most were robust in regards to the public housing portfolio and alignment in regards to the need to create standardized costs between the motel rooms purchased through Inside Safe, Pallet Shelter sites, and more traditional shelter models like A Bridge Home.

Alarmingly, only 17% of Inside Safe participants have secured housing, taking them off the street.

The City claims the housing is permanent, but most of these exits are subsidized by Rapid Re-Housing ("RRH").  RRH, also called “time-limited subsidy (TLS)” is a favored homelessness intervention because the City and County have an agreement on the proportions they’ll each cover, a major accomplishment because these entities struggle to work out the details on pretty much anything else.  Also, since 2013, HUD has allowed local Continuums of Care like the Greater LA CoC600/LAHSA to classify exits on RRH/TLS as permanent housing (PH) placements, despite RRH’s other name, TLS, having time-limited right in it! 

Many of these beds are in shared rooms in halfway houses, sober living communities, and SHARE! They lack oversight to prevent tenant abuse. People frequently leave and avoid all future “assistance” from housing service providers, making these desperate exits look just like success, at least on paper. A disappointing 83% return to the streets! In no small part because the wait time to go from a motel room to transitional housing is 64 days and 252 days to go from temporary facilities into permanent housing! Mega-shelters like Oceanwide Plaza or the Sears Project would be exceptionally difficult to police while making people feel safe within their confines. 

Perhaps that is why the Sears Project is supposed to contain an LAPD substation right inside of its campus, according to renderings on Izek Shomof’s website. LAPD no longer seems to be able to visibility guard the abandoned three towering Huizar-era husks opposite the Crypto.com arena. LAPD Media Relations declined to confirm that the prior 24/7 deployment of 5-7 officers at taxpayer expense had ended, responding that

The Department does not discuss [the] deployment of officers at a location. We continue to monitor Oceanwide Plaza.

Previously, an LAPD commander, in coordination with Media Relations indicated:

There is no date on when the special detail will end and private security will be hired. There is an on-going working group headed by the Mayor’s office staff.

Council had voted 13-0 to end the deployment, and now there is opacity?

Can you imagine how many LAPD officers it would take to secure a mega-shelter? Even if there is no single model, the idea of warehousing should be as clearly denounced as County Supervisors, the “Five Queens” recently did with the idea of jailing people for living on the streets. At the Tuesday meeting for the LA County Board of Supervisors, agenda items #1 and #2 had to do with criminalizing homelessness, and #3 was about closing Men’s Central Jail. While Sheriff Luna did a little bit of humming and hawing back and forth about LASD’s stance on arresting unhoused people, he ultimately made a pretty firm declaration that he does not and would not be using the County’s jails to house homeless people. But then, during item #3 Sheriff Luna said LA County would need a new jail if MCJ were to close and tried to turn the long-anticipated jail closure into a jail replacement conversation!

About items #1 and 2, criminalization of homelessness, Sheriff Luna said the Supreme Court decision may allow for arrests and jailings but that there would be no change in protocol. This was reassuring to many in the room, but left unanswered questions, such as whether or not LAPD’s old practice of ticketing the unhoused for “quality-of-life” crimes like napping and then rounding them up on “failure to appear” charges (since their court dates are sent through the mail and scheduling requires calling the courthouse with the mailed ticket information, making it impossible for houseless people to navigate) would be resurrected. It remains to be seen what changes, if any, LAPD will be implementing as a result of SCOTUS’ 6-3 decision in Gloria Johnson v. Grant’s Pass, Oregon. A request for LAPD’s updated Standard Operating Procedures and any new memos about “quality-of-life” enforcement remains open.

Most importantly, our political leaders must do more to listen to voices like Rooflesser’s who have current lived experience. Leaders have demurred on bringing their voices to the table, even when ordered to, because, sadly, they think they know better. Doesn’t it make so much more sense to ask people what they want? What would get them off the streets and into housing rather than dumping them into a motel room with questionable levels of service and care, much less a mega-facility? If Los Angeles has the worst crisis in the nation, isn’t it possible to come up with the best solution? Sometimes it seems like nobody is listening.

Zachary Ellison recently saw a small moment of compassion on his way downtown at Martin Luther King Boulevard and Figueroa Street near the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, now named for United Airlines. An African-American woman, presumably unhoused and roofless herself, sat by the road in a blanket, looking dazed. A driver stopped their car and reached out to hand her a $10 bill so she could eat. Why is the only assistance that is actually working these days these meager funds that kind people put directly into the hands of the affected? How are the millions and billions handed down by the State and Federal governments getting intercepted out of the hands of those who need it?

You can find many more people like the blanketed woman in the shadows instead of sitting in the morning sun under overpasses, in alleyways, or struggling openly in the streets, but the solution is always compassion, never cruelty. Even as we know that sanitation is a challenge, simply ordering people to go away never works, whether done by a judge or governor. If you ask us, corporations and aristocrats should be lining up to offset public funding to meet this crisis just as quickly as public officials seem to be moving to end it before the planned 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Shouldn’t we want to put on our true best face for the world rather than just make-up? Offer people meaningful care in a safe place where they won’t be victimized further, and they’re going to be more likely to take it, and surely that will be more cost-effective than imprisoning them or just sweeping people from place-to-place. 

As former Councilmember Bonin wrote,

Confronting the homelessness crisis demands real leaders.

No one begrudges Mayor Karen Bass or Council President Paul Krekorian a free trip to Paris to see the world’s greatest athletes perform, but we only wish just as much attention would be paid to service providers for the unhoused. LAHSA insists that the critical aspect of breaking the crisis is more housing navigators. They may be implying that the City has taken all of the County’s housing navigators for Inside Safe, which is not untrue. Let’s start celebrating case workers and housing navigators who are working to get people into sustainable housing solutions, like we celebrate our favorite athletes like LeBron James.

One thing is for sure, no one is dominating the Olympics by eating a diet of ramen noodles. Thankfully, someone got through to Controller Kenneth Mejia’s “‘waste fraud and abuse’ hotline,” according to the LA Public Press report by journalist Elizabeth Chou, which in turn led investigators from the office to determine that the provider wasn’t just doing this once a day, but that, as they reiterated this in a follow-up request:

We observed that the service provider was providing Inside Safe residents with instant ramen for nearly every meal.

This finding isn’t an anomaly. If Inside Safe has been funded with over half a billion dollars of public money and unhoused participants are lucky to get a 25-cent lump of noodles, it’s no wonder the more funding goes to homelessness, the worse it gets.

It’s unclear if the Inside Safe provider will be prosecuted for “contractor fraud” or if they’ll be found guilty, as surely as the LA Alliance has sought to prosecute the government for failing to check the crisis in the first place. The era of turning a blind eye to our own humanity on the streets of Los Angeles must end. It’s not just the embarrassment or the eyesore that you notice in the streets, but the routine lack of compassion.

One thing is for sure: the City of Los Angeles can do much better than barely one Homeless Strategy Committee meeting a month. They now plan to hold a special meeting in advance of the next scheduled date on September 5. Councilmember Nithya Raman was reluctant to bring the data at this time to a full Council meeting, suggesting at one point that discussion was needed “offline.” We disagree; not only is the state’s Brown Act still in force, but clearly more meetings and more voices are needed, or the City and County will continue to flail, just like LAHSA. 

The County may have 4 different departments involved in its efforts, but that’s no excuse. There is no more important issue for the City to address at this time. This affects policing, it affects firefighters, it affects schools, and it affects the budget. No one wants to see money thrown into the wind; instead, we want to see people off the streets, when they are ready, into a safe situation. Undoubtedly, not everyone out there is cogent or lucid, and yes, mental illness is a real problem. This is all the more reason to ensure that service providers are being properly monitored, and there is no excuse for the overuse of restraints. Similarly, closing down a successful hospital program that may be a model for care, as recently happened in Boyle Heights at Los Angeles General Medical Center, formerly LAC-USC Medical Center, and folding its participants into the County Department of Mental Health is not ideal, as Los Angeles Times journalist Emily Alpert Reyes recently reported. 

A recent visit to a Department of Mental Health contracted facility suggested that severe understaffing was a problem, including a lack of security personnel, which led to nurses being threatened and assaulted, as well as a lack of on-site psychiatrists, which diminished quality of care. They are seeing hundreds of patients weekly, so monitoring individual progress and ensuring that medications are appropriately prescribed and monitored becomes impossible. The widespread use of 3-day 5150 holds and 14-day 5250 holds and the elimination of some Riese hearings, which gave patients a chance to object to forced medications, will not be solutions for the unhoused, as they have been touted in media and legislative sessions. Even when used exactly as intended, 5150 and 5250 provide a bed for 0-3 and up to 14 days, respectively, and new legislation allowing for more liberal use of these holds does nothing to make more people safer.

People have rights, but mental health facilities cannot double as “hotels” for homeless people, much less as permanent housing. In fact, LA County’s DMH-HOME teams will often try to avoid using W & I § 5150 and 5250 at all costs because it breaks trust and unnecessarily traumatizes their clients, sometimes permanently severing the relationship. Once people are stabilized, they need to be discharged to long-term care facilities if needed or to affordable housing with wraparound services. The housing administered by DMH-HOME can run as low as $66/month in cost to the tenant!  If people could access deeply affordable housing without interventions that give them PTSD and suicidality that they didn’t have before, wouldn’t that be ideal?  To be clear, people are NOT accessing deeply affordable housing through involuntary hospital stays, but sometimes people may initiate stays thinking it’s for someone’s own good and that it may connect them to the housing they need.  That’s not how it works.

None of this was on the Homelessness Strategy Committee’s mind as they went over the numbers. Clearly, the goals set out by the LA Alliance settlement won’t be met just because the City and County were again taken to court. We can only hope that audits will be completed and the missing funds will be appropriately accounted for, perhaps as $200 million dollars, but that alone won’t stop more spending, much less waste, fraud, and abuse. Perhaps leadership should put some skin in the game and take people into their own homes if beds can’t be secured. 

Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano wrote in describing the demise of local journalism that

L.A.’s heartbreak industry isn’t Hollywood; it’s journalism.

We don’t disagree, and as Arellano said,

To paraphrase what the late A. Bartlett Giamatti said about baseball, it's designed to break the hearts of those who work it.

Sadly, the same is true for social workers. LA and Hollywood must do better for the unhoused and those who seek to uplift. We can’t litigate our way out of this crisis. Continuing to try to do so will only lead to more frustration and failure. The answer is better policy solutions with input from more people, not simply tense discussions in small groups inside Los Angeles City Hall. Yes, we can!

🔗 Rick Caruso Tweet RE: Oceanwide Plaza 

🔗 Graffiti towers: What should be done with the DTLA building

🔗 Stalking horse offers $500M for abandoned Oceanwide Plaza in DTLA

🔗 Change In LA: Homelessness Down In City of L.A. for First Time In Years Following Urgent Action Taken By Mayor Bass and Partners

🔗 City of Los Angeles Homelessness Strategy Committee

🔗 L.A. should pay $6.4 million for slow action on cleaning homeless camps, judge is told

🔗 L.A. agrees to pay up to $2.2 million for outside audit of homelessness programs

🔗 After high court ruling, L.A. County supervisors to reaffirm policy against jailing homeless people

🔗 Homelessness: A $3 Billion Win

🔗 Revealed: 300% surge in deaths of unhoused people in LA amid fentanyl and housing crises

🔗 Tough Talk, Bad Policy

🔗 LA council moves toward hiring private security at graffiti-covered high-rises in downtown

🔗 Some “Inside Safe” residents fed only instant noodles, LA city controller says

🔗 L.A. General is closing a mental health clinic. Longtime patients worry about the move

🔗 Column: L.A.’s ultimate heartbreak industry isn’t Hollywood. It’s local journalism

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 #LAAlliance lawsuit. We hope to expose the inner workings of the government real estate development world and the impact felt by the people residing there.

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On Friday April 1, 2022, former Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez, former Mayor Eric Garcetti, Attorney Elizabeth Mitchell for the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, and Councilmember Kevin de León held a press conference in LA City Council chambers to announce a settlement to force the City to address homelessness through providing housing.

The L.A. Alliance started out as just a small group of fed up people, community members, residents, homeless, housed, business owners, factory workers, service providers, non-profit organizations, all coming together to say, this is enough, this crisis needs to end, people are dying.

Mitchell says after saying the group’s “message” had spread like “wildfire.” Kinda, you could say?

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Mitchell says joyously:

It’s now a large group of fed up people.

The case was back in court on Monday March 18, 2024 after the Alliance failed in its initial effort to secure a $6.4 million dollar fine against the City and County of Los Angeles for failing to meet the terms of the settlement. Mitchell also made no mention of real estate developer Izek Shomof who co-founded the 501(c)(3) group and discusses hiring Mitchell in his new book Dreams Don’t Die from Simon & Schuster. According to a source report from whistleblower Patrick Wizmann, brother-in-law to Shomof who attended the latest hearing, that fine still isn’t happening, but Judge David O. Carter still said Mitchell’s firm Umhofer, Mitchell & King LLP “deserve to be paid for their work”.

A figure for the legal fees remains to be set, but headlining the proceedings was current Mayor Karen Bass presumably testifying to the fidelity of the City in meeting the terms of the settlement, which the Alliance has alleged was done in “bad faith.” In response to the Alliance’s claim, Deputy Mayor for communications Zach Seidl said:

Since Day 1, Mayor Bass has moved with urgency to save lives and bring unhoused Angelenos off the streets leading to thousands more Angelenos coming inside last year than the year before.

Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez, who only months ago barged into a closed-door meeting with Judge Carter and attorneys for the Alliance, presumably Elizabeth Mitchell and Matthew Umhofer, said:

Until we can verify what each level of government is doing to solve the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time, I cannot say with certainty that we have an efficient and effective operation free of redundancies.

Where the money went is the big question, a reported $600 million dollars for which invoices are not to be found in sight, as Carter has called not only Bass in for testimony regarding, but also Council President Paul Krekorian and Controller Kenneth Mejia. Representing City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto was Scott Marcus, a top deputy, and according to Patrick Wizmann, Scott Marcus seemed to want a smaller auditing firm. How fast it will happen is uncertain, but Judge Carter was clear the agreement to house 60% of the unhoused in each council district would move forward, reportedly declaring that it’s “still valid” in seeking to balance the public interest with his prior ruling in favor of the Alliance’s claim to be acting in the best interests of the city. This has come amidst intense debate about whether this limited goal is even possible in Los Angeles.

According to data charts titled “Alliance Project Pipeline” obtained using the California Public Records Act, the City is still short 4,365 housing units with 12,915 in progress, with the biggest deficits being in Rodriguez’s CD 7, that of KDL in CD 14, and CD 9 held by Curren D. Price. Similarly, the CPRA produced an exchange between Cristian Tafoya, homelessness deputy for Rodriguez, inquiring (presumably before she charged the judge’s chamber) only to be told:

the matter is still under discussion with the court.

According to Wizmann, Judge Carter may fear being overturned again if he were to take any broad strokes to shift the goals. Having previously controversially ordered, “Offer everyone on Skid Row housing within six months” in April 2021, before being overturned by the Ninth Circuit. 

Judge Carter is famously known for his prior handling of the O.C. Catholic Worker “OCCW” v. Orange County Cities case, which is the model for at least 20 similar related lawsuits. Shomof talks about this in his book, writing that he visited Bill Taormina’s Life Rebuilding Center and:

When I walked through the facility with Bill and my sons Jonathan and Jimmy, the homeless people who were there getting help continuously thanked Bill for what he had done for them.

Shomof hired Mitchell for the Alliance, according to the book, and he wants to transform the abandoned Sears Mail Order building into his own Life Rebuilding Center within KDL’s District 14. At the 2022 press conference announcing the agreement De León after quipping back to Mitchell who says:

‘KDL’ has been ‘reduced to an acronym’.

He says:

The settlement should come as a relief to taxpayers…

because of the lack of return on investments, particularly Measure H, which allocated “$355 million a year for the next 10 years”.

The City of LA has no mental health department of its own, instead it’s LA County that’s needed and so despite Judge Carter ordering an MOU be created between the two governmental agencies, the status of that remained unclear.  According to the City News Service report by Fred Shuster, an:

April 4 hearing was also set to discuss the county's efforts to meet its deadlines.

Carter is assisted by “Special Master” Michele C. Martinez, who is the former Mayor Pro Tem of Santa Ana in Orange County, whose efforts with the OCCW case against Orange County and its Cities has now led her to work for Carter, for which she refuses to accept a salary according to a 2021 Forbes Magazine story by journalist Allison Noralian. Martinez has listed on her public LinkedIn profile, another position as:

People First Project Management Consulting Firm for Emergent P4 Advisors

and teaches government as an Adjunct at Santiago Canyon College.

Lawsuits like these have the potential to corner local governments and force them with litigation to take bold and decisive actions. Settlement demands are presumed to be fulfilled under the threat of returning to court and hashing out disagreements in an actual jury trial, should any party fail to keep up their end of the bargain. In this case, it’s not really clear what the standing L.A. Alliance has to make these demands, but nothing they asserted really got challenged. Discovery won’t happen without a trial, and the case is settled for now. Shomof writes in Dreams Don’t Die that in 2019 he approached then Mayor Eric Garcetti and:

his team looked at me and told me that they had no answers

about homelessness before declaring:

You are leaving me no other option than to file a lawsuit against the city to make you deal with the homeless.

Garcetti and his staff don’t discourage Shomof from creating the Alliance and hiring Mitchell to litigate it out. 

In his April 2022 remarks in City Hall chambers, Garcetti says he put together a

billion dollars together into a budget, a justice budget, to say will look for every dollar we can find, but we don’t want any other money, whether it’s mental health money at the County, whether it’s State surplus, whether it’s Federal ambitions, to lie there in a bank account, while people are lying on our streets.

Garcetti now serves as U.S. Ambassador to India after a long confirmation process following President Joseph R. Biden’s nomination. Perhaps Judge Carter should recall Garcetti from abroad for questioning about the missing funds, that might be even faster than an audit. From California Public Records Act requests, we know that Michele C. Martinez sets phone and in-person meeting appointments with L.A. City Council members like CD4’s Nithya Raman over Signal App, and:

He doesn’t like zoom . [sic]

from a December 2019 invitation to meet the judge extended following her election.

It appears that Nithya Raman was almost late for a meeting on March 10, 2022 to discuss the litigation. Raman is known for being critical of the City’s approach to the crisis. Michele C. Martinez messages her:

Great chatting with you. I know you have not spoken to the LA Alliance for Human Rights but if you want to connect with them . I am sure, I can connect you with them or your COS.

Martinez continues:

Many of your other colleagues have spoken with them

having explained that Judge Carter

makes himself available as he has to other members of the city council.

It’s not clear if Kevin de León has had a closed door meeting with Carter, or if the Judge would even want to see him. Izek Shomof certainly doesn’t, their relationship having soured over KDL’s late objections to his homeless shelter conversion proposal for the Sears Building. Michele Martinez did not return an email request for comment by Ruth.

According to Shomof in his book Dreams Don’t Die:

The lawsuit and the Life Rebuilding Center were completely separate issues and had nothing to do with each other, though they both centered on the city’s homeless problem.

Shomof clearly has met with Judge Carter from the book, so it’s unclear why he’s so despondent except that he doesn’t like the robust debate because he writes about how after hearing KDL on the LA Fed Tapes:

The end result was that those who opposed the Life Rebuilding Center had a loud voice, and our elected officials were listening to them more than to reason.

Shomof further writes in explaining his view:

That is why it appears that the Life Rebuilding Center is unlikely to see the light of day.

Shomof reportedly needs $200 million more to renovate the building, if there’s $600 million dollars in suspect spending, perhaps he should be investing in the city’s audit. It’s unclear if Shomof agrees with the allegation made by the Alliance that the city has operated in “bad faith.”

While it may be easy to be cynical about politics, and whether the probable billions of dollars spent to address homelessness in Los Angeles are well-spent, the LA Alliance Hearings if nothing else promise at least the idea of good government. Respected legal journalist Meghann Cuniff was more doubtful at the courthouse to cover the trial of former Garcetti Deputy Mayor Raymond Chan who conspired with former Councilmember José Huizar to accept $1.5 million dollars in bribes from developers.

Writing on X, formerly known as Twitter, Cuniff wrote bluntly:

The biggest accomplishment of the homeless lawsuit hearing today seems to be angering the courthouse security who have to cater to that power-soaked ego party all day.

Cuniff then declares:

Ray Chan’s corruption trial is absolutely a much better use of federal taxpayer dollars.

The trial of Raymond Chan is supposed to last for a few weeks. According to journalist David Zahniser of The Los Angeles Times, Assistant U.S. Atty. Brian R. Faerstein told jurors:

[Chan] got bribes for himself, and he got bribes for other public officials.

Counsel John Hanusz representing Chan in his second trial, and the final expected one from Operation Casino Loyale says in Chan’s defense:

‘He rolled out the red carpet’ for real estate development. ‘And this city benefited.’

The amount of unaccounted for money being spent on homelessness programs dwarfs the bribes that Huizar and his friends took. The FBI has declined a Freedom of Information Act request for files related to Izek Shomof and the investigation, who according to Patrick Wizmann was interviewed as part of the investigation. Shomof was one of the biggest beneficiaries of Adaptive Reuse, which permitted the conversion of historic buildings into modern retail, lofts and penthouse apartments.

According to the Zahniser report, Ray Chan and José Huizar:

used the downtown real estate boom of the prior decade to enrich themselves and their allies.

Part of that meant moving the significant homeless population away from the commercial core of downtown Los Angeles and back fully into Skid Row, which has the nation’s highest concentration of unhoused people. Izek Shomof says:

If the Life Rebuilding Center had still been a viable option, it could have provided most of these services and even saved the city a ton of money.

In a television interview with Siyamak Khorrami from November 3, 2023, Shomof said about homelessness on California Insider:

It’s wild, it’s bad, it’s getting out of control, and it needs to be addressed. So I came up with a solution.

Shomof further says:

I’m a successful human being but it's time to give back to society, give back to the people.

Presumably Shomof means the Life Rebuilding Center here and not the LA Alliance, and of course Huizar or Nury Martinez is never mentioned in Dreams Don’t Die, nor is Ray Chan. Martinez was essential to the Shomof Groups’ real estate portfolio growth.

A 2016 Real Deal interview by journalist Cathleen Chen with outgoing Central City Association founder Carol Schatz mentions Ray Chan, crediting him with the “Restaurant and Hospitality Express [Program]” and also summarizing the presumptive financial situation on downtown investment redevelopment boom. “We had wonderful developers: Tom Gilmore, Izek Shomof, Cedd Moses, Andrew Meieran, Homer Williams, Geoff Palmer — all these people spent millions not knowing whether they’d get it back,’ Schatz tells Chen about the dynamic. Shomof isn’t planning to retire anytime soon from the real estate business, in his interview with Siyamak Khorrami, he declares:

People are asking me when I’m going to retire, when I’m going to die.

Undoubtedly, Shomof will keep pushing for the Boyle Heights project!

It’s unclear how much time Izek Shomof has spent working with the unhoused, and other than his tour with Taormina it’s hard to know if he understands just what he’s getting into other than getting them off the streets and away from businesses. The frustration with the overall situation is evident throughout the interview. Perhaps though the solution isn’t to be found in litigation, or government planning, sweeps, services or even in Judge Carter’s courtroom. Unsurprisingly, Patrick Wizmann hasn’t seen Shomof at the Courthouse recently, but he believes that Shomof is acting under “false pretenses” in pushing for both the LA Alliance and the proposed Life Rebuilding Center. Patrick Wizmann plans to return with more copies of Izek Shomofs’ book Dreams Don’t Die in the hopes that people will see the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Can everyone be taken off the streets? Probably not, but doing so humanely matters, and in moving forward the books need to not only be checked by the judge, but the conversation needs to be expanded from more people than Izek Shomof and the LA Alliance to include more representatives of the unhoused community. Advocates shouldn’t be ignored, nor does everyone want to move into a shelter, and how we get to having permanent housing for everyone, and not just shelters is bigger than any one mega-project could ever handle. The next LA Alliance Hearing is scheduled with Judge David Carter for April 4.

Proposition 1

Governor Gavin Newsom’s signature proposal to address the crisis remained too close to call, with 166,000 votes remaining to be counted by April 5. The Los Angeles Times called the race with 50.2%, but the results won’t be certified until April 12. What happens next?

📼 LA Alliance Press Conference 4/1/22

📕 Dreams Don't Die by Izek Shomof

🔗 Los Angeles offers independent audit of homelessness programs by City News Service on Daily News 3/8/24

🔗 City Faces Independent Audit of L.A.'s Homelessness Programs Spending by City News Service on Patch 3/18/24

🔗 Los Angeles settles sprawling lawsuit over homelessness crisis by Hillel Aron on Courthouse News 4/1/22

🔗 To Help End Homelessness In Her City, She Had A Radical Idea: Sue Us by Allison Norilan on Forbes 7/21/21

💬 Meghann Cuniff Tweet about ex-Deputy Mayor Ray Chan 3/18/24

🔗 Former L.A. deputy mayor goes on trial a second time in bribery and racketeering case by David Zahniser on LA Times 3/13/24

📼 How Housing Without Rehab Fails Los Angeles's Homeless (video has been made private)

🔗 Carol Schatz talks urban planning, oversupply and Downtown’s metamorphosis at large by Cathaleen Chen on The Real Deal 11/2/16

🗳️ Why does it take California so long to count votes? by Sameea Kamal on CalMatters 3/19/24

Ruth 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. She can sometimes be heard as an unhoused correspondent on SMOGLAND Radio, L.A. Public Press’ podcast or giving remote general public comment at L.A. City Hall.

Whistleblower Zachary Obama is an Independent Journalist in the Los Angeles area. Zach was most recently employed by the University of Southern California, Office of the Provost from October 2015 to August 2022 as an Executive Secretary and Administrative Assistant supporting the Vice Provost for Academic Operations and the Vice Provost and Senior Advisor to the Provost among others. Zach holds a Master’s in Public Administration and a Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Policy and Planning from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. While a student at USC, he worked for the USC Good Neighbors Campaign including on their newsletter distributed university-wide. Zach completed his B.A. in History at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon and was a writer, editor, and photographer for the Pasadena High School Chronicle. He was Barack Obama’s one-millionth online campaign contributor in 2008. Zach is a former AmeriCorps intern for Hawaii State Parks and worked for the City of Manhattan Beach Parks and Recreation. He is a trained civil process server, and enjoys weekends in the great outdoors.

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Solve homelessness

1. House person/family

2. Don’t evict*

3. Repeat

*important

In under five years, the City of Los Angeles has gotten fantastic at getting unhoused people to move into motel shelters quickly*.

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(I don’t think anyone has ever made the claim that moving unhoused people into prepaid motel rooms would be particularly difficult).

Unfortunately, the City has become even better at kicking people out of motels and interim housing without getting their hands dirty by withholding payments to motel owners, landlords and service providers.

Owners eventually grow tired of waiting for promised payments and begin to remove formerly homeless occupants in one way or another, usually with the help of the service provider (until they stop getting paid, too)—activating a series of lockouts, botched “transfers”, and allegations of behavioral violations designed to make people abandon or abscond from their doomed accommodations.

The chaotic cycle of interim shelter stays punctuated by inevitable terminations is a chronic state of displacement that many unhoused people have been stuck in for several years.

The ones who have remained in motel accommodations through multiple program transfers consider themselves the “lucky” ones to still be indoors. We don’t hear too much from the “unlucky” ones, who also consider themselves “lucky” not to be living under the trauma-triggering threat of “termination” any longer…but are now facing exposure to the elements again.

Back-to-back one-time grants propel a shelter placement-displacement cycle.

Emergency money always runs out eventually because interim shelter is so much more expensive than permanent homes, but permanent housing requires the commitment of secure, ongoing funding—not bursts of emergency aid.

Chronic homelessness isn’t like a closed highway or a wildfire. Chronic homelessness is an ongoing economic circumstance that manifests as visible encampments of unsheltered people who find creative ways to live within the same parameters that apply to all of us under capitalism.

Living outdoors long-term is a logical solution for people who can’t afford rent.

If the economy were better, there would be fewer people who find themselves in that situation, but not necessarily fewer homeless people than there are today. Many chronically homeless people (like me) have jobs and incomes that provide more than enough money to sustain our needs outside, but without a federal housing voucher, we won’t be able to afford to market rents for more than a few months in a row.

One-time grants without ongoing economic investment in keeping individuals out of homelessness is just throwing money on a fire to keep warm.

The government provides ongoing federal funding for permanently subsidized housing in the form of grants and vouchers for use on the private rental market. This is ongoing economic investment into getting and keeping individuals off the streets. But L.A. returns those grants and allows valuable housing vouchers to expire, unused. Meanwhile, a person perishes outdoors in L.A. every few hours.

After returning all those resources, our Mayor has the nerve to ask for more federal funding (more money to not spend) and our Councilpeople apply for one-time State ERF grants to implement more temporary shelter programs. Infuriatingly, those grants start with displacement of an “encampment” and terminate within months, usually just 30 days, long before permanent housing can be secured for anyone. Each State grant funds a full 360-degree revolution in the displacement cycle for everyone impacted. We saw this play out multiple times in 2021 in Venice with people cycling from Penmar to motel to Ocean Front Walk to motel and back outside. There were at least two ERF grants involved in those operations.

Let’s have a look at how some of this motel spending “checks out”. We know motels tend to be more expensive per night than renting, but they can be the only option for people who don’t have the qualifications to submit a winning rental application.

Shelter programs

All hotel/motel interim shelter programs operate in basically the same way. The main costs are for the shelter and the services provided by nonprofit service providers, who are sometimes aided by City and County agencies.

Variables:

• Rooms

• Nights

• Room rate

Budget:

Motel nights multiplied by program rate

• Motel nights:

Rooms multiplied by nights

• Shelter cost:

Motel nights multiplied by room rate

or

Budget minus services

• Program rate:

Budget divided by motel nights

or

Room rate plus services per diem

• Services:

Budget minus shelter cost

• Services per diem:

Program rate minus room rate

By analyzing the proportion between shelter cost and services, we can see where the bulk of the money is going whenever one of these “solutions” is initiated.

Encampment to Home (CD4 ERF grant)

Current budget (obtained from CAO via CPRA) 👇 

Budget = $1,750,000

• Rooms = 60

• Nights = 90

• Room rate = $120/night NOT including food

✍️ Determine the number of motel nights.

Motel nights = Rooms * nights

60 rooms * 90 nights = 5,400 motel nights

✍️ What is the shelter cost?

Shelter cost = Motel nights * room rate

5,400 * $120 = $648,000

✍️ Calculate the program rate.

Program rate = Budget / motel nights

$1,750,000 / 5,400 = $324

✍️ What portion of the budget is for services?

Services = Program rate  -  room rate

$324  - $120 = $204

$204 / $324 = 63%

💰The nonprofit operator of the E2H motel shelter program gets $204/day per room for providing “services”, or 63% of the program cost, while the motel gets 37% for providing the temporary shelter.

Inside Safe

Spending report #2 5/16/23

Budget* = $43,684,303.16

(*projected spending through end of FY23)

Note: Calculations assume the rate the City paid private motels is the same as the L.A. Grand rate ($154)

L.A. Grand Hotel + Private Motels

• Rooms = 481 + private motel rooms

• Nights = 150 (February 1st to June 30th)

• Room Rate = $154*/night including food

(*Room rate for L.A. Grand applied to private motels but could vary)

✍️ Determine the number of motel nights.

Motel nights = Rooms * nights

481 * 150 = 72,150 motel nights for L.A. Grand

22,437 (2/1 – 4/28) + 22,142 (4/29 – 6/30) = 44,579 in private motels

Total motel nights = 116,729

✍️ What is the shelter cost?

Shelter Cost = Motel nights * room rate

72,150 * $154 = $11,111,100 for L.A. Grand

44,579 * $154 = $6,865,166 for private motels

Total shelter cost = $17,976,266

✍️ Calculate the program rate.

Program rate = Budget / motel nights

$43,684,303.16 / 116,729 = $374

✍️ What portion of the budget is for services?

Services = Program rate  -  room rate

$374 - $154 = $220

$220 / 374 = 59%

💰At $374/room/night, with 59% going to the nonprofit and 41% going to food and shelter, Inside Safe at the LA Grand seems to pay slightly more for shelter ($154) than Encampment to Home ($120). However, this Inside Safe rate includes three meals/day, whereas E2H included $150/week for gift cards in the “services” rate. Participants at E2H reported only getting $50 food cards some weeks and not others, and towards the end of the program, they were told the nonprofit “ran out”.

How many rooms are in use right now?

So far, at least 1,590 people have entered Inside Safe. 1,043 people, or 66% were currently in motel rooms and participating in the shelter program, as of a September CAO report obtained via CPRA.

It’s unclear at this point whether the number of rooms is the same as the number of participants because there are probably couples in some rooms with one bed and there may also be families or friends sharing rooms with two beds. For simplicity, I am figuring 1 participant = 1 room.

The L.A. Grand Hotel has 487 rooms but six are reserved. There is a total of 671 beds in the Hotel. The rest of the Inside Safe rooms are being rented from private motels all around the City.

If you’re curious to know which motels, you can view the CAO’s Homeless Emergency Account in the City’s open checkbook. I made a Google Map of 25 motel shelter locations using the names on the paid invoices in the checkbook, but it’s possible it is not 100% accurate if there were missing invoices and/or multiple hotels in L.A. with similar names.

What is the average duration of stay in Inside Safe?

Since most people haven’t checked out yet, we can only calculate the average length of time people have been staying there so far. The average duration of Inside Safe participants’ stays so far is currently over 200* nights as of November. There hasn’t been a status report since September so unfortunately I can’t give more updated information.

206 nights = average duration of motel stay so far for nearly 1,000 Inside Safe participants who remain in motel rooms, including 35 L.A. Grand hotel legacy guests beginning 2/1/23; as calculated on 11/6/23. 99 participants that came from Winter Shelter Programs or outreach referrals were excluded from estimation because their specific check-in dates were unknown.

Please feel free to check my work!

Services

Services in both the State-funded E2H motel shelter program and the City-funded Inside Safe cost around $200/day, and they tend to be roughly twice as costly per diem as the motel room rate (but they don’t have to be).

ERF grants do not allow for any spending by municipal departments because the State won’t fund City services and execution of the operation should not require City employees to do additional work outside of the normal scope of their jobs. Since the City can add things like “extra work” by LASan, LAPD, and LADOT to their operations, because they are the ones paying for it, they usually do.

Unhoused Whistleblowers

I started a hotline on Google Voice at (818) 600-1846

If someone has an Inside Safe or interim hotel/motel shelter concern or grievance, they can tell me by texting or leaving a message.

I am NOT mobile and I AM POWERLESS TO HELP THEM.

My phone is not always charged and I have no influence with the City or nonprofits.

But I will try to advocate for them not to be evicted to congregate shelter or the streets.

The City should be doing this (and allowing phone-in comments on Homelessness and Housing Committee meetings) and hopefully the City Controller will take over it soon.

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