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 In approving a permanent source of revenue, voters chose the new Measure A and repealed Measure H, making permanent the increased sales tax along with changes to administration and oversight that will improve the management of funds.

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

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

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

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

The shifting sands of Los Angeles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“meetings from his car.”

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

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

“wanted to give them the option.”

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

“It’s important that we execute with urgency”

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

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

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

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

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

The only way we will be

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

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

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

“We have to avoid setting up for failure.”

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

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

LAHSA has a controversial new Chief Executive Strategist, Kris Fre...