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

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

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

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

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

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

Can LA wait that long?

Block-by-block

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

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

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

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

X owner Elon Musk recently stated:

“the word ‘homeless’ is a lie,”

calling it:

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

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

Bed-by-bed

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

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

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

United to House LA…but not until next year

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

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

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

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

ULA’s income assistance program to keep vulnerable tenants housed won’t begin until sometime next year. Meanwhile, without delivery of promised anti-displacement measures, evictions are overwhelming the Court and Sheriffs, with 1,453 unlawful detainers originating from within the City of LA over the Thanksgiving holiday between November 4th...