Podcast
Landless in Los Angeles
Hosted by Ruth @roofless · EN
Survival, justice and belonging for The Unhoused, 100% made in public
By Ruth @roofless, host of weekly X Displacement Spaces (Sundays 7pm PST), an ongoing discussion for and about global displacement and local housing and homelessness
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“Just for the record…”
Jan 4, 202500:22:32Tap to summarizeThe 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 In approving a permanent source of revenue, voters chose the new Measure A and repealed Measure H, making permanent the increased sales tax along with changes to administration and oversight that will improve the management of funds.The Los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.Thanks for reading roofless! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.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 AngelesLos 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 beMoney 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...
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“Vertical Integration” for the Unhoused
Dec 13, 202400:18:10Tap to summarizeLos 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.Thanks for reading roofless! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.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-blockThe 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-bedThe 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 yearThe 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...
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“Somehow at some point” Part 2
Dec 11, 202400:13:38Tap to summarize“Somehow at some point” parts 1 and 2 were originally published together by CityWatchLA in their newsletter on December 5th, 2024.I’m Ruth @roofless and I write about homelessness and housing in the City of Los Angeles. I’ve lived on the streets here continuously for seven years and first experienced displacement in 2003. I write a Substack series with USC whistleblower Zachary Ellison about the legal landscape of landlessness in LA. Zach has made himself a fixture in the courtroom of U.S. Judge David O. Carter, where major settlements affecting the unhoused like LA Alliance, addressing our civil rights and compelling “bed” creation, are enforced. In another settled lawsuit overseen by Carter, veteran plaintiffs led by Jeffery Powers sued the V.A. over illegal leases and insufficient housing at the West LA Soldiers’ Home.In part 1, I dove into the most recent Powers hearing and revisited a 2019 displacement of veterans from Echo Park which coincided with a near-cessation of veterans’ housing voucher awards. In part 2, I interrogate top-paid homeless advocates for aligning with gentrification goals over housing and healing and suggest a simple solution.The Raid on the LakeIn March 2021, two years after the 2019 closure of the Billets cottages and just one mile away, tranquil Echo Park Lake resembled somewhat of a war zone. LAPD swarmed in helicopters overhead and formations of riot cops unconstitutionally placed dozens of members of the press including L.A. TACO’s Lexis Olivier-Ray and Spectrum’s Kate Cagle in flexcuffs. They brutally concussed a housed civilian, putting them in the hospital and broke one protestor’s arm. LAPD’s raid of Echo Park Lake, which happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, ultimately displaced around 200 unhoused people, although some temporarily made it into shelter through Project Roomkey at the downtown L.A. Grand Hotel, three miles away, while people nearby in Skid Row were passed over for those same rooms. LAPD’s overkill response cost the City around $2M.Thanks for reading roofless! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.The closure was a violent, expensive and unnecessary show of force, decommissioning the entire park from all public access for two months, and arresting it behind rented chain link fences for more than two years. CD13 Councilman Mitch O’Farrell, whose district included Echo Park and Hollywood, was unseated in 2022. His loss was attributed to unsatisfactory leadership during the pandemic, including his brutal handling of EPL. His successor Hugo Soto-Martinez finally removed Echo Park Lake’s gentrification fences in May 2023. Some speculated that the rental fence was possibly due for return by then, anyway. It’s unclear just how many veterans may have been displaced in the EPL operation, but documented outreach regarding Economic Impact Payments conducted by National Veterans Foundation “NVF” on May 26th, 2021, just two months after the raid, shows that at least one unhoused veteran, Marvin, was found at EPL as soon as it reopened.LAHSA’s lack of AuthorityHeidi Marston, CEO of LAHSA at the time, made an appearance at EPL during the raid. She handed people cardboard boxes to aid in their moves to nowhere (or possibly serve as their new homes?). Knock.la’s Jamie Loftus reported Marston’s delayed reaction, quoting her regrettably musing:“…it didn’t need to happen this way.”If only the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority had exercised any actual authority, such as instructing LAPD to stand down, demanding Sanitation back off of their clients while outreach worked to find them housing, attending City Council during LAMC § 41.18 hearings, or opposing the Recreation and Parks Department’s plans to close the public park in a pandemic, things really could have ended differently.A lot of people showed up in incredible ways to show solidarity with the unhoused of EPL in March 2021. But many people failed the community, too. Marston’s job as the top-paid homeless advocate in the region should have given her a little more confidence to robustly oppose the violence done to her clients rather than wishing things happened differently.Interestingly, Marston had worked as an executive for the VA prior to coming to LAHSA as a Chief Program Officer just two months before the veterans were removed from The Billets. Marston had worked for the VA in different capacities since 2009 and for a period worked as an assistant to the VA Secretary in DC. Her transition to LAHSA and exit from the VA are both listed as occurring in February 2019 on LinkedIn. Did Marston bring the Gateways contract to LAHSA? If she did, she knew exactly what she was doing, because she would soon be rewarded with a promotion to CEO.Displacements don’t happen in a vacuum.Gentrification pressures had been growing for years in Echo Park, with developers exploiting the “substantial remodel” loophole to evict multigenerational families from rent-controlled buildings. The “renoviction” removal mechanism was finally addressed by Housing and Homelessness Committee and City Council in November, thanks to tenant advocacy by Echo Park’s Mohawk Tenants.Young Mohawk tenant organizer Matthew Mata and his family pleaded not to have to relocate from Echo Park for his senior year of high school. Mohawk’s supporters packed City Hall dressed in red, with some describing through translators during public comment experiences of being threatened with eviction as many as three times in the past few years under the now-closed legal loophole.The Billets should have been studied and replicated for its ability to accommodate veterans, who some consider to be among the most difficult-to-serve clients because of their complex needs compounded by warranted distrust of the system. By managing to convert the majority of participants into residents of permanent housing, despite post-traumatic stress, serious mental illness and substance abuse, The Billets seemingly overcame the challenge of “acuity” in homelessness services, at least when it came to LA’s veteran population. Acuity has since been contemplated in the LA Alliance for Human Rights v Los Angeles court hearings. Unhoused people “with serious mental illness” are considered inappropriate for City shelters in the settlement. Alliance was filed in March 2020, right at the onset of the pandemic, and settled in 2022. It is overseen by the same judge as Powers, David O. Carter, himself a Vietnam veteran and double UCLA alum.At the most recent Alliance hearing, the flag-draped tent across from the new federal courthouse was similarly addressed by the plaintiffs, to justify their demand for an evidentiary hearing. It didn’t go over too well, but an audit of spending on homelessness was demanded by the court, which is currently being conducted by firm Alvarez & Marsal and expected to deliver answers by February 2025.Conflicting understandings of “harm” in courtOn November 13th, the VA said it will be irreparably harmed if forced to add 100 modular housing units on-site. Plaintiffs’ lawyers said unhoused veterans (not named plaintiffs, who are now housed) will die. The VA’s lawyers wanted to know which ones, and the plaintiffs’ lawyers pointed to a 2,000 “by-name list” of unhoused veterans who they allege are connected to outreach or services, as well as the flag-draped tent near the courthouse. The West LA VA “Soldier’s Home” currently accommodates only around 300 veterans in housing on its property, and it formally objects to the Court wanting the VA to add 100 more units on-site by February, which would increase its housing capacity to around 400.Does the VA mean it can’t federally subsidize those proposed units and will be forced to pay “out-of-pocket” for operating them, so it won’t be a profitable venture for the VA? Is that really irreparable harm that can be compared with the physical, mental and mortal costs of homelessness?The truth is of course murkier than that, as the VA is expressing reluctance to accept what is essentially a packaged deal to implement a controversial Master Plan at the Soldier’s Home which includes retail development. The shopping component, which will open the Veterans’ property in West LA up to the general public, has an expedited timeline of two years, placing it at a higher priority than permanent housing for veterans. The VA may experience irreparable harm if it swaps out one group of illegal tenants (currently UCLA, the Brentwood School, Bridgeland Oil and SafetyPark are occupying the VA on leases that were deemed void by the Court) for another set of leases which also does not principally benefit unhoused disabled veterans and their families.The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the d...
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“Somehow at some point” Part 1
Dec 8, 202400:12:17Tap to summarize“Somehow at some point” parts 1 and 2 were originally published together by CityWatchLA in their newsletter on December 5th, 2024.I’m Ruth @roofless and I write about homelessness and housing in the City of Los Angeles. I’ve lived on the streets here continuously for seven years and first experienced displacement in 2003. I write a Substack series with USC whistleblower Zachary Ellison about the legal landscape of landlessness in LA. Zach has made himself a fixture in the courtroom of U.S. Judge David O. Carter, where major settlements affecting the unhoused like LA Alliance, addressing our civil rights and compelling “bed” creation, are enforced. In another settled lawsuit overseen by Carter, veteran plaintiffs led by Jeffery Powers sued the V.A. over illegal leases and insufficient housing at the West LA Soldiers’ Home.In part 1, I dive into the most recent Powers hearing and revisit a 2019 displacement of veterans from Echo Park which coincided with a near-cessation of veterans’ housing voucher awards. In part 2, I interrogate top-paid homeless advocates for aligning with gentrification goals over housing and healing and suggest a simple solution.“There's one [unhoused veteran] across the street, one tent across the street from this courthouse today.”Attorneys for a plaintiff class of unhoused veterans in Powers v McDonough pointed to the American flag-draped tent outside the new federal courthouse on First Street during a hearing on Wednesday, November 13th, two days after Veteran’s Day, objecting to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ motion to stay the district court’s October 11th judgment.Thanks for reading roofless! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Hours later, the patriotic tent was gone, and a new fence erected where the humble shelter stood for months. Obstructive panels of rented chain link blocked an entire Metro bus stop, attracting a ticket on 11/19 from the City’s Bureau of Street Services Investigation and Enforcement Division, as reported by L.A. TACO journalist Lexis Olivier-Ray. The occupant of the tent, presumably an unhoused veteran, therefore a member of the now-settled Powers plaintiff class, was nowhere to be seen.A quote obtained by Olivier-Ray from Zach Siedl of Mayor Karen Bass’ office explained that an Inside Safe operation had indeed occurred on Wednesday, November 13th. But with the nearby L.A. Grand Hotel, a Project Roomkey-turned-Inside Safe whose fugitive owner is entangled in corruption with imprisoned former downtown councilman José Huizar, having completed a final “demobilization” months ago, it’s unclear where those affected by the operation ended up.Inside Safe operations are “sweeps”, as evidenced by their inclusion on CARE/CARE+ Sanitation schedules, and the well-being of the displaced comes secondary to the stunning (in a good or bad way, depending on your perspective) “before” and “after” photos. Accountability at and after these operations is difficult. Olivier-Ray himself was recently handcuffed and placed in the back of a black-and-white LAPD SUV while observing one of these operations as media.Veterans in LA are not strangers to displacement.In 2019, 72 veterans were displaced in Echo Park when the VA was outbid on a cluster of cottages operating a safe haven program called “The Billets”. The VA was used to paying Gateways Hospital $1M per year for use of nine residential units on their property, which the VA secured in an annual competitive bidding process. The cottages, located on a residential street, were used for a transitional housing program ran by nonprofit operator Volunteers of America “VOALA”.In 2019, a mystery bidder’s $1.4M offer topped the VA’s, and the veterans were told to report to Salvation Army’s shelter in Bell. The shelter is eleven miles away from Echo Park, in an old armory the City of Bell acquired in a 1985 trade with the federal government.LA Times’ Gale Holland sympathetically covered The Billets’ closing at the time, but did not disclose the identity of the “mystery bidder”, which may not have been known.It has since been revealed that the bidder who defeated the VA was in fact LA’s Homeless Services Authority “LAHSA”, which wanted 14 of Gateways’ cottages for a new family shelter. The project secured $500,000 in discretionary homelessness prevention funds from County Supervisor Hilda Solis.Barry Lank wrote about the new shelter opening under operator The Whole Child for The Eastsider on October 9, 2019:“The project was funded by $1.4 million from the Los Angeles Housing [sic] Services Authority, with a shortfall of around $500,000 being covered by Supervisor Solis’ discretionary Homeless Preventative Initiative funds.”LAHSA and the VA are the last two entities that should be engaging in a bidding battle that takes 72 veterans off a therapeutic track for permanent housing. It is even more inappropriate that LAHSA were aided by County Supervisor Solis’ discretionary homeless prevention initiative funds.A CPRA to the County CEO for clarification on how much discretion is allowed when allocating homeless prevention funds hasn’t delivered any materials so far, but it’s interesting to observe all of the main public advocates with access to resources for the unhoused instead aligning with gentrification goals of bringing in a younger crowd, and pushing older, disabled people out.LAHSA is supposed to serve the general unhoused population as well as veterans who can’t or won’t associate with the VA, such as those who are unsheltered in LA anywhere off the VA’s West LA property and those with discharges other-than-honorable. Both LAHSA and the VA have access to federal subsidies through the City and County’s Public Housing Authorities “PHAs”, The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles “The HACLA” and the LA County Development Authority, “LACDA”, respectively.Indeed, for six years prior to LAHSA’s acquisition of the cottages, the transitional “safe haven” program dubbed “The Billets” was operated under a “harm reduction” model in which 70% of participants exited to permanent subsidized housing with services facilitated by the use of U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department - Veterans Affairs Supportive Services “HUD-VASH” vouchers.On the peaceful grounds of Gateways hospital, veterans had been able to keep service animals, have guests and use medical marijuana with a license. They enjoyed their “walkable” neighborhood and became regular patrons of a nearby coffee shop. They voluntarily graduated to permanent housing, an upgrade from the shared Gateways cottages, making room for more veterans in the program, and making good use of federal assistance.When The Billets shut down, HUD-VASH awards seemed to stop as well.Federal housing support for veterans slowed to a trickle in 2019 and has not recovered.It used to be that LA City and County’s PHAs, The HACLA and LACDA, could receive referrals from LAHSA and the VA to get veterans permanently housed, as the PHAs manage federal subsidies in the form of Housing Choice Vouchers “HCV” (commonly called “Section 8”) and HUD-VASH vouchers. HUD-VASH data during the six years of The Billets’ operation shows both the City and County’s public housing authorities, The HACLA and LACDA, receiving several hundred vouchers per year while The Billets was in operation from FY13-18:Combined HUD-VASH awards to The HACLA (City) + LACDA (County) by Fiscal Year, including Project-Based Voucher “PBV” awardsData: HUDFY • [CA002 + CA004 + PBVs]08 • 84009 • 38510 • 52511 • 30012 • 80013 • 77514 • 84715 • 75516 • 58617 • 81618 • 67819 • 020 • 50021 • 022 • 50023 • 0The City’s public housing authority, The HACLA, received 250 HUD-VASH vouchers in the five-year period from FY19-23, an average of 50/year, with all of them coming in one award in FY22. In the same time period, the County’s public housing authority, LACDA, got 750 vouchers, or 150/year for those five years.In 2019, the same year The Billets closed, Los Angeles’ award of HUD-VASH vouchers was zero for the City and ...
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“The Rocky Horror Picture Show"
Dec 2, 202400:17:58Tap to summarizeThe Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved by a vote of 4-0-1 a motion to study the feasibility of creating a new homelessness response agency on November 26, right before the Thanksgiving holiday. As noted by Los Angeles Times journalist Doug Smith writing on the notable approval, the County Chief Executive Office under Fesia Davenport will need to produce:“a feasibility report in 60 days, an analysis of which County and LAHSA programs would be absorbed by the new department in 90 days, and a fiscal and staffing plan in 120 days.”A “friendly amendment” from Supervisor Janice Hahn to allow staff more time to complete the feasibility report was met with a lukewarm response despite “the holidays.” The move to restructure comes after a scathing audit from the County Auditor-Controller’s office under Oscar Valdez as well as a review of homelessness spending by Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia.Thanks for reading roofless! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.In question are tens of millions of dollars in “working capital” advances made to service providers in 2017-18 from County Measure H funding. Similarly, questions remain regarding spending at the City of Los Angeles that have yet to be resolved, even as an audit approved by the City of Los Angeles in response to the LA Alliance for Human Rights v Los Angeles lawsuit filed under Judge David O. Carter.The audit underway by firm Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) is now expected to issue a report no later than the end of February due to delays getting data from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). Under review, pending the audit findings, is whether LAHSA should be streamlined to have a narrower set of responsibilities limited to conducting the annual point-in-time count and managing the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) versus direct fund administration for service providers.LAHSA has struggled with these tasks even as it’s obligated under federal guidelines to be responsible for the Greater Los Angeles Continuum of Care “CoC 600” under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (U.S. HUD). CoC 600 includes the entire County except Glendale, Pasadena, and Long Beach, which have their own CoCs under the supervision of their separate public housing authorities. President-elect Donald Trump has nominated former NFL player Scott Turner to lead U.S. HUD. The extent of mismanagement by LAHSA left even former Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, now a member of the Board of Supervisors, openly wondering whether LAHSA had allowed funding in the past to be illegally comingled:“Was it criminal?”Expenditures of federal funds require full accounting.Whether follow-up from the U.S. Attorney’s Office is the next step remains to be seen after Judge Carter singled out providers with outstanding balances. In response, Supervisor Holly Mitchell declared she was concerned that service providers were being "demonized.”Apparently, after Measure H’s passage, service providers were given large cash advances that did not require repayment across multiple fiscal years. This was years before many of the same nonprofits received $250k in cash advances on contracts for operating Homekey sites they were to acquire. Undoubtedly, there has been mismanagement at all levels of government, which must be resolved so housing efforts can move forward.The week prior, Judge Carter had held a hearing to overcome delays in fully funding the A&M audit. With Los Angeles City Council on recess until the week of December 2, Carter was irate, declaring that this was like:“The Rocky Horror Picture Show”The 1975 musical horror comedy cult classic is noted for its revealing takes on sexuality and a plot twist involving extraterrestrials. Carter, aged 80, who also referenced Groundhog Day (1993), a film about time travel, noted that LAHSA has also been accountable for State funding, declaring:“The State had about $13 billion plus invested.”None of this should have been news to LAHSA, which left Carter questioning how the mismanagement had gone on for so long despite prior auditing:“What occurred here was these findings were made by an auditor/controller at the time, but it took a year and a half of your bureaucracy to get to this Board for any attempted correction, while all this money just continued to flow out, with no data.”Several County Supervisors during their November 26 meeting had referenced Judge Carter in describing what’s been happening as:“untangling the spaghetti”.Thankfully to our knowledge or recollection, there are no spaghetti scenes in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which ends with an unnamed character, “The Criminologist - An Expert,” declaring:“And crawling on the planet's face, some insects, called the human race... lost in time... and lost in space... and meaning.”Whether any taxpayer funds have truly been lost to embezzlement remains to be seen. Auditing, in essence, is after all a form of investigation. LAHSA has been a significant delaying factor in completing the Alvarez & Marsal audit, as A&M’s Laura Collier explained to the Court:“delays (in receiving requested data) and complexity coupled with its condition” have “required additional time and resources.”Since being launched in March with Mayor Karen Bass’s approval, the A&M audit’s scope has been expanded several times, which has also increased its costs. The apparent move by the Los Angeles City Council to block additional funding was met with furor from Judge Carter, who declared that it:"will not be compromised by a budget imposed by the City Council that limits the adequacy and sufficiency of this assessment.”The pressure to fully fund the A&M audit left the City Attorney’s office sputtering, with Deputy City Attorney Valerie Flores promising:“Over the lunch break and after the clarifications of this morning, the council president [Marqueece Harris-Dawson] will be scheduling the item regarding consideration of the $440,000 additional payment to A&M next -- well, the week of December 2nd.”Advisor scapegoatedWhether LA City Council will swiftly approve additional funding remains to be seen, but resistance wouldn’t be well-received by the Court. Some within the City of Los Angeles have been resistant to the auditing of spending on homelessness, even asserting to Controller Mejia’s office that they lacked the authority. Last March, Judge Carter had read aloud LAist journalist Nick Gerda’s report, citing text messages from former Karen Bass advisor Mercedes Márquez that she:does “not want to be anybody’s scapegoat.”Cursed committee chairFor her part, Councilmember Nithya Raman, at the center of the City of Los Angeles’s response to the homelessness crisis, may have the most to lose politically from non-cooperation, having inherited her seat as Chair of the Homelessness and Poverty Committee and seat on the CAO’s Homeless Strategy Committee from Kevin de León, who filled it when Mark Ridley-Thomas was indicted. Is this City position cursed? Or is homelessness in Los Angeles simply an intractable problem? While the LA Alliance for Human Rights hardly has clean hands, declaring in a November 20 email that readers should:“Follow the Money of LA's Homelessness Industrial Complex,”billing themselves as:“the region’s only organization holding the City and County accountable for the homelessness issue”.You have to wonder whether political leadership is capable of turning the ship around. The Alliance seems to be relying on demagoguing on the issue versus providing any sort of best practices input that might actually improve governance on the issue. Undoubtedly, there is no single solution to this complicated issue.CEO-Dr. Adams-Kellum ”clawing back” fundsStuck in the middle is LAHSA CEO Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum, Ph.D., appointed by Mayor Karen Bass. The day before Thanksgiving, after appearing before the County Board of Supervisors, she wrote to Judge Carter, trying to assure him that the joint-powers authority of the City and County was on top of recouping funds from Measure H, which Measure A increased and extended indefinitely.“Since the County audit, LAHSA has recouped an additional $3.8 million, bringing the total recouped in the past year to $6.3 million.”Adams Kellum added:“This reduces the outstanding balance to $44.5 million.”LAHSA plans to clawback the funding through:“Reduced Payables: Offsetting future payments to service providers against their outstanding balances” and“Direct Payments: Providers making direct payments to LAHSA."It wasn’t immediately clear if the service providers, which now have a guaranteed funding source, have the capacity to repay these advances while still making payroll. Ironically, in many discussions, “expanding capacity” seems to be the top goal for these providers, referring to their staffing, not the number of people they are able to house.Additionally, LAHSA plans:“to improve financial management and oversight”<p...
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“Looking for Unicorns”🦄
Nov 26, 202400:17:22Tap to summarizeFinding housing in Los Angeles isn’t easy, much less finding the perfect units for potential tenants within a building.At the City Administrative Officer’s (CAO) pivotal Homeless Strategy Committee meeting on Thursday, November 7, Assistant City Administrative Officer Edwin Gipson remarked that he felt like he was“looking for unicorns”in making placements.Thanks for reading roofless! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.The real unicorn might be Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Authority “LACAHSA”, a new-ish body designed to comprehensively tackle the housing crisis. Hydra-like problems of housing unaffordability and homelessness are nothing new in Los Angeles, but LACAHSA’s novel multi-jurisdictional structure promises a new approach to building affordable housing, keeping people off the streets, and getting those on them housed.The CAO’s meeting with a single elected, Councilwoman Nithya Raman, takes place in non-descript conference room Suite 1500 in City Hall East, attached to main City Hall by a bridge over Main Street.By contrast, LACAHSA meets in the boardroom of the Metropolitan Water District Building on Alameda Street, with elected officials gathered at DWP’s usual chamber underneath elaborate lighting. The futuristic DWP meeting space was only sparsely filled with public attendees.With 77,049 evictions originating from within the City of Los Angeles being processed through LA County Courts from February through December 2023, according to Controller Kenneth Mejia, the room could have been filled with those who were evicted many, many times over.The despair is real, as several public commenters reminded LACAHSA of their housing struggles. Indeed, at one point, the board even discussed adding outreach workers to the meeting plan.Councilwoman Raman was there, too, at LACAHSA (say it “la casa” like “the house” en Español) as a representative for the City of Los Angeles alongside Chief Housing and Homelessness Officer Lourdes Castro-Ramirez, representing the office of Mayor Karen Bass. Los Angeles County Supervisor Holly Mitchell sat nearby amidst representatives from other municipalities within the county in a meeting led by California Community Foundation President and CEO Miguel Santana and Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson, who stated that the LBC might as well be another county given its size and independent agencies, including its own health department. The crisis of the unhoused has bedeviled Los Angeles in a fiscal way that only the Los Angeles Police Department could rival, with people hitting the streets perhaps almost as fast as they come off them. Is LA doomed to simply repeat the same old mistakes?As part of its work, the CAO’s office on November 7th again took up a continued item from its October 3rd meeting, now branded:“Motion for the Development of the Comprehensive Work Plan for the Homelessness Strategy Committee” • CF24-1179The measure by Nithya Raman, with a second from Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, was approved by City Council on October 29th with a 13-0-2 vote and involves an in-kind gift of 4 months from the California Community Foundation, The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, and Southern California Grantmakers:“to develop a clear and cohesive map of the City’s homelessness operations, across departments.”The evaluation will be led by Sarah Solon of HR&A Advisors, who serves as Principal, Inclusive Cities. With Solon having previously worked for the New York City Mayor’s office in both criminal justice and mental health, as well as for the ACLU. Asked for a comment about the scope of her work and goals for the project, Sarah Solon didn’t immediately respond.Lived ExpertiseClearly, our first recommendation would be to implement CF19-1020, which we’ve campaigned for along with others in Los Angeles who wanted to see the City make good on its promise to create a Commission on Lived Experience with Homelessness. The motion, authored by former Councilmember Mike Bonin with a second from Harris-Dawson, was introduced on September 4th, 2019. CF19-1020 can be located in the City Clerk’s Council File Management System “CFMS” along with an 11-page report from the Chief Legislative Analyst office dated November 22nd, 2022.Creating the commission is a basic move to get more feedback from those being served, but attempts to revive it before the November 18th expiration date faltered. This was despite a last-ditch attempt to move it forward with the recent endorsements of 9 separate neighborhood councils ranging from Palms to Reseda to Rampart Village. CF19-1020 received the backing of a similar Lived Experience Advisory Body, "LEAB,” within Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), who had stated that they too wanted to see Council take this step forward by engaging the expertise of people who live on City streets and in City-run shelters. We can only hope that this great idea will rise again to the top of the agenda, especially with recent news from the Controller about massive underspend of City Homelessness funds, which likely would have been detected sooner had the City been listening to the streets.Meanwhile, LACAHSA, separate from LAHSA, was doing its thing on affordable housing like a finely-tuned machine. If LAHSA were a joint-powers authority between the City and the County, LACAHSA is modeled much more like the Metro Board, with representation from cities from across the County. Administratively led by Ryan Johnson, Interim Chief Executive Officer, an investments specialist with experience in New York City, Orange County, and Greenville, South Carolina; Johnson also served in the U.S. Army with the 502nd Military Intelligence Battalion. Johnson’s presentation on “Alternative Affordable Investment Models” states that:“LACAHSA is able to unleash large scale production by creating investments that avoid the bond cap allocation.”The bond cap allocation limits borrowing under a state ceiling by the California Debt Limit Allocation Committee (CDLAC) in order to manage limited public borrowing power. LACAHSA would take an end-run around state limits, promising to provide:“a conduit for significant rehabilitation of aging affordable housing.”Johnson’s presentation suggested that.“the organization in partnership with philanthropy & private sector can create catalytic investment partnerships to leverage agency financing on [sic] 4-1 basis.” Asked how this would be accomplished, Ryan Johnson stated that:“LACAHSA has been engaged with both philanthropic and private sources of funding prior to the passing of Measure A.”Furthermore, Johnson plans to leverage:“additional sources from my career in the non-profit and private sector.”LACHSA’s investment models are seemingly still under consideration, but Johnson’s presentation stated under “Guarantee Programs” that:“Government or Philanthropy can create pools of money designed to unleash private capital (equity or debt) by providing gap coverage”and bridging“the delivery of other government sources of investments or catalytic investment in underinvested communities.” The presentation further suggested a“Joint Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae Preservation Product”to achieve its goal with a “July/August 2025 Launch” date set. Also on the table are “LACAHSA Social Mortgage Bonds,” for which:“LACAHSA is the sole lender or risk shares with senior leader.”In an email response, Johnson added that LACAHSA, unlike similar projects in the Bay Area and Charlotte,“has the unique dual ability to issue bonds and a sustainably source of funding via Measure A.”The presentation left at least one commissioner asking if this was really the solution that LACAHSA leadership promised and if the risk of such widespread lending was in fact perhaps greater than anticipated at the start. YIMBY somewhat?Next on the agenda was a quick approval of hiring a General Counsel and Inspector General for LACAHSA at a recruiting and solicitation cost“in an amount not to exceed in total, $450,000, for a term not to exceed eighteen months.”Will turning affordable housing in Los Angeles County into a Wall Street model work to unleash the levers of capital? There are clearly no guarantees, even under the current effort to change zoning laws to promote density. In fact, as Los Angeles Times journalist Liam Dillon recently reported, at least one think tank thinks the proposed rezoning wouldn’t even produce enough housing to meet the state goal of 250,000 more units by 2030. Moreover, how do you get past the NIMBY effect? The story noted in “single family home neighborhoods” that:“City officials had considered allowing changes…but reversed course after pushback from homeowner groups that protested the potential for traffic and parking problems.”Financing and planning alone clearly can’t get Los Angeles out of this crunch, nor can more bureaucracy, even done with the best apparent intentions as LACAHSA has set out. If anyone knows of additional funding sources, please do let LACAHSA know ASAP.Perhaps Edwin Gipson was right; developing housing in Los Angeles is a bit like “looking for unicorns,” much less getting clients, including the unhoused...
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I don’t want to live in a world without Palestinians.
Oct 31, 202400:20:45Tap to summarize“keep talking about me”19-year old Mohammad “Moe” (he/him) has enchanted the cat-loving Internet with a gut-wrenching rollercoaster ride involving his aloof ragdoll cat, Leo, as they dodge quadcopters and IDF tanks in Gaza.In September, Moe’s cat, Leo (to whom Moe refers using both he/him and she/her pronouns, sometimes within the same tweet) was injured in his eye and leg while outside on the street during an explosion. Mohammad dutifully found a veterinarian to inspect and treat Leo’s injuries. She was tended to by Moe and made a full recovery, which she signaled by darting out the door and staying out for more than two days. Without his companion, Moe spiraled and the situation outside grew more violent, causing him a great deal of worry and loneliness.Thanks for reading roofless! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.When Moe and Leo were lovingly reunited on 10/15, they soothed their invested followers with a string of sweet selfies of the two of them snuggling.“ …😭😭😭❤️ Leo is back, thank God. Despite the death and destruction we are experiencing here in Gaza, I am now the happiest person on earth,as if my soul has returned to me 🥹❤️❤️”—@mo7medjbour “Mohammad in Gaza 🇵🇸” via X • 6:05am PST 10/15/24“Don't forget me in your prayers”A week ago, Leo and Moe were both starving, without access to food for humans or cat food. Then, Thursday night, they were saying final goodbyes, sharing this dystopian view of twin missiles illuminating a smoky sky with tank-tracks visible on the ground:“If I die,I am not a number,I am a planet in itself,I have dreams and ambitions that I wanted to achieve….”—@mo7medjbour “Mohammad in Gaza 🇵🇸” via X • 1:49pm PST 10/24/24Despite being stalked by an IDF quadcopter when he went out a few nights ago to check on Leo, as of the most recent updates, Moe and Leo are currently snuggled up together and still somehow managing to stay online. Mohammad requests bags of flour and winter clothing but admits he doesn’t know how he could even receive anything at the moment. He takes comfort in any words of support offered via X and wants as many people as possible keeping eyes on his precarious situation. He also wants people to compliment Leo, of course. 😻 Leo prefers Instagram to X and has her own profile there, leo.moe0. #homelesswithaniphoneResearching, documenting and reporting systemic abuses is an essential job born out of struggle. Anyone with a smartphone and a mind for resistance can break into independent investigative reporting, as @Wizard__Bisan’s recent Academy-affirmed Emmy win demonstrated. Bisan uses her smartphone and fluency in English to show Americans what our government does with our federal tax money. Bisan doesn’t go on long-winded rants about politics while safe and comfortable indoors, like many creators. Almost antithetical to TikTok and YouTube style, she doesn’t use hyperbole or clickbait. She shows people the parts of displacement that usually remain abstract: what she has been eating (usually plain flat breads when she can get some, dressing it up with corned beef when she was able to obtain a can of the SPAM-like ration) and where she will be sleeping. She takes us to the devastating aftermath of missile strikes and brings her audience along with her on endless evacuations.Bisan’s manner is matter-of-fact and sometimes emotional. Her role as a reporter on devastation that she is also experiencing makes her a subjective but trustworthy narrator. Bisan has a way of appealing to a common humanity like a friend or sister, inspiring a desire to protect Palestine, even if just to protect her, personally. Only in her mid-twenties, she’s developed parasocial relationships all over the world through her savvy use of social media. But no matter how beloved she is, her audience is helpless to save her without freeing Palestine from occupation. Witness protectionThe Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has tracked at least 134 journalists that have been killed covering Gaza, often in their “PRESS” vests, nearly all of them Palestinian except six from Lebanon and two Israeli casualties. In addition, CPJ report 71 journalists have been arrested, with 43 of them still incarcerated as of October 30th, plus 41 are injured and two are missing. These figures are only those that have been confirmed and are therefore undercounted.Unfortunately universal rules of war don’t seem to have helped journalists stay safe while immersed in Israel’s attempt to expand further into Palestine. Israel’s allies, the top one being the United States, seem content to look the other way as war crimes and clear-cut evidence of genocide and ethnic cleaning are unfolding before our eyes.Exposing abuses committed by powerful people has always been dangerous, but press are intentionally targeted and murdered with an alarming frequency while reporting on Gaza, in violation of international law.Wafa.psDespite the bleak situation for press covering Gaza, at the end of September, 11-year-old Palestinian student Wafa shared with co-hosts of an educational X Space @GazaGreatMinds her dream to be a top investigator one day. Her name happens to be shared with WAFA.ps, which lost one of their journalists, Mohamad Abu Hassira to IDF violence on November 7th, 2023. His home was struck by (a) missile(s), killing him along with 42 other members of his family. The news was confirmed by his colleagues at local WAFA.ps, as well as London’s The New Arab, and Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate.Palestinian people call their murdered loved ones martyrs, elevating them in death to people who died not simply because of their ethnicity or proximity to militarized colonizers—but because they hold valuable information and/or unshakable spiritual convictions. Martyrs are witness to unbelievable, unspeakable things. They die with a message which survives through their loved ones.California GenocideLast week, the President formally apologized to survivors for nearly 1,000 Indigenous people who were confirmed to have been killed and buried at boarding schools across America. This horrific discovery confirmed long-standing claims made by Indigenous survivors of America continuing to engage in ethnic cleansing long after they colonized the continent, which was denied for generations. Indigenous peoples’ testimonies got scientifically proven in recent years with the discovery of 65 graves that prompted a vindicating apology in which Biden describes genocide as horrific and shameful, but stops short of naming it:“…the United States was established and began expanding, entering treaties with sovereign Tribal Nations. But as time moved on, respect for Tribal sovereignty evaporated, was shattered, pushing Native people off their homelands, denying their humanity and their rights, targeting children to cut their connection to their ancestors and their inheritance and their heritage….…the federal government mandated the removal of children from their families and Tribes, launching what’s called the Federal Indian Boarding School era. Over a 150-year span from the early 1800s to 1970…”The purpose of our education system is supposed to be for learning words, history and culture, but even the President admits that it still does better at avoiding, erasing and actively destroying those things. He proceeds to defend denial, stating that most people still aren’t aware of the California genocide, managing to do so without as much as saying the “g-word”:“One of the most horrific chapters in American history. We should be ashamed. A chapter that most Americans don’t know about. The vast majority don’t even know about it……The Federal Indian Boarding School policy and the pain it has caused will always be a significant mark of shame, a blot on American history. For too long, this all happened with virtually no public attention, not written about in our history books —“—President Joe Biden <a target="_blank" href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/10/25/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-biden-harris-administrations-record-of-delivering-for-tr...
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“This Didn’t Happen Overnight”
Oct 30, 202400:23:21Tap to summarizeThe City of Los Angeles is in deep trouble, and all the finger-pointing in the world won’t solve it, much less presentations and proclamations. Los Angeles City Hall is a world away from Agoura Hills where developer Izek Shomof was recently cited on October 21, for violating Los Angeles County building codes in converting outbuildings for residential occupancy. According to electronic records provided by Shomof’s brother-in-law whistleblower Patrick Wizmann, this wasn’t even the first time that one of most powerful figures in LA had been found to be in violation of County building rules. After first being identified on February 5, 2024, LA County Public Works issued an additional “notice of violation” writing that they are:“actively working with the property owner to bring the specific structures with unpermitted occupancy use conversion, back into compliance.”After all, compliance is a process, and it can be costly to resolve issues.Thanks for reading roofless! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Shomof, one of Los Angeles’s most powerful developers, wrote a self-promoting memoir Dreams Don’t Die last year. According to one source, it slightly exaggerates his role in founding the LA Alliance for Human Rights. The 501(c)(3) non-profit’s primary service is litigation, having “successfully” forced the City and County into settlement to ostensibly meet 60% of the housing needs of the unhoused in each City Council District. Now though, even Alliance seems confused about what to do next, as they still have the City and County engaged in regular hearings, and housing is still out-of-reach to so many; with many more falling out of housing each month. The connection between money, power, housing, and elections has never been more clear in Los Angeles as we close in on November 5. We all get to make choices.Both Izek Shomof and former business partner billionaire Naty Saidoff have recently given downtown Councilman Kevin de León’s re-election campaign $900 each, and in Saidoff’s case his spouse as well. Saidoff and Shomof engaged in litigation over three downtown properties in 2012, with Shomof prevailing and later writing about the dispute in his book. Dreams Don’t Die completely omits former Councilmember José Huizar, who pioneered the so-called “adaptive reuse” model of re-development, which allowed for the conversion of office space and old hotels in the city’s historic core into residential units. Adaptive reuse created hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions in wealth for owners of historic buildings practically overnight. Shomof became the so-called “King of Spring Street”, a bold claim for someone who is not a politician, let alone mayor, considering City Hall itself is at 200 North Spring Street in Downtown LA. LA Alliance’s Murky OriginsThe LA Alliance didn’t just sprout up overnight. In fact, the first so-called meeting of the LA Alliance was held on May 13, 2019 in Palm Court, the beaux-arts style ballroom of a Shomof adaptive reuse property. The Alexandria, located at 210 West 5th Street off Spring Street, is one of the biggest rent-controlled residential hotels in the City after The Cecil Hotel. Formerly Hotel Alexandria, it was first built in 1906 for $2M, constructing an addition that included Palm Court in 1911, according to LA Conservancy. Shomof’s conversion into rental units occurred in 2005, 99 years after its original development by the Bilicke-Rowan Fireproof Building Company. Today it is directly across the street from The Last Bookstore, where Dreams Don’t Die was released.Then-Mayor Eric Garcetti was slow to warm up to LA Alliance, but the unhoused people of downtown were not completely without representation, even if they were not formally invited by Alliance, which insisted at the time that it included unhoused community members. If Skid Row had a mayor, it would have certainly been the late General Jeff Page, legendary Skid Row activist, who was, according to one source, all but locked out of the initial Alliance hearing, only to meet with presiding Judge David O. Carter outside and become friends after taking a walk together. Perhaps this can be considered the first act of “locking arms” as Mayor Karen Bass has sloganed as part of her signature Inside Safe initiative to get people off the streets.Corruption runs deep in LAMultiple LA Alliance settlement agreements haven’t yet resolved homelessness in Los Angeles and are set to expire in June 2027. An “evidentiary hearing” over a planned reduction in shelter-system beds didn’t occur as planned this Friday, October 25, with Judge Carter calling off the affair. The hearing had been insisted upon by the Alliance, frustrating all involved parties including the City and County, who made multiple legal filings to the ever-expanding Alliance docket, which is under the jurisdiction of California’s Central District. While the Alliance itself may not be corrupt, its path has paralleled the exposure of significant corruption in Los Angeles. The City’s longest corruption case to-date began November 7th, 2018 when the FBI raided the Boyle Heights home and Spring Street offices of three-term downtown councilman José Huizar. Huizar now sits in a Federal prison cell in Lompoc, having been sentenced to 13 years for racketeering. His shoes were filled by State Assemblymember for the 45th district and 50th president pro tempore of the State senate Kevin de León, who now faces a re-election challenge from Ysabel Jurado. Incumbent de León has the political upper-hand, even winning the financial support of Izek Shomof, the Spring Street developer and self-proclaimed “king” who has been one of his biggest critics, chastising de León for withdrawing support for a proposed “Life Rebuilding Center” at the historic Sears, Roebuck & Company Mail Order Building, which both Shomof and Alliance have heavily promoted as a key strategy to addressing Los Angeles’ homelessness emergency. Sometimes, things just converge!At City Hall on Friday, October 25, Karen Bass could be seen alongside Kevin de León, who once had hopes of running for Lieutenant Governor in 2026, honoring the late Richard Alatorre. Former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who also represented CD14 prior to Huizar, was present. Villaraigosa is now running for Governor of California again in 2026, in a long-shot bid. It was truly a momentous occasion for politicking with only dignitaries and gadflies present. Unbeknownst to the Council, yet another scandal had been forming right before their eyes as Los Angeles Times journalist Dakota Smith would soon report with the help of colleague David Zahniser. The preceding presentation honoring groups for providing food security had included World Harvest, now the subject of an investigation in regards to Kevin de León for making political donations after receiving $1.91 million in discretionary funding from his officeholder account. The group had even gone as far as to feature his image on their vehicle for weekly food giveaways.Political ties with developersIzek Shomof had previously donated to State Assembly members Miguel Santiago and Wendy Carrillo who had both sought to represent CD14 before faltering to Jurado, who has the endorsements of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party as well as the Democratic Socialists of America - Los Angeles (DSA-LA) chapter. Shomof and his family have previously donated to politicians such as former City Council President Nury Martinez, Gil Cedillo, José Huizar, and even Huizar’s ill-fated attempt to install his wife Richelle Huizar as his successor. So as Kevin de Leòn has stated in multiple debates with his challenger Jurado that the solution to Los Angeles’s housing crisis is to go vertical in Downtown Los Angeles, you have to really wonder what he means. Shomof’s book goes as far as quoting Kevin de León making an inflammatory statement about putting the unhoused on 747s to Israel to work on kibbutzes, and yet he also represents himself as the best possible candidate on homelessness, all while attacking County Supervisor Hilda Solis including writing a letter to Judge Carter for failing to address the crisis in his district, which includes Skid Row, the nation’s largest concentration of the unhoused. Latino politics in Los Angeles have never been more conflicted as Los Angeles Times journalist Gustavo Arellano documented in his 4-part series, writing in billing the series questioningly as:“That’s when I asked myself: How did Latino politics in Los Angeles get to this moment?”In previously interviewing Izek Shomof about the Life Rebuilding Center, he described how he had:“told Shomof his proposal was too good to be true.”With Shomof smiling in response, remarking:“It’s true.”The Sears building is still empty, and not a word has been said about it in the race for Council District 14 even as its husk shadows over Olympic Boulevard, renamed after the 1932 Summer Olympics. Were the proposed Life Rebuilding Center ever to come to fruition, even at a reduced bed number of 2,500, it would be the largest such facility in the system, and likely more akin to a warehouse or hospital than housing or a comparable shelter. The project ha...
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“A Big, Fat Grenade”
Oct 22, 202400:17:28Tap to summarize“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.Thanks for reading roofless! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.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 BassThe 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...
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“A Failure of Moral Judgment” – Judge Carter & the Crisis of the Unhoused
Oct 12, 202400:26:56Tap to summarize“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:Thanks for reading roofless! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.“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 XThis 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 SafeBetween 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 CarterCarter 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” i...
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