Part 102: The Heartbreak Industry of Los Angeles – Failures in Litigating the Crisis of the Unhoused

Published August 3, 2024

Photo of the abandoned Oceanwide Plaza towers, now rumored to be the subject of sale negotiations after sitting for five years and being graffitied from top-to-bottom overnight in January 2024 by Zachary Ellison (GoPro Hero 11 Black)

By Zachary Ellison and Rooflesser, Independent Journalists

“Turn it into a homeless shelter!” went out as a popular cry as soon as the abandoned Oceanwide Plaza towers sandwiched between Flower and Figueroa Streets gained attention after being visibly graffitied overnight last Groundhog’s Day. Billionaire former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso had another vision, alternating between wanting to turn it into “workforce housing, which is sorely needed for our teachers, firefighters and police.” Caruso similarly concluded that it would be economically unviable to complete, having evaluated the project previously after its abandonment in 2019 following the developers and investors going bust after spending $1 billion on the project. 

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

In fact, Rooflesser, herself unhoused, during the first City Adminstrative Officer’s Homeless Strategy Committee meeting held since March, asked this very question, only to be told curtly at the end of her comment that her “time had expired.” The convening of this group, comprised of City Administrative Officer Matthew W. Szabo, Chief Legislative Analyst Sharon M. Tso, CD4 Councilmember Nithya Raman (who also chairs the City Council’s Homelessness and Housing Committee), and Lourdes Castro Ramírez, Chief Housing and Homeless Officer for the Office of the Mayor, is where the proverbial rubber hits the ground. 

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

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

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

Soon, our LinkedIn profiles were checked by a brand manager for the law firm, and our comments were swiftly deleted from the platform for some digital silencing, law firm style! How conveniently we were disposed of with a few clicks! Promptly, the firm heralded an award to Umhofer and Mitchell from the publication Lawdragon for having “been recognized by Lawdragon as 2024 Leading Civil Rights & Plaintiff Employment Lawyers” because, as the firm claims on their website: “At the time we filed the lawsuit, three or more people were dying on the streets of Los Angeles every day…[and] the judiciary had a critical role to play in solving this crisis.” This number actually doesn’t seem to have gone down; in fact, according to a recent report from The Guardian, the numbers are likely going up as the fentanyl crisis spreads among drug users and more people under pressure from increasing health costs and mental illness rates end up on the streets. 

The high-powered opioid is now so present in street drugs like heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and fake pills, meaning that among the 2,000 unhoused people who died in the nation’s most populous County according to the report by journalists Sam Levin and Will Kraft, the rate is now “an average of nearly six deaths a day of people living on the street or in shelters in the nation’s most populous county.” This is no time for self-congratulating victory laps. We agree with former Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin @, himself the target of intense criticism for his empathy, that, as he recently wrote about Governor Newsom, so many critics like the LA Alliance have “made it sound like public officials were to blame for homeless encampments because they refused to displace people, not because they failed to house people.”

Moreover, as Bonin notes about Newsom, “Like so many other public officials who promote sweeps, his goal is not to solve the problem; it is to make it appear as if he is doing so.” Rooflesser and Zachary Ellison both tried to bring our best listening abilities to yesterday’s Homelessness Strategy Committee, but the two words we heard most were “robust” in regards to the public housing portfolio and “alignment” in regards to the need to create standardized costs between the motel rooms purchased through Inside Safe, Pallet Shelter sites, and more traditional shelter models like A Bridge Home.

Alarmingly, only 17% of Inside Safe participants have secured housing, taking them off the street. The City claims the housing is permanent, but most of these exits are subsidized by Rapid Re-Housing ("RRH").  RRH, also called “time-limited subsidy (TLS)” is a favored homelessness intervention because the City and County have an agreement on the proportions they’ll each cover, a major accomplishment because these entities struggle to work out the details on pretty much anything else.  Also, since 2013, HUD has allowed local Continuums of Care like the Greater LA CoC600/LAHSA to classify exits on RRH/TLS as permanent housing (PH) placements, despite RRH’s other name, TLS, having “time-limited” right in it! 

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

Perhaps that is why the Sears Project is supposed to contain an LAPD substation right inside of its campus, according to renderings on Izek Shomof’s website. LAPD no longer seems to be able to visibility guard the abandoned three tower Huizar-era husks opposite the Crypto.com arena. LAPD Media Relations declined to confirm that the prior 24/7 deployment of 5-7 officers at taxpayer expense had ended, responding that “The Department does not discuss [the] deployment of officers at a location. We continue to monitor Oceanwide Plaza.” Previously, an LAPD commander, in coordination with Media Relations indicated: “There is no date on when the special detail will end and private security will be hired. There is an on-going working group headed by the Mayor’s office staff.” Council had voted 13-0 to end the deployment, and now there is opacity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

One thing is for sure, no one is dominating the Olympics by eating a diet of ramen noodles. Thankfully, someone got through to Controller Kenneth Mejia’s “‘waste fraud and abuse’ hotline,” according to the LA Public Press report by journalist Elizabeth Chou, which in turn led investigators from the office to determine that the provider wasn’t just doing this once a day, but that, as they reiterated this in a follow-up request: “We observed that the service provider was providing Inside Safe residents with instant ramen for nearly every meal.” This finding isn’t an anomaly. If Inside Safe has been funded with over half a billion dollars of public money and unhoused participants are lucky to get a 25-cent lump of noodles, it’s no wonder the more funding goes to homelessness, the worse it gets.

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

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

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

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

People have rights, but mental health facilities cannot double as “hotels” for homeless people, much less as permanent housing. In fact, LA County’s DMH-HOME teams will often try to avoid using W & I § 5150 and 5250 at all costs because it breaks trust and unnecessarily traumatizes their clients, sometimes permanently severing the relationship. Once people are stabilized, they need to be discharged to long-term care facilities if needed or to affordable housing with wraparound services. The housing administered by DMH-HOME can run as low as $66/month in cost to the public!

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

Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano wrote in describing the demise of local journalism that “L.A.’s heartbreak industry isn’t Hollywood; it’s journalism.” We don’t disagree, and as Arellano said, “To paraphrase what the late A. Bartlett Giamatti said about baseball, it's designed to break the hearts of those who work it.” Sadly, the same is true for social workers. LA and Hollywood must do better for the unhoused and those who seek to uplift. We can’t litigate our way out of this crisis. Continuing to try to do so will only lead to more frustration and failure. The answer is better policy solutions with input from more people, not simply tense discussions in small groups inside Los Angeles City Hall. Yes, we can!

Link: Rick Caruso Tweet RE: Oceanwide Plaza 

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

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

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

Link: City of Los Angeles Homelessness Strategy Committee

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

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

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

Link:  Homelessness: A $3 Billion Win

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

Link: Tough Talk, Bad Policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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