Part 139: “Vertical Integration” and the Unhoused – Reform Crisis in Los Angeles

Published December 12, 2024.

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Dec 12, 2024

Los Angeles Police Department Officers prepare to load a wheelchair into an ambulance after bystanders called for help by Zachary Ellison (GoPro Hero 111 Black).

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By Ruth Roofless and Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalists

Los Angeles City Councilmember 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.

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 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. 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?

The Los Angeles City Council had approved last Wednesday, December 4, 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 that “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.

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

For example, just last week, the Ramada Inn at 3130 Washington Blvd in Marina Del Rey received an additional $1.5M, this time from HHH funds. The 33-unit Homekey was purchased for $10M and received an additional $5M, totaling $16.5M. It was supposed to open as housing in December, according to Circle the News, but CD11 Councilwoman Traci Park's homelessness deputy Carol Williams said that date was “exaggerated,” and opening is now projected in 2025. The issue of vacancy and eviction has not been addressed in the LA Alliance court, although property and business owners comprise most of the members of the Alliance. However, the scope of the audit prescribed by Alvarez & Marsal has expanded several times to include LAPD spending at the suggestion of intervenor Shayla Myers with LAFLA, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, on behalf of affected unhoused people, especially those on Skid Row. This also includes spending by the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health.

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

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

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 and 29th. A notice to vacate posted the first week of November that we have been tracking still hasn’t been enforced by LASD as of publication, indicating a delay of at least 5 weeks. Another 474 unlawful detainers were initiated on tenants just last week, over 90% of whom owe rent, according to LAHD’s dashboard. Is LA simply kicking people out faster than it should be for its own good?

Also scheduled for January 7th, 2025, is an Alliance hearing (the CAO Homeless Strategy meeting is later that day) where the Court will hear an update from Controller Kenneth Mejia and LAHSA on the recoupment of funds advanced to service providers under County Measure H. Measure H has now been replaced by Measure A, providing a permanent half-cent sales tax County-wide to fund homelessness reduction efforts. How much money LAHSA can claw back from roughly $45 million in accounted cash advances, much less the City’s budgetary allocation, is actually being spent in ways that benefit the unhoused, will be the question before the judge.

Meanwhile, those in the City system face a reported 20:1 chance of receiving permanent housing, even as the City plans to complete 3,000 units in the next 6 months. A study of the “Housing First” policy, which Alliance lobbies hardline against, found that only 11% of unhoused people who entered LAHSA’s “Coordinated Entry System” or CES were offered permanent housing within 12 months following intake. The findings of Controller Kenneth Mejia’s audit were perhaps even more concerning than the recent internal County audit that preceded it.

If it takes a year for the high-tech, federally required, overly engineered “solution” to locate a unit of housing for one in every ten qualified unhoused clients, is it possible the burden of the CES is the problem, and not the “Housing First” policy itself? Some say, “The purpose of a system is what it does”. It does seem CES serves a purpose of bottlenecking demand for affordable housing. Have we simply created a system so complicated no one can understand it?

Ruth Roofless made a tool to locate affordable housing units and motel shelters within the City of LA, identifying projects that receive funding from Homekey, HHH, Roadmaps, Alliance, Inside Safe, and Measures H/A. I figured if the system of “matching” is so inefficient, people could do their own matching and seek the unit they want directly, rather than expecting an algorithm to eventually decide where they are best suited to live. After selecting a project, the new problem that arises for unhoused tenants lies in identifying the nonprofit and the person within it that is willing and able to take an application directly. Going through LAHSA’s burdensome entry system, which is a federal requirement enforced by the Housing and Urban Development Department “HUD,” removes accountability to the unhoused tenant, which our neighbors are now visually interpreting as unaccountability to them as well. Something has to change.

Curiously, LAHSA excitedly announced their new “bed-finding” tool in a social media blast over the weekend, but it appears that the resource was designed for service providers and is not “public-facing”, demonstrating the level of gatekeeping that has become acceptable or even required when it comes to administering homeless services, housing, and shelter. The last Homeless Strategy committee meeting included a disconnected discussion about “throughput” from shelter to housing sprinkled with whimsical euphemisms. “Unicorns” was the choice word to describe brand new but long-vacant HHH-funded permanent supportive housing units that have layered tenant eligibility requirements. The Homeless Industrial Complex is a mindset.

Representatives from LAHD described difficulty matching unhoused applicants to these units because they must seek out prospective tenants with specific disability-related needs, sometimes layered with other requirements like domestic violence/trafficking survivor, veteran, and/or a family with a certain number of children. For example, a unit with a visual fire alarm would be best suited for a person or family member with a hearing-related disability, but they must also have the appropriate number of family members to utilize the unit’s bedrooms. The idea that it is this difficult to locate tenants for subsidized units in brand-new buildings when six unhoused people perish every day in the City of LA is a fairy tale. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Alliance for Human Rights continues to bill itself as the key watchdog despite providing no services other than a lawsuit that is down to one plaintiff. Multiple requests for the identity of that plaintiff made to the City Attorney’s office of Hydee Feldstein-Soto went quite unanswered.

Whether the City and County of Los Angeles can make this any better remains to be seen, much less President Donald Trump. Writing in the Los Angeles Public Press, journalist Liz Chou wrote, "Unlike most parts of the country, Los Angeles has significant funding to address homelessness that does not originate from the federal government. She added with a caveat, “But federal funding remains a significant portion of the overall budget, and experts worry that a more conservative federal government might apply stringent requirements that complicate how those funds are used.” State funding is also critical to addressing this crisis. Governor Gavin Newsom, even as he gives orders and money to “Trump-proof” California, will be termed out in 2026. More than any other issue, this may be the one that defines his legacy as a leader.

Link: Dkt. 767 Motion for Order Re Settlement Agreement Compliance

Link: HACLA Board Approves Employment Contract with Lourdes Castro Ramirez as President & CEO

Link: Encampment Track

Link: Elon Musk Twitter Post RE: "Homeless"

Link: Broken Homes

Link: Skid Row Nonprofit ‘Fighting to End Homelessness’ Hires Former City Attorney Mike Feuer, the ‘Architect’ of Anti-Homeless Law

Link: LAHSA Governance slides

Link: LAHSA Subscribers Slides

Link: Economic Roundtable: Los Angeles County Homeless Count Data Library

Link: LA Alliance for Human Rights

Link: ULA Ordinance

Link: LA City Controller Audit - Homelessness Audit Pathways to Permanent Housing