Part 178: A Homelessness Impasse in Los Angeles? Judicial Nothingburger and Policy Indecision

Published July 2, 2025.

and

Jul 03, 2025

Photo Long Beach Deputy Mayor for Housing Connor Lock guiding a bus tour of innovative housing solutions on July 2 by Zachary Ellison (GoPro Hero 11 Black).

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By Zachary Ellison and Ruth Roofless, Independent Journalists

After over five solid years of hype, the LA Alliance court’s ruling was as perplexingly unsatisfying as any in Los Angeles. Judge David O. Carter declined to impose a receivership over the homelessness authorities, despite finding numerous shortcomings in shelter systems. After multiple evidentiary hearings on whether the city had breached a settlement agreement with the LA Alliance for Human Rights, the decision, as Carter wrote, came with ersatz approval: “the Court’s decision not to declare a breach reflects judicial restraint, not confidence.”

Despite claimed signs of progress by Mayor Karen Bass in modest reductions of street homelessness, reality can be quite different from even the best political intentions of municipal leadership. It’s easy to scoff at the 758 tents Mayor Bass exchanged for seemingly indefinite hotel stays through her Inside Safe program. Unhoused people and advocates have long said the goal shouldn’t be to eliminate “encampments,” but City leaders for the past two decades have never managed to pull off promises of fewer makeshift dwellings.

Advocates and unsheltered people have long warned against measuring the disappearance of tents as success. “Encampment reduction” happens organically as a result of permanently housing tent-dwellers, but strategies that focus only on reduction cruelly leave people who have little with less. Similarly, counting people on the streets, as RAND has done with their LA 4LEADS survey for three consecutive years, equates dying on the street with being successfully housed, because both result in overall visual reductions.

Alliance’s remaining City settlement, which is monitored by Michele C. Martinez, demands 10,000 “encampment reductions” before June 2027. Resolutions/reductions are hostile to unhoused people who are trying to survive, and losing their items like blankets simply makes death more likely.

The Mayor is pulling off reductions but not enough to please Alliance, and she’s not housing people quickly enough to impress, although she’s sheltering an impressive 2,552 participants as of December 31. This contradiction may be why few people are 100% in the Mayor’s corner with Inside Safe. But it seems like the goalposts for claiming progress on homelessness were adjusted as soon as Bass and her team started making legitimate progress toward those misguided goals, which raises the question of whether there is anything she can possibly do to win her critics.

Referencing the Supreme Court of the United States decision in Grants Pass, the octogenarian Judge Carter submitted that “federal courts cannot substitute their judgment for the democratic will of a community grappling with complex and deeply human questions.” LA voters have continuously decided to support homelessness propositions, just to be let down by the nonprofit recipients of their tax funds. But the nonprofit service providers are not affected by the restructuring that the Alliance court has influenced, as they are basically vendors. Holding them accountable to the terms of their contracts still seems to be a challenge.

The question “Where am I going to be able to safely sleep tonight?” is indeed a deeply human one that Alliance hasn’t quite answered. In fact, before the March 2020 complaint was filed, Los Angeles City and County were at least in agreement over the acronym of the homelessness authority. The new un-acronymed agency has reportedly selected its leader, but their identity has not yet been made public, and per breaking reporting in LAist, the position will come with a salary of $219,000 to $423,000.

To be fair, Carter hasn’t circled out imposing a receivership, a move that was viewed as a clear political loss for Bass and the political order of testifying City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo in conjunction with Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum, Chief Executive Officer “CEO” of LAHSA. CEO Adams-Kellum announced her resignation following defunding of her agency by Los Angeles County and a fairly critical “assessment” from Alvarez & Marsal (A&M), initially termed an “audit,” that was to be both forensic and performance-based.

Despite clear concerns about the auditability of city contracts and a push to repay funds advanced to nonprofits under County Measure H ahead of the planned 2027 settlement deadline, Carter’s reticence to take punitive actions was more discrete than his recent push to reform land use at the West Los Angeles Soldier’s Home. Referencing “injunctive relief” only once, Carter didn’t so much take the current leadership’s side as he moved to approve the appointment of a “a third-party Monitor by August 22, 2025, and, subject to the Court’s approval, select the Monitor by September 12, 2025.”

A federal takeover might not be happening on homelessness response, but the City and County aren’t out of the legal woods just yet ahead of the expiration date for the current settlement. Measure H was repealed and replaced by County Measure A, but oddly, the latter, Measure A, isn’t mentioned in Carter’s 62-page ruling. It should be, though, as it presents an opportunity to test the theory of whether providing a permanent funding source to address homelessness somehow saves the sinking ship that couldn’t meet the test of accounting.

Moreover, it’s still not entirely decided where all the money went, nor has anyone been prosecuted yet by new U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, who has been focusing his efforts on deportations. The recommendation of a monitor, not a receiver, from Special Master Michele C. Martinez might be the most concrete step in a hesitant ruling that was otherwise a so-called nothingburger after much speculation that the veteran jurist would take bold steps.

Martinez survived, at least seemingly, her own conflictual encounter with outside counsel for the City of Los Angeles from the firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher (GDC), whom Carter described as, “The City wasted significant time during the hearing berating A&M for not adhering to certain governmental accounting standards even though the City agreed to the standards used by A&M and paid for the Assessment to resolve Plaintiffs’ previous sanctions motion.” Martinez was tasked with coordinating the audit led by Managing Director Dianne Rafferty of A&M.

Was restructuring seemingly for the sake of pleasing plaintiffs worth all the money, time, and energy spent over the past five years? The impasse in Los Angeles is a product of both judicial indecision and governmental failure. There might not be a silver bullet, but one thing that is most assuredly needed is more housing, especially after losing over 12,000 homes in January’s fires. Most especially, permanent housing is needed. Interim situations often are not the best solutions to the crisis of the unhoused, because interim shelters inevitably become permanent. Where will Los Angeles go from this anticlimax?

The future of housing production in Los Angeles depends on the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (LACAHSA). The still-new agency is Los Angeles’s answer to the elimination of redevelopment agencies and will be funded by Measure A with roughly 36% of the funds. LACAHSA, under Interim Chief Executive Officer Ryan Johnson, recently released its 2025-26 expenditure plan and agency strategy, which promises to allocate an estimated $382,773,809 to “affordable housing production, preservation, and renter protection services.” Under the guidance of Board Chair Rex Richardson, who was just re-elected and serves as the mayor of Long Beach, and Vice Chair Miguel Santana, who serves as President of the California Community Foundation, it will have lofty goals to reach.

At its recent June 26 Housing Solutions Summit at the Long Beach Convention Center, keynote speaker Ezra Klein, a journalist, was scratched due to a family emergency. Gracing the stage were leaders from business, labor, and government, including Tomiquia Moss, California Secretary of Business, Consumer Services, and Housing Agency, who shared that her office was being reorganized to sever its business and consumer services functions from its housing responsibilities. Also in attendance was Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO President Yvonne Wheeler, who recalled how the group had helped collect over 450,000 signatures to get Measure A on the ballot.

The event was preceded by an Innovative Housing Solutions Bus Tour that visited three sites in Long Beach: “Oceanaire at 150 W Ocean Blvd, Mosaic and Jefferson at 165 E 4th Street, three unique projects at one intersection at 14th and Long Beach Blvd.” Traveling on a Metro bus with Deputy Mayor for Housing Connor Lock in a dapper blue suit, it was easy to see Long Beach, with its ample redevelopment potential, could usher in a SoCal housing redevelopment spree. Co-hosted in part by developer Waterford Company Co-Founder and Head of Acquisitions and Development Sean Rawson, the Oceanaire lobby water feature was certainly enticing for a project that sought to meet demand for the “missing middle.”

The Long Beach Grassroots Art + Media group “ForThe” targeted the development with a 2021 exposé by journalist Kevin Flores that noted to live there, a family of four needed an income within the $90,000 to $135,000 a year. Moreover, Waterford secured “up to $43 million in property tax subsidies over three decades in exchange for little public benefit” and had also donated extensively to Long Beach politicians, including $29,450 to Richardson, who was then Vice Mayor under current Congressman Robert Garcia, who received $80,050 in donations from Waterford-associated companies and individuals, including Rawson.

With soft-white walls, the model unit shown to tour guests at the Oceanaire at least wasn’t an empty lot prepared for development at the second destination or the third, where a complex still under construction was graced by a homeless encampment neighboring its flank and across from a parcel scheduled to be transformed into a city park. Most assuredly it takes money and time to develop properties, but can Measure A, much less LACAHSA, really make an impact? Out of its total allocations, LACAHSA plans to distribute $111,004,405 through its in-house lending program, with the remainder of the projected $382 million being outlaid to regional governmental groups, including the Las Virgenes/Malibu Council of Governments, set to receive $393,147 for a room or two. Other regions receive bigger chunks, but you have to wonder.

A “LACAHSA Mortgage,” according to the document, “provides a one-stop shop for developers to fund 65%-90% of development costs with low-interest, tax-exempt debt.” The loans made either an A-Note or a B-note for new construction or for additional operating costs will be tradeable as “complementary financing tools” with the goal of jumpstarting housing development. Real estate has generally been a surefire investment in California, except for during bust periods such as 2008, and LACAHSA’s planners acknowledge that the “LACAHSA Mortgage will take time to be established as a reliable capital source for projects.”

Supervisor Janice Hahn, attending the summit, celebrated the move toward a regionally organized redevelopment agency. A familiar face in Los Angeles politics, not least because her father, Jim Hahn, who was once the mayor of Los Angeles, seemed impressed by the scale of the endeavor. LACAHSA, which is quickly staffing up, seems like the right idea, provided it can deliver the results. The potential to leverage additional funding may be there, but in an increasingly uncertain market, you have to wonder about the chance of undercollection on a sales tax and underimpact in meeting housing goals. Los Angeles may be an asset, but can it finance its way out of a housing crunch that, in addition to sending Californians elsewhere, is also leaving too many on its streets in RVs and encampments?

The risk of scattershot here is very real. By splitting up its Measure A pie, LACAHSA may meet political goals of widely distributed investment, but it could also fail to meet the most difficult and most concentrated housing injustices. Moreover, its funds aren’t intended to be used in direct response to homelessness, with the rest of Measure A funding going under the Executive Committee for Homelessness Regional Alignment (ECHRA). In the near post-LAHSA environment, the question of what the separation between housing and homelessness is for so many has never been less tangible.

The shell of LAHSA met on Friday, June 27th, to discuss the discontinuation of $50M in funding for 1,000 time-limited subsidies and prioritization of keeping people in housing over street-level services. Even as leaders are congealing around a common purpose under Measure A to deliver housing, they’ve been coming apart at the seams on homelessness. Is it that Los Angeles has never been closer to failure, or perhaps it’s never been closer to success? The answer just might depend on who you ask and what your income level is, along with your ability to access market capital and decisively leverage your relationships for development efforts.

Link: Dkt. 991 Order Granting in Part and Denying in Part Plaintiffs' Motions for Settlement Compliance

Link: Judge declines to take power over L.A. homeless programs away from city leaders

Link: LAHSA Commission Special Meeting 6/27/25

Link: Dianne Rafferty

Link: Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency

Link: LACAHSA FY25-26 Expenditure Plan and Agency Strategy

Link: LA County Labor “All In” for “Yes on A”

Link: Sean Rawson

Link: Oceanaire

Link: New Housing Program Targets ‘Missing Middle’

Link: 'It is Misleading': Consultants Say City Promised Millions in Tax Money Under Guise of Creating Affordable Housing at the Oceanaire

Link: LA County officials select leader of new homelessness department