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iAUDIT! - Since 2016, UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs has published a Quality-of-Life Report on L.A. County residents’ views of various issues, like affordability and disaster preparedness. The 2026 report shows residents have the worst outlook since the survey began 10 years ago. The report shows across the board declines in 10 of the 11 survey categories, including education, cost of living, race relations, and traffic, (page 2). Although the survey does not address homelessness directly, overall, it paints the dim view most residents have of their elected leaders’ ability to address major concerns in their communities.
Considered in the context of that survey, recent news on the homelessness front should be concerning. For example, see a recent story on the L.A. City Council’s glacial move toward redefining its relationship with LAHSA. Councilmembers are considering becoming a “majority partner” with LAHSA, assuming some of its administrative duties and contracting with providers directly. While this may avoid many of LAHSA’s problems with financial and contract management, there was no mention of addressing the City’s own problems, which I summarized in a Substack column. The City has no clear idea of what it spends on homelessness and cannot produce reliable performance statistics on program outcomes. As I noted here, the City’s Chief Legislative Analyst reported that LA’s homelessness programs are disjointed, siloed, and unaccountable. So far, how the City Council intends to improve the effectiveness of its programs hasn’t been part of the discussion, although the Times’ article seems to indicate Mayor Bass and several Councilmembers intend to follow the same troubled path the city has been travelling for years. One indicator of how the City prioritizes its funding is that, despite problems balancing its budget, and despite a potential overall decrease of $116.1 million in homelessness funding, Mayor Bass’s draft budget for fiscal year 2026-27 includes an increase of $119.8 million in General Fund costs for homelessness, (see p. 539).
The UCLA study also raises questions about how well local government uses the resources it has. An article in LAist discusses how the $1 billion raised by Measure A is divided but said nothing about how well that money is used. As I wrote last April, Measure A’s funding priorities are largely set by a “Leadership Table” whose membership includes nonprofits and development advocates who stand to benefit most from the Measure’s funding. There is also the question of how the County’s new homelessness department can claim is starting the new fiscal year with a $200 million deficit despite a billion dollars in new funding. Granted, not all of Measure A’s revenue goes to the County, but the bulk of it does, and it is up to Measure’s governing board on how it prioritizes funding.
When it comes to using resources, the city homelessness program that consumes the most funding is Inside Safe. According to the latest numbers on the City Controller’s homelessness dashboard, Inside Safe has cost $391.4 million in three years. The program has permanently housed 1,431 people, meaning it has cost more than $273,000 per person housed. The dashboard shows 358, or about 25 percent of the total, of those defined as housed are in time-limited subsidies. As soon as the subsidies expire (usually in two years), those people may be back on the street. Besides being costly, Inside Safe is minimally effective. As an LA Times article shows, 40 percent of Inside Safe participants have fallen back into homelessness, while the Controller’s dashboard shows only about 25 percent (1,431 of the 5,808 clients served) have been housed. A survey performed by a coalition of advocacy groups shows two-thirds of Inside Safe clients obtained no housing assistance, and nearly half have received no services at all.
The Times article also casts doubt on a core message of Housing First proponents; that relatively few homeless people suffer from substance abuse or untreated mental illness, and that homelessness is primarily a problem of insufficient affordable housing. The article quoted executives from The People Concern, one of the largest homelessness nonprofits, that anywhere between 50 and 65 percent of their clients have serious drug abuse issues. Indeed, another Times article shows more than half of all shelter clients are evicted for behavioral problems ranging from persistent drug use to assault. Since providers are paid for the number of beds in shelters rather than by the number of clients, it is easier for them to evict troublesome people than to address their behavior. Coupled with No Barrier polices concerning substance abuse or mental health treatment, paying for the number of beds removes any incentive to provide effective support services, which may explain the dismal statistics from the coalition’s survey.
What is especially interesting is how these issues are related to and interact with one another: residents’ historically low satisfaction with their quality of life, how government services in general and homelessness specifically seem to be falling into disarray; widespread distrust of elected leaders, and the pressures of an election year. If it wasn’t an election year, I highly doubt we’d see Councilmember Raman suddenly become a critic of LAHSA, an agency she ferociously defended until she announced her mayoral run. We’re seeing the same from Supervisor Horvath, who once exclaimed “LAHSA is us”! and is now assiduously working on moving funding and services from the Authority to the County’s new homelessness department. If one wanted to take a Machiavellian view, one could suppose Horvath is less interested in reform than she is in consolidating the Board of Supervisors’ power (and financial authority).
As I have written before, local government in Los Angeles is purely reactive. Solutions follow those who scream the loudest or who wield the most influence. Neither the Council nor the BOS took any action about LAHSA’s bleak performance history until a series of audits and high-profile failures forced them to, and even now they are proposing no substantive reforms. As a Westside Current article shows, Raman’s newfound concern about LAHSA came 522 days after Councilmember Rodriguez first proposed changes to the City’s agreement with the Authority. As Rodriguez said, “It’s unfortunate that Ms. Raman’s newfound sense of ‘urgency, accountability, and ambition,’ has not been applied in her current leadership overseeing homelessness policy. As Housing and Homelessness Committee Chair, Nithya Raman has sat on reforms for the last three years and recently advanced recommendations that do nothing to better clarify how the City of Los Angeles will organize its homelessness response”. That is the essence of homelessness in Los Angeles; it’s treated as a public relations problem or a campaign issue instead of the crisis it is. Until we insist on leaders who take homelessness seriously, we will continue to see more of the same.
(Tim Campbell is a longtime Westchester resident and veteran public servant who spent his career managing a municipal performance audit program. Drawing on decades of experience in government accountability, he brings a results-driven approach to civic oversight. In his iAUDIT! column for CityWatchLA, Campbell emphasizes outcomes over bureaucratic process, offering readers clear-eyed analyses of how local programs perform—and where they fall short. His work advocates for greater transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness in Los Angeles government.)
