The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is starting to resemble a licensed character from horror movies. The whole agency is undead, so lawyers for Dracula might be on it already.\u00a0<\/p>\n
LAHSA was formed in 1993 as a joint powers authority for the city and county of Los Angeles. It has been the lead agency for the distribution of money from local, state and federal taxpayers. Over the last ten years, a pattern has emerged: the more tax money that is spent on the collection of problems that\u2019s called homelessness, the worse the problems have become.<\/p>\n
In 2016, voters in the city of Los Angeles approved $1.2 billion in new debt to build homeless housing. Then in 2017, L.A. County voters approved Measure H, a temporary 0.25%\u00a0 sales tax increase with the revenue earmarked for homelessness services. It brought in hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and then in 2024, voters were persuaded to approve Measure A, doubling the tax and making it permanent.<\/p>\n
Tax increase proponents made the argument in the 2024 campaign that the tax was really helping, because homelessness had declined. They cited that year\u2019s point-in-time count in L.A. County showing a 0.27% drop to 75,312<\/a>.<\/p>\n What they didn\u2019t say is that eight years earlier in 2016, before the Measure H sales tax increase started throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem annually, homelessness in L.A. County was up 5.7% over the previous year \u2013 to 46,874<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The 2026 point-in-time count found 73,040<\/a> homeless individuals in Los Angeles County, an increase over the 2025 count of 72,195<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the city of Los Angeles, the 2026 count<\/a> was 45,194, up from 43,699 in 2025, and up from 28,464 in 2016, before the tax increases for homelessness began.<\/p>\n What\u2019s wrong with this picture?<\/p>\n Among other things, LAHSA. In April 2025, after a county audit found an excessively relaxed attitude toward such things as accounting and paying contractors, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to get out of the Homeless Services Authority and take back the roughly $350 million in annual funding that made up about a third of LAHSA\u2019s budget.\u00a0<\/p>\n The city of Los Angeles is staying in, so far. Mayor Karen Bass has no love for auditors. She blocked the city controller from auditing her monstrously expensive Inside Safe program, one part of the city\u2019s total budget for homelessness of $953 million<\/a> in fiscal year 2025-26.<\/p>\n There are now bureaucrats in three government entities \u2013 LAHSA, the County\u2019s new Department of Homeless Services and Housing, and the L.A. mayor\u2019s program \u2013 all pulling down salaries to hand out money to nonprofit organizations and other \u201cproviders\u201d of housing and homeless services in L.A. County, each with its own hefty executive payroll.<\/p>\n Those salaries are partly paid with funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD is now investigating to see why the problem in Los Angeles is not getting better despite all the money spent on it. In June, HUD sent a 12-page letter<\/a>, with a 13th page listing 34 exhibits, informing LAHSA that it has been suspended from \u201cfuture participation in procurement and nonprocurement transactions\u201d while the Office of Inspector General investigates \u201cwanton mismanagement of public funds.\u201d<\/p>\n HUD\u2019s letter painstakingly lists previous attempts to audit or review LAHSA\u2019s spending, finding \u201clack of financial management and internal controls,\u201d \u201cconflicts of interest,\u201d \u201csystemic and repeated failures,\u201d \u201cobvious fraud,\u201d \u201crepeated false statements,\u201d \u201cmisused money\u201d and an internal audit program that is \u201cnot meaningfully functioning.\u201d<\/p>\n HUD has sent LAHSA $944 million dollars since 2021, but now LAHSA is suspended from receiving any federal funds while the investigation continues. HUD issued a notice telling homeless services contractors to prepare to apply directly to the federal agency, not through LAHSA, for funding.<\/p>\n But despite losing county funding and federal funding, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority will not give up the ghost. Instead, it is spending your hard-earned tax money on lawyers, suing HUD to halt the suspension. It will protect its lush salaries at all costs.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is undead, eternally sucking the blood of taxpayers wherever it can find any.<\/p>\n Maybe Dracula\u2019s lawyers at Universal Pictures can get it shut down for trademark infringement.<\/p>\n