Should homeless programs funded by the taxpayers of the city of Los Angeles be audited for their effectiveness?
Of course they should be. Any outlay of tens of millions of dollars of public monies that continue to show results that are questionable at best should be audited.
And no one — not Mayor Karen Bass, nor anyone else employed in the effort to better the conditions of the unhoused, within or without City Hall — should be offended by such an auditing effort.
Just after she took office, and it was shown that a year after the $67 million program known as Inside Safe had moved just 255 homeless people indoors, Bass herself said that she was “not satisfied with those numbers.” Of course she wasn’t. When there are about 46,000 people who live on the L.A. streets, no civic leader would be satisfied with those numbers.
Now, according to Los Angeles Magazine, Bass’s office says that Inside Safe has moved 2,153 people indoors since December 2022, and that 402 of them have been permanently housed.
Better, sure. But now one would claim that the numbers are anything like great.
That’s why U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, famous for his interest in and tough talk about homelessness, was right this month to call for an independent auditing of all Los Angeles homelessness programs, including Inside Safe.
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“Which provider is producing results out there?” Carter asked, the L.A. Times reports. “We have no benchmark, and we have no accountability at this point. It’s just as simple as that.”
There is some argument about whether City Controller Kenneth Mejia is the right person to conduct such an audit. As literally the city’s chief auditor, in a position elected separately from the mayor or anyone else, we don’t see why his office isn’t the right one to perform an audit. Mejia said in a social media post that he is concerned about the city’s “lack of transparency & accountability on homelessness efforts despite billions of dollars spent” and said his office would perform “a focused audit on Inside Safe.” But he also said that “Our office welcomes an external, independent auditor to aid” in the audit.
It matters not to the citizenry of Los Angeles who performs the audit. Action is what matters in the crisis.