Los Angeles’ homelessness crisis isn’t just a battle against a humanitarian disaster—it’s a failure of governance.
A newly released audit of the Los Angeles Homelessness Services Authority (LAHSA) confirms what many residents have suspected for years: LA’s homelessness response is a chaotic, unaccountable mess where money is funneled into programs with little oversight, unclear goals, and virtually no measurable success.
Without accountability, the government has spent millions of dollars, yet can’t even tell how many people are being helped, how long they stay housed, or whether the programs are even functional. Even worse, the agency at the heart of LA’s response—the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority—has been allowed to continue its mismanagement without any real consequences. The severity of this crisis has not been alleviated by the upper echelons officials of our city, who claim to be solving the problem. It has worsened, fast.
This isn’t just about inefficiency—it’s negligence. The Alvarez and Marsal audit lays bare a system so riddled with financial mismanagement that fraud and abuse are not just possibilities; they are inevitable. LAHSA pays service providers without requiring proper documentation, often without contracts in place, and the city signs off on these payments without verifying if the work is actually being done.
Shockingly, the report found that 70% of the city’s temporary housing contracts did not report financial expenditures for an entire fiscal year, meaning no one can even verify where the money went. The city is burning taxpayer dollars while thousands of unhoused residents remain in squalor.
Additionally, the mismanagement isn’t limited to financial incompetence. LAHSA and city officials are failing at the most basic function of a homelessness response: tracking and housing people effectively. A&M found that data sharing between agencies is so poor that many shelter beds go unused every night—even as thousands of people sleep on the streets.
Inside Safe, Mayor Karen Bass’s signature homelessness initiative, has proven to be the most expensive interim housing program in the city, costing taxpayers $82,000 per person per year for motel rooms that may or may not even be occupied. This money could have been used for permanent housing, but instead, it’s disappearing into bureaucratic black holes.
Shockingly, the audit found that only 22% of individuals in city-funded shelters find permanent housing, while nearly 48% fall back into homelessness. Los Angeles’ incompetent government and mayor haven’t just fueled wastefulness, but also systemic failure. LAHSA and city officials are content with paying service providers to go through the motions of helping people rather than actually getting them off the streets. The contracts used to fund these programs don’t focus on results but instead reward organizations for merely completing bureaucratic steps, like outreach and referrals, regardless of whether they actually get people housed.
Karen Bass argues that the problem is simply too complex and that failures should be expected when tackling such an enormous crisis. However, the A&M audit makes it clear that the real problem isn’t the scale of the crisis: it’s the structure of the response. Homelessness in LA is overseen by three separate entities: the city, the county, and LAHSA.
Instead of working together, they operate in silos, duplicating services, wasting money, and often failing to communicate basic information. The city has its own outreach teams because LAHSA isn’t reliable. Council districts are hiring their own mental health professionals because the county isn’t providing enough support. As a result, some unhoused people are being counted multiple times in different programs, while others are falling through the cracks completely.
The solution is clear: LA’s homelessness response needs a total overhaul. There must be a single, centralized authority with the power to enforce accountability, track spending, and demand measurable results. Without a fundamental restructuring, LAHSA will continue its cycle of waste and failure, and the city will keep throwing money at a crisis it has no real plan to solve.
Los Angeles cannot afford to keep making excuses. The city’s homelessness response is broken—not because of a lack of funding, but because of a government that refuses to be accountable. It’s time for city leaders to stop rewarding failure and start demanding real results, and taxpayers must act to demand a change. Otherwise, LA’s homelessness crisis will remain exactly what it is now: a monument to government incompetence.
Aidan Chao is chairman of the Los Angeles County Taxpayers Association.