If you believe homelessness spending in California is not accomplishing its intended purpose, you must be assuming that the purpose is to reduce homelessness.
It’s not.
The intended purpose is to take your tax dollars, replace them in your pocket with a silencing sense of guilt, route the money to political allies and make sure nobody gets blamed for it.
It’s working perfectly.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, for example, responded to a scathing new report assessing L.A.’s homelessness spending by saying, “This audit validates our work to change what’s festered for decades.”
The court-ordered independent report from Alvarez & Marsal Public Sector Services found $2.3 billion in homelessness spending related to city programs but auditors were “unable to completely quantify the total amount spent” because of a lack of recordkeeping by the people in charge of keeping the records.
The mayor declared that the city, the county and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), a city/county joint powers authority set up decades ago, “are working together to change and improve the system, and we are committed to continuing to do that.”
So no one is responsible.
LAHSA was disemboweled by the auditors’ report, which found that nobody verified the “quality, legitimacy or reasonableness of expenses” when reviewing invoices. In fact, LAHSA approved invoices without “clear indications of the specific services delivered.”
LAHSA is a bureaucracy that acts as a go-between for hundreds of millions of dollars annually from federal, state and local taxpayers to contracted service providers. But because of LAHSA’s “insufficient financial accountability,” auditors found that they were unable to “trace substantial funds” that were supposed to go to city homelessness programs.
Your tax dollars at work.
It’s not just Los Angeles that can’t find your money. The state Legislative Analyst’s Office just released a new report titled “Oversight of Encampment Resolution Funding.” Since the 2021-22 budget year, the Legislature has handed out $900 million from the General Fund “intended to help local communities address homeless encampments by funding housing and other services to the people living there.” Another $100 million is currently planned in the governor’s budget for 2025-26, but because of a lack of “compelling evidence that program goals are being met,” the LAO recommends holding off on that funding for now.
The LAO’s report says the January 2024 point-in-time count found 187,000 people who are homeless in California, an all-time high for the state, up 24 percent from January 2019. Two-thirds were unsheltered, living on the streets, sidewalks, parks and other places that should be totally unacceptable in a civilized society, or even in California.
Yet the LAO says the real numbers are “even higher.” Here’s how they know.
The California Interagency Council on Homelessness (Cal ICH) maintains a “Homeless Data Integration System” (HDIS) to keep track of data from 44 “Continuums of Care” (CoCs), which are federally required regional planning and coordination bodies made up of local governments, nonprofit service providers and “other member entities focused on addressing homelessness in their area.”
We should do a point-in-time count of the bureaucrats drawing salaries from the homelessness spending.
Cal ICH’s HDIS found that the CoCs “collectively provided services to about 337,000 people (unduplicated) who were experiencing homelessness during calendar year 2023.” In 2024, only through September, it’s 310,000.
The LAO says that’s an undercount, too. “The HDIS data do not include people experiencing homelessness who did not access any services” or who accessed services outside a CoC, such as veterans who receive services exclusively from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
According to the LAO, the state has spent $37 billion since 2019-20 on homelessness, allocated to the Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) and Cal ICH.
That doesn’t include local taxes. Property owners in the city of L.A. are paying off a $1.2 billion bond that was supposed to build 10,000 units of housing, including housing for the chronically homeless, and L.A. County residents and visitors have been paying a temporary .25% sales tax for homelessness services which was just doubled and made permanent by a November ballot measure approved by voters.
Conveniently, the court-ordered report on L.A.’s homelessness spending didn’t come out until after the election.
Everything is working exactly as intended.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley