By Nick Gerda for LAist
Originally published April 1, 2025
L.A. County will stop sending hundreds of millions in taxpayer money each year to the troubled agency charged with serving the unhoused — a stinging admission by elected officials that the region’s longstanding approach to homelessness has failed.
What the vote means
On a 4-0 vote Tuesday with one supervisor abstaining, the Los Angeles County board put in motion a plan to strip more than $300 million a year in taxpayer funding from the L.A. Homeless Services Authority — known as LAHSA — by the middle of next year. Instead, those funds will shift to the county’s direct oversight and control.
The funding shift was spearheaded by supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Kathryn Barger. Horvath said the move was needed to fix a broken system and to make it more transparent and accountable.
“To engender the public’s trust, we must take action for a more centralized, effective, data-driven strategy to reduce homelessness,” she said. “Investments must be connected to outcomes — outcomes that this Board ultimately must be responsible for. We have studied the homeless service system to death,” Horvath said at Tuesday’s meeting.
Speaking before the vote, Supervisor Janice Hahn said no one really defended LAHSA “because I don’t think anybody wants to.”
Why it matters
The move follows a series of harsh audits and a judge’s rebuke of the job LAHSA officials have done in recent years at managing and tracking spending — including an inability to properly account for billions in taxpayer dollars. That’s on top of a public growing increasingly impatient with L.A. government leaders’ handling of the crisis.
What do Los Angeles officials say?
The supervisors moved forward with seizing control despite being urged not to by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and several L.A. City Council members who raised concerns that services could be disrupted and questioned if the new approach would be better.
“We are making forward movement. We must keep building on this and confronting our challenges, together,” Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman wrote in a joint letter to supervisors they distributed to the media a few hours before Tuesday’s vote.
While LAHSA’s mismanagement has been a major concern, experts and advocates for unhoused people have said the main driver of the homelessness crisis in L.A. is rising housing costs amid short supply of homes.
What happens to LAHSA?
Tuesday’s decision by county supervisors leaves LAHSA’s fate uncertain.
Its largest funder is the county, with taxpayer funds making up 40% of the agency’s projected funding this fiscal year and an even larger share — 70% — of LAHSA’s administration budget.
Hundreds of LAHSA staff will likely have to leave the agency due to the funding shift. The county plan calls for giving priority to LAHSA employees for jobs in a new county department tasked with overseeing spending meant to help unhoused people get permanently off the streets.
LAHSA’s next largest funder is the city of L.A. at 35% of all revenues. The city is now exploring whether to follow in the county’s footsteps by pulling city funding and moving it under direct city control.
If both the city and county pull funding, LAHSA would dramatically slim down to far less than half its current size, handling a small subset of its current work.
The agency’s ongoing work would include managing federal homelessness funds for the region, handling the annual point-in-time homeless count and overseeing the main data tracking system for homeless services, known as HMIS.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
This report is reprinted with permission from Southern California Public Radio. © 2024 Southern California Public Radio. All rights reserved.