The three main homeless service and housing agencies in Los Angeles failed to spend almost $150 million in federal housing grants between 2015 and 2020, according to a newspaper report.
The unused funds were returned to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
The Los Angeles Housing Services Authority (LAHSA)—the lead agency servicing both the County and City of Los Angeles’s homeless population—returned more than $29 million to the department over six years, the Los Angeles Times reported Sept. 24. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles County Development Authority returned roughly $38 million, and the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles returned more than $82 million.
“In a climate where the rental market is so hard to access, it makes it very challenging to use all these resources,” LAHSA spokesperson Ahmad Chapman told the newspaper.
Chief Programs Officer Molly Rysman said the federal housing department’s “rigid” and “complex” funding structure makes it difficult to disperse funds quickly, and if they are not spent, reallocating presents additional hurdles.
“We’ve said this to HUD over and over again,” Rysman said in the report. “We need a lot more flexibility.”
The report comes on the heels of the L.A. City Council’s homeless committee’s discussion on whether the city should split from LAHSA and start dealing with the homeless more directly as questions mount over the accuracy of the agency’s homeless count.
LAHSA came under criticism from residents of the Venice neighborhood after it reported no homeless population in the northwest quarter of Venice—an area known for its homeless encampments. The agency cited lack of training and poor internet connection as reasons for the errors.
Last week, city council President Nury Martinez and three other councilors called for an assessment of LAHSA’s response to the homeless crisis. In two new motions, Martinez requested a third party conduct the annual point-in-time counts and a review of LAHSA’s previous counts over several years.
A LAHSA spokesperson told The Epoch Times that “despite these errors, we are confident in the accuracy of this year’s homeless count because LAHSA and its partners took several steps to account for what was happening in the field.”
Efforts to combat these errors were put in place, according to the agency, such as a geolocation feature that can flag errors when volunteers recorded counts for the wrong location or when multiple volunteers were covering the same area.
For locations where no data was recorded, LAHSA staff conducted a separate count to ensure all necessary data was collected.
“[W]e can say with high confidence that we secured the data necessary to report an accurate picture of the number of people experiencing homelessness on any given night within the [Los Angeles area],” LAHSA’s statement read.
According to a local news report on the Westside Current, a member of a Venice group conducting its own count disagrees with LAHSA’s methodology.
“Ultimately our service providers must transparently collect high-quality, real-time, by-name data to make sure all unhoused people get the right kind of help based on their actual needs,” Connie Brooks told the news outlet. “Our unhoused population is not invisible. And they don’t appear on only one day every year.”
LAHSA estimates that more than 54,000 homeless people are in the area, but the agency excludes homeless people in Long Beach, Pasadena, and Glendale from its count.
LAHSA was founded in 1993 after extensive back-and-forth dialogue between the city of Los Angeles and the county about who was responsible for aiding the homeless on the streets. For the last several years, both the Board of Supervisors and the city council have suggested the agency may need reforms.
Los Angeles City Controller Ron Galperin, who oversees the city’s finances, did not respond to a request for comment by press deadline.
On Sept. 8, after LAHSA’s point-in-time count showed a 1.7 percent increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness in the city and a 4.1 percent jump countywide, Galperin said the results were “deeply frustrating.”
“Taxpayers have opted to invest billions of dollars to address the homelessness crisis, only to be disappointed as benchmarks for progress continue to go unmet,” Galperin said.
