Los Angeles County Will Create Its Own Homelessness Department

County officials voted to set up the new homeless department after defunding the prior agency, which lost track of billions in spending.

A homeless encampment in Los Angeles, Calif., on Aug. 7, 2024. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted April 1 in favor of creating a new department to take over services provided by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), which administers homelessness services in both the city and county of Los Angeles.

The Supervisors discussed the proposal during a more than 6-hour-long board meeting, ultimately voting 4–0 to create the county’s own homeless services department. Supervisor Holly Mitchell abstained from the vote. Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Kathryn Barger introduced the motion.

The funds overseen by LAHSA will be redirected toward the new department. The new county department will be accountable to the city council and the mayor, said the county supervisors.

LAHSA, formed in 1993 and co-funded by the city and county, oversees initiatives for shelter, food programs, and other services for homeless residents.

“The status quo is not serving anyone,” Horvath said during Tuesday’s meeting. “If we accept it, nothing will ever change.”

Horvath argued that the county’s own homeless agency would provide better oversight, as well as improved efficiency and results.

“This moment is about the county taking the dollars that taxpayers have entrusted to us, and investing them in what works,” she said.

Barger held a similar point of view.

“If anything, I think this creates a better streamlined process that relates to the services that are provided, as well as the housing component,” she said.

Supervisor Hilda Solis said representatives have received calls from providers about delayed contracts, as well as from people on the streets in need of LAHSA services. While the county saw some improvement recently, it wasn’t enough, Solis said.

“People were asking, ‘Where is the money, where are the shelters, where is the interim housing, where are the boots on the ground, where are the [Mental Evaluation Teams], where are the teams that we all need?’” Solis said.

LAHSA Interim Chief Program Officer Nathaniel VerGow cautioned at the meeting that the change left many unanswered questions.

“What I don’t understand is the rush of the proposed strategy of moving all services with no real plan in place,” VerGow said. “How can we expect that a new, larger bureaucracy built at a time of potentially reduced budgets will yield significantly different results?”

In a letter to the county supervisors ahead of the meeting on April 1, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Councilwoman Nithya Raman said the county would be “going backwards” on homelessness with this plan.

“Dismantling LAHSA will deprive the City of Los Angeles of essential resources, including recent voter-approved Measure A funding, and would severely stunt the City’s ability to oversee existing programs that provide holistic solutions to individuals with complex needs,” they wrote. “This action would create a monumental disruption in the progress we are making and runs the serious risk of worsening our homelessness crisis, not ending it.”

Officials took control on March 25 of hundreds of millions of dollars in homelessness spending after two audits found LAHSA had not properly tracked the funds it had been allotted.

The audits found LAHSA failed to track spending and verify whether services the city and county paid for had even been provided. An independent audit released on March 6 found that LAHSA had lost track of $2.3 billion in homelessness services spending.

“Repetitive information gaps, coupled with a lack of accurate and complete data and documentation, posed significant obstacles to this assessment,” the report states.

LAHSA said that the agency had identified the same issues in 2021.

“This audit calls out the siloed and fragmented nature of our region’s homeless response for driving poor data quality and integration, lack of contractual clarity, and disjointed services as major impediments to success and oversight. LAHSA’s own Ad Hoc Committee on Governance came to the same conclusion in 2021,” a LAHSA spokesperson told The Epoch Times in a statement.

“Since then, LAHSA has advocated for creating a regional body to mandate collaboration between the City, County, and LAHSA, just as proposed in the court’s audit.”

In November 2024, Los Angeles County auditors also completed a review of LAHSA, which had been requested by the Board of Supervisors in February of that year.

Officials found LAHSA could not provide comprehensive contract data, according to the review.

“LAHSA may not be able to recover all working capital advances and as a result, may not repay the County the full $82.5 million in advanced Measure H funds,” a report on the county review reads. Measure H is also known as the Los Angeles County Plan to Prevent and Combat Homelessness, and was approved by voters in 2017 to create a one-quarter of a cent sales tax to fund homelessness services.

“In addition, due to a lack of standards for conducting and documenting the results of their contract monitoring reviews, we could not determine whether LAHSA adequately monitored all their contracts to ensure subrecipients complied with their contract terms.”

According to the most recent data from 2023, seven homeless individuals die per day on average in Los Angeles County, according to a report released on March 6 by the L.A. County Department of Public Health.