L.A. aims to add 6,000 beds for homelessness this year alone
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L.A. city officials say they're on target to create 6,000 new beds for unhoused Angelenos in 2025—however, some advocates think it's only 4,600. The excellent LAist reports.
L.A. city officials say they’ve been complying with a federal court requirement to create 6,000 new beds for unhoused Angelenos.
But there’s a problem.
Court-appointed auditors were not able to verify that the city was actually following through on that commitment.
Officials at the L.A. Homeless Services Authority — who Mayor Karen Bass oversees — failed to provide records to the auditors for any spending on more than 1,400 rental subsidies the city was taking credit for in compliance reports submitted to the court.
LAist asked for the spending data the day after that hearing. It took more than a dozen requests over the last month-and-a-half before LAHSA eventually provided LAist on Tuesday with the fuller spending records they had withheld from the court’s auditors.
Go Deeper:
- Local Salvation Army head: Sober homeless shelters a safe and effective methodology (2/4)
- Case study Sacramento: When sanctioned encampments go wrong—lessons for SJ
- Strategy fail: Why some states (like CA) and some cities (like SJ) have high (and rising) homelessness rates despite billions in spending
LAist has asked repeatedly for an explanation from city and LAHSA officials for why the city was counting more than 1,400 beds toward its obligations that LAHSA’s accounting shows no city role in funding.
A LAHSA spokesperson previously told LAist that “LAHSA stretches the City’s investment by braiding its money with other funding.”
LAHSA spokesperson Paul Rubenstein disputed that anything was withheld, pointing to a partial dataset that LAHSA provided to LAist in mid-April and that court-auditors had flagged as incomplete. He has not responded to repeated questions about why the full accounting was withheld for months from the court-overseen reviewers, and from LAist, until this week.
Judge Carter scheduled the hearing response to a filing by the plaintiffs — the downtown business group L.A. Alliance for Human Rights — requesting the judge find the city in violation. They want the court to seize control of city homelessness spending and hand it to a court-appointed receiver to oversee.
“Knowingly or unknowingly, the City was falsely reporting that it paid for and provided all 2,293 beds when it unequivocally did not,” L.A. Alliance attorney Elizabeth Mitchell wrote in a court filing last week requesting the receivership.
The court-overseen deal at issue is known as the Roadmap agreement. Signed in the fall of 2020 as part of the L.A. Alliance lawsuit, the agreement requires the city to expand the number of shelter beds for unhoused people in the city of L.A. by adding 6,000 new beds — and paying for them.
The city “is responsible for all costs” for the beds, aside from the annual county payments to the city, according to the agreement.
Every three months, the city has been submitting required reports showing how it claims to be meeting its obligations under the Roadmap agreement.
Read the whole thing here.
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