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iAUDIT! - As the home of the world’s film industry, Los Angeles and its residents appreciate the value of a good script. A well-written screenplay can take viewers anywhere from the limits of outer space to the most intimate thoughts of a troubled soul. An experienced director knows staying on script is vital to telling the story; when an actor wanders off-script, the story gets muddled, and the entire production is endangered. In a culture where intermixing fantasy and reality is an industry, many elected officials know how important a script is when they step into the public spotlight. Recent court hearings show us how important it is for the city to command the narrative about homelessness, and what happens when it loses control of the script.
The past two weeks have seen some interesting developments in the homelessness court case. Several witnesses testified about the city’s homelessness program failures, and the City hired a high-powered law firm to defend itself, to the tune of at least $900,000 in a time of huge budget deficits. Attorneys for the LA Alliance for Human Rights initially subpoenaed Mayor Bass and Councilmembers Rodriguez and Park, but withdrew the subpoenas when the City made it clear they would appeal should federal Judge Davod O. Carter require their appearance, delaying the hearing for months (and running up the contract attorneys’ billings). Despite losing its high-profile witnesses, the hearings had no lack of drama or revelations of questionable decision-making.
The central thrust of the Alliance’s argument is that the City has no control of its homelessness programs and has been unable to meet its obligations to create the number of shelter beds and provide services required by its settlement agreement with the Alliance. To that end, Alliance attorneys’ questions focused on how reliable the City’s numbers are and if those numbers support claims homelessness is decreasing. Of course, anyone who’s been following homelessness for the past few years knows the answer is no. Nevertheless, city officials did their best to stick to the script, despite the clear disconnect between the narrative and the reality on the streets. Let’s look at a few examples.
When the Alliance’s attorneys withdrew its subpoenas, the City’s lawyers feigned umbrage at the suggestion that officials are not committed to ending homelessness. One lawyer was quoted as saying, “Of course the mayor and our City Council are 1000% committed to solving the homelessness crisis, and also to fulfilling the city’s obligations under the agreement”. The attorney when on to say thousands of shelter beds and housing units have been created since the agreement took effect, and homelessness is decreasing. That’s the script.
The reality is different. During her time on the stand, Deputy Mayor for Homelessness Dr. Etsemaye P. Agonafer admitted that the city’s “1,000% commitment” to meeting the agreement’s obligations didn’t extend to her actually reading it. She said, “I may have skimmed it. Maybe skimmed it once. I’m not an attorney, and so the goals from my understanding are around street cleanings and beds online”. I’m not quite sure how one can claim to be in full compliance with an agreement one hasn’t read. And her summary of the agreement’s requirements was plain wrong; its about much more than street cleaning and beds.
In a similar vein, City CAO Matt Szabo said he was confident LA would meet its shelter and housing obligations by the June 2027 deadline, despite being far behind on intermediate goals. He noted, as did the city’s attorney, that thousands of units have already been created. Apparently, he forgot thousands of units lie vacant due to bureaucratic delays and a report from the court-appointed audit firm Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) found the City had yet to develop a plan to create at least 4,500 remaining beds subject to the agreement. He must have also forgot a December 2023 City Controller’s audit that said LAHSA chronically loses track of shelter bed availability and often counts beds as “occupied” even when a client has been missing up to three days. There is also the inconvenient fact that A&M found no proof of payment for 2,679 time-limited subsidy units for which the city took credit. And maybe he didn’t read the December 2024 audit that showed city shelters haven’t exceeded 78 percent capacity over the past five years, and LAHSA’s utilization data is next to worthless. Sticking to the script, Dr. Agonafer gave herself a convenient excuse, saying, “…it’s important that all city interim housing or homeless services data is accurate — adding that it’s only good as what's collected”. In other words, it’s not the city’s fault if LAHSA is giving it bad numbers, even though the city is paying the bills.
Perhaps no one knows the value of sticking to the script, and of the dangers of wandering from it, more than Mayor Bass. Ever since the highly questionable 2024 PIT count was released last year, she and former LAHSA CEO Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum have been trumpeting about “turning the corner” on homelessness due to a minuscule decrease in the count. They’ve conveniently ignored the alleged reduction was statistically insignificant and well within the margin of error. They also never mention the steady stream of criticism of the count’s methodology from volunteers, survey professionals, and the unhoused themselves, going back years. Nevertheless, the story that homelessness is decreasing is a central theme of the mayor’s talking points, and although unproven, was mentioned several times by the city’s attorneys.
The big problem, of course, is that Mayor Bass only talks about homelessness in carefully staged press opportunities, where she and a small army of aides can control the narrative and cherry-pick data. When she finds herself in real-world situations, she either ignores questions or trots out a set of trite sayings that make nice sound bites but have no intellectual value. For example, at a March court hearing, (for which she literally had to be tracked down and brought to court), she tried to brush off A&M’s crushing report by saying it only covered “administrative” issues and wasn’t really about the people. It was an appallingly cynical quip, and one that devalued the human impacts of LA’s homelessness failures. Following her lead, both CAO Szabo and Deputy Mayor Agonafer tried to decouple bad management from poor outcomes by saying its not really about the money, but about programs that bring people inside. Of course, we know programs have failed across the spectrum of performance measurement, from financial to operational.
Perhaps the most disgraceful part of the City’s script is its reliance on words like “compassion” and “love” to sidestep its real-world failures. During her testimony, Dr. Agonafer, unable to give a substantive answer to a question about performance measures, “reaffirmed her commitment to serving vulnerable people and those living on the streets “in a way that is centered in love and making sure that we recognize each of those individuals are someone's loved one and child.” Her “love-based approach” includes:
- Shelter clients receiving only two meals per day while providers charge the city for three (per the A&M report);
- Shelter residents subjected to inconsistent staffing and being shuffled from one case manager to another, (per A&M);
- Marginal living conditions in shelters, including inoperable showers, and exposure to people with untreated mental illnesses (per A&M);
- “Outreach” performed by providers like Urban Alchemy, whose staff have been the subject of multiple lawsuits for issues ranging from drug dealing to assault;
- Inside Safe, the mayor’s crown jewel of homelessness program (and the one Dr. Agonafer spends most of her time on according to her testimony) has provided mental health services to fewer than 25 percent of its residents, drug treatment to just seven percent, and 24 percent don’t know who their case workers are.
- Dr. Agonafer’s “individual” approach permanently houses less than 20 percent of the people in interim housing, and more than 50 percent fall back into homelessness, per the City Controller.
I could cite many more examples of the city’s “loved-based” approach, but I’m sure readers get the idea. The point is the city’s attorneys opposed elected officials’ testimony because they know reality doesn’t match the script. Much like actors on the screen, officials say their lines, then walk off the stage and leave their caring personas behind. And much like actors, their true motivation lies elsewhere, probably in maintaining the free flow of funding to the nonprofits that support them. According to an eyewitness account reported in the Westside Current, the last thing Dr. Adams Kellum wanted was to eliminate homelessness. A homelessness activist from the Westside recounted meeting Adams Kellum when she was CEO of St. Joseph Center, where Adams Kellum said homelessness programs were about providing services to make life on the street easier rather than reducing homelessness, and her goal was to increase revenues for her nonprofit. This is the attitude she brought to LAHSA, and one enthusiastically shared by our mayor, who steadfastly refuses to implement programs consistent with the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision.
Even without elected officials’ testimony, the court hearings revealed the cold reality behind the city’s cheery script. LA’s homelessness system isn’t loved-based or centered on helping individual people get off the streets. Just like the studio system, it’s a cynical, self-justifying multibillion dollar industry dependent on maintaining false narratives, and on making people disbelieve what they see in the world around them.
(Tim Campbell is a resident of Westchester who spent a career in the public service and managed a municipal performance audit program. He focuses on outcomes instead of process in his iAUDIT! column for CityWatchLA.)
