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iAUDIT! - During the past month my wife and I have been on vacation, I took some time to catch up on news and reading about subjects that have nothing to do with homelessness. One of the more interesting items I found was updated research about the sinking of the Titanic. Recent studies by maritime historians suggest the damage from the iceberg was much smaller than originally thought. Rather than a long 300-foot gash down its side, the ship more likely incurred damage totaling no more than 12 square feet, about the size of a small walk-in closet. If the iceberg opened a huge gash, the ship would have capsized and sank in minutes, rather than taking more than two hours to slowly founder. It wasn’t so much the total amount of damage as where it occurred; a series of holes in five compartments just large enough to overwhelm the ship’s pumps. Each hull puncture, relatively minor in itself, combined with the others to sink the mightiest ship of its time.
Looking back on 2025, we can see some similarities to the slowly crumbling structure of Los Angeles’ homelessness programs. Some stories received more coverage than others, but no single item was the death blow many critics looked for. Taken together, however, the news items clearly show how poorly homelessness programs are managed, how lax oversight is, and how desperately leaders are trying to keep the leaking wreck afloat. The first sign of trouble came early in the year, when LAist discovered that former LAHSA CEO Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum approved contracts in excess of $2.1 million with a nonprofit where her husband was a senior manager. That story was followed soon thereafter by revelations of whistleblower complaints that Dr. Adams Kellum hired friends from her former nonprofit, St. Jospeh Center, when she became LAHSA’s CEO. The complaints also alleged she and other senior leaders fabricated numbers around Mayor Bass’ signature Inside Safe program. Dr. Adams Kellum has since resigned.
Like water cascading from one compartment to another as the Titanic slowly sank, one scandal led to another. The whistleblower accusations were bolstered by more revelations about LAHSA’s botched 2024 PIT count, where mid-level managers made on-the-fly decisions about excluding numbers that seemed too problematic to reconcile. Despite a count that potentially ignored thousands of people, Mayor Bass and Dr. Adams Kellum used the numbers to “prove” their approach was working to reduce homelessness. They continued to insist homelessness decreased into 2025 even though a study by the RAND corporation found the PIT count has been chronically undercounting the unhoused population. The RAND study further undermined the narrative that LA’s broken homelessness system somehow magically resulted in falling homelessness after more than 20 years of failure.
Another hole in the lumbering ship of homelessness came in March, when audit and consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) released a comprehensive court-ordered review of Los Angeles’ homelessness programs. To call the review damning would be an understatement. A&M found that millions in taxpayer money had been paid to providers with little or no proof of performance. Many shelters are so poorly managed they rival life on the streets in terms of danger, unsanitary conditions, and a dearth of support services. The report created a stunning picture of a homelessness system so broken, providers define their own performance standards, while City and LAHSA managers seem focused on paying them as quickly as possible regardless of outcomes.
The City’s response to the report is a case study in organizational denial. First, the City Attorney hired high-powered (and high-priced) law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher at nearly $1,300 per hour per attorney to try to discredit the report’s findings, an effort that has cost the City at least $6 million and continues climbing as the city appeals federal Judge David O Carter’s order to appoint an independent overseer to analyze the city’s program data. Despite repeated promises to produce accurate data, the City has been so laggard Judge Carter held a contempt of court hearing in early December; the hearing is continuing as of the date this column was written.
As we have come to expect of leadership that’s complicit in the history of mismanagement, city officials have rushed to defend the status quo. One of the more confounding statements came from Councilmember Nithya Raman, who issued a press release claiming the City is a model of transparency, but Judge Carter’s hearings and decisions are burdening an “already strained” system. The judge’s demand for empirical data wouldn’t be so onerous if the City had an existing system to produce it. Instead, it has allowed programs to operate in an environment virtually free of accountability for so long, it has to go back to base data, if it has any at all. Apparently, Councilmember Raman is all for transparency, as long as its not too transparent.
In an even more bizarre event, Mayor Bass penned a December 7 op-ed in the L.A. Daily News that can most charitably be described as detached from reality. In the column, she defended her bold leadership in reducing homelessness, citing numbers that have been seriously questioned, if not wholly discredited. She boasted about the success of her Inside Safe program, which has sheltered and housed “thousands”. According to the City Controller’s website, Inside Safe has cost more than $323 million, and housed only 1,243 people in three years, at a cost of about $260,200 per person; of those, 313 (25 percent) are in time-limited subsidized housing, and may become homeless as soon as the subsidies expire. In fact, 2,048 people in the Inside Safe program have already fallen back into homelessness--that’s 1.64 times more people than have been housed. And remember, as dismal as they are, these numbers may have been manipulated to make Inside Safe look more successful than it is, based on the LAHSA whistleblower complaints I mentioned earlier.
The Mayor’s op-ed is nothing more than a 1,000-word defense of the status quo, and of a system that leaves 75,000 people on our streets every night. Instead of challenging that system, Mayor Bass has been a stalwart champion, fighting any hint of reform. As she said in her column, she opposes City and County efforts to defund LAHSA in favor of more accountable agencies, and she condemns potential reductions in state and federal homelessness funding. Her protests would have more weight if the City could show some real progress with the billions it has spent over the past 10 years.
Just one example of how far removed the Mayor is from reality is the recent resignation of Kevin Murray, the CEO of large nonprofit Weingart Center, from his position with the L.A. County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (LACAHSA), a body that guides funding decisions for Measure A revenue. Mr. Murray was suspended from the CEO’s position last month after the US Attorney General’s office announced the indictment of a real estate developer for fraud in connection with a homelessness housing project in Cheviot Hills, in which the Weingart Center paid $27 million for a property valued at $11 million just weeks before. While neither Mr. Murray nor anyone else at Weingart has been charged, serious questions persist as to why the Center used taxpayer money to pay $16 million over the property’s value. Mr. Murray was appointed to LACAHSA by Mayor Bass, and they have been political allies for years. Mayor Bass was also an ardent supporter of and personal friend of Dr. Adams Kellum.
Indeed, the fact Mr. Murray was on LACAHSA’s board to begin with is indicative of everything wrong with LA’s homelessness system. The board makes decisions about how Measure A revenue will be spent, especially on affordable housing projects. Weingart Center is a major provider of transitional and other housing, so it could benefit from the decisions made by the board of which Mr. Murray was a member. In addition, the nonprofit tracking service ProPublica noted Weingart Center’s 2023 audit reported material and significant deficiencies in its finances and internal controls. Yet the Center continues to be one of the leading contractors for homelessness services in LA County.
Just as LA’s leaders insist everything is fine in local homelessness programs, Titanic’s owners insisted the ship was unsinkable. Even after reports began trickling in about a disastrous encounter with an iceberg, one of the White Star Line’s (Titanic’s parent company), vice presidents issued a statement saying the ship was still afloat and being towed to New York, falsely raising the hopes of thousands of families. Only after the rescue ship Carpathia docked did the full extent of the tragedy become known. In 1912, the loss of 1,500 people on Titanic triggered major reforms in iceberg tracking, lifeboat capacity regulations, and safety practices. More than 2,500 people die on LA’s streets every year, and our leaders look the other way. The flow of bad news about LA’s homelessness became a torrent in 2025. How much worse will it have to get before our leaders admit the truth and embrace reform?
(Tim Campbell is a longtime Westchester resident and veteran public servant who spent his career managing a municipal performance audit program. Drawing on decades of experience in government accountability, he brings a results-driven approach to civic oversight. In his iAUDIT! column for CityWatchLA, Campbell emphasizes outcomes over bureaucratic process, offering readers clear-eyed analyses of how local programs perform—and where they fall short. His work advocates for greater transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness in Los Angeles government.)
