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iAUDIT! - In the past, I have written about the horrific conditions in LA’s homeless shelters and housing. Many shelters and housing buildings offer their clients environments that are no better than life on the streets. News stories are rife with stories of increased crime in and around shelters, lack of maintenance in housing, and a near-complete lack of services. But its not just Los Angeles. We see the same stories in San Francsico, Seattle, New York, and other cities. Why is it that service providers can’t seem to manage safe, clean facilities where clients can receive needed services? This is a foundational question because cities lose the moral right to force a person off the streets and into a shelter if the shelter is more dangerous. It also raises questions about why so much local, state, and federal money is spent with so little oversight over the living conditions residents must endure.
Starting north and moving south, let’s look at the shelters in the Seattle area. A short video from the Discovery Institute reveals the horrendous conditions inside housing run by a local nonprofit called Plymouth Housing. Filth, rats, and roaches infest the building, while occupants openly use drugs. Management seems nonexistent, and recovery services are nowhere to be found. Footage from the facility is intercut with advocates telling local officials that more “public education” is needed to combat the fear and prejudice against using “proven methods” (e.g. No Barrier Harm Reduction policies) in taxpayer-funded housing. Meanwhile, in the housing facility, tenants live with broken fixtures, plumbing leaks, and near continuous drug use among residents. Contrast that reality with the montage on Plymouth Housing’s website, showing happy people living in apartments that rival luxury hotels. Ironically, one of the website’s banner headlines says “People need a safe place to live before anything else”; the squalor in the video’s building would barely qualify as “housing” anywhere but the Walled City of Kowloon. The hypocrisy between the fantasy shown on the nonprofit’s website with the grim reality of its housing borders on nauseating.
A few hours south of Seattle, the notorious nonprofit Urban Alchemy operates a transitional living facility in the former Ansonia Hotel on Lower Nob Hill. According to a two-part story in the Voice of San Francisco, 280 people and 42 dogs are packed into a building meant to hold 250. Urban Alchemy CEO Lean Miller assured neighbors the Ansonia would be, “the same when people go to those spas in Sedona, or something, and just start to get their health back”. City of San Francisco Homelessness and Housing Department officials told the community it would “…meet regularly and check in with them about their experience as neighbors … to ensure that we’re meeting their concerns, that we’re addressing them, if things start to go awry in their eyes.” Instead, local residents say the hotel has become a center for crime, violence, and rampant drug use, and the City has done nothing.
A site manager gave Voice of SF reporters a tour of the Ansonia. Despite its designation as a transitional living center, some of the residents have lived in the hotel for three years, where they receive two meals a day and laundry and fold service. What they don’t receive is drug addiction recovery counseling. The manager told reporters about 95 percent, or 266, of the residents were referred to the Ansonia with substance abuse issues. Yet there was no evidence any residents were receiving consistent recovery services. The most the site manager could offer was that users are organized by their drug of choice, with fentanyl users on one floor and crystal meth or heroin addicts on their respective floors, to give each other “mutual support”.
After neighbors lodged constant complaints about the way the shelter was operated, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors debated the Ansonia’s future. Some wanted it closed, while others insisted the city find a new provider due to Urban Alchemy’s mismanagement. In a case of the tail wagging the dog, Homelessness and Housing Department staff balked at closing the facility or changing providers. Instead, they promised to adopt new performance-based measures to improve the facility’s services and outcomes--begging the question why they didn’t do this from the outset. It seems odd that staff would dictate policy decisions to elected leaders, but such is the nature of the control the Homelessness Trust has over the narrative. In any case, while staff promises performative changes and elected officials dither, residents and business owners suffer the consequences of a mismanaged shelter, and 280 people (and their pets) live in conditions rivalling the worst Rio de Janeiro favela.
As most Angelinos know, Los Angeles is not exempt from the plague of horrendous homeless shelters. In August 2025, investigative reporter Sam Quinones took an in-depth look at the Riverside Bridge Home shelter in the Los Feliz area in Nithya Raman’s Council district. The 100-bed facility is infamous for violence in and around the building, culminating in the stabbing death of an occasional client in July 2025. Neighbors told Quinones drug use is rampant inside and outside the shelter. The drug trade is so lucrative, it has drawn the attention of local gangs, who control sales and also manage an alleged sex trafficking market for addicts who need money to finance their habits. The shelter operates in a type of migratory environment: while drug use is technically prohibited inside the facility, residents are free to step outside to engage in substance abuse, and then go back inside for meals, showers and sleep. As in Seattle and San Francisco, recovery services are neither required nor offered.
Councilmember Raman has been typically tone deaf to the pleas of her constituents. She has steadfastly refused to increase law enforcement in and around the shelter, although, as Quinones reports, she did approve a $42,000 no-bid contract to the nonprofit she started, SELAH, for vaguely-defined “ambassador” services. In what may be best described as out of the fire and into the frying pan, the City changed shelter management providers, moving away from the large corporate nonprofit PATH in August 2025. Unfortunately, the new provider is the Weingart Center, another large nonprofit and one at the center of a federal fraud investigation over another housing development on Shelby Drive in Cheviot Hills.
Housing management is just as bad as it is for shelters. Last June, I wrote about a friend in a housing facility formerly owned by the defunct Skid Row Housing Trust. The building is rife with deferred maintenance issues like broken locks and peeling paint. A burst pipe flooded several floors until it was fixed. Management shows little interest in the tenants, even when they go missing.
This is the shelter and housing system that is central to local officials’ policy of Housing First. In fact the one thing the facilities in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles have in common is the No Barrier Housing First policies required by HUD and the State of California. To receive funding, providers must follow the policy that makes housing the first (or only) priority for homeless interventions, and prohibits sobriety requirements for continued occupancy. Because service contracts contain no real outcome-based performance requirements, providers have no incentive to offer robust recovery services. If they do offer services, they are the bare minimum required to meet contractual obligations. This is borne out in a 2024 survey conducted by a coalition of advocacy groups of Inside Safe clients, where 70 percent of residents received no permanent housing assistance, and only seven percent received drug treatment services. Intervention programs are driven by simple, and often inaccurate, numbers: the number of people in shelters and the number of people “housed”. It makes no difference if the same people cycle in and out of the system, or if they receive no services; they can be counted as sheltered or housed for funding purposes.
The driving force behind the system of warehousing human beings is, of course, money. In November 2024, a group of major homelessness providers under the banner of the Greater LA Coalition on Homelessness, (GLACH) managed to pressure the LA City Council into approving an increase in the nightly rate per bed from $89 to $139 (a 56 percent increase) for interim housing facilities. In what can only be described as pure gall, providers claimed they were losing money on shelter operations because of all the services they provide. GLACH members warned they would have to curtail services or close facilities if they didn’t get hefty increases. These are the same providers who allow unfettered drug use in their facilities, perform almost no maintenance, and provide virtually no services. As several audits and reviews, including one from Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) have found, providers are paid per bed whether or not the bed is occupied. There is no incentive to provide services or maximize facility use. The word immoral is barely adequate to describe how a coalition of large nonprofits has manipulated the system to maximize revenue at the expense of the most vulnerable in our community.
The problem is common in many cities because the overarching policy of No Barrier Housing First encourages it. The obsessive focus on housing--warehousing--people has left recovery and recuperative services deemphasized and underfunded. While this represents a tremendous waste of taxpayer money, it also has a cost in human lives lost to the abyss of addiction, untreated mental illness, and death. That is the true legacy of homelessness shelter and housing in the United States.
(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.)
