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iAUDIT! - This column will be published the night before our primary elections. Even if I wanted to make voting recommendations, (which I don’t), it would be too late. But, as we transition from the primary to the general election, (and expect five more months of our mailboxes being flooded with campaign mailers), we should start thinking about substantive issues and what any given candidate can do about them.
An excellent place to start is Michele Martinez’s Substack column on what we should be asking candidates for mayor and governor. She writes that we’re asking the wrong questions in town halls and debates. The question isn’t how government can improve the way it does things. Rather, we should be asking why some things being done at all. As she writes:
“California’s core failures (housing affordability, homelessness, climate resilience, fentanyl deaths, the broken fiscal relationship between the state and its cities and counties) are adaptive. They cannot be solved with faster permitting, more dashboards, or another layer of oversight. They require accepting losses, renegotiating entrenched interests, and sustaining conflict long enough for new equilibria to form.
And yet the state defaults, year after year, to technical theater. New programs. Compliance regimes. Bureaucratic expansion”.
Most state and local leaders tinker with systems when they should be reassessing the entire ecosphere of some problems. Housing First was developed more than 30 years ago, when the demographics of homelessness were profoundly different than they are now. Yet advocates insist all it will take to work is more money, more time, and more patience from an electorate weary of the human tragedy playing out on our streets. Powerful advocacy and lobby groups have grown up around Housing First/Harm Reduction policies to the point that alternatives are not even considered, and those who propose change are branded as hating the homeless.
Consider the case of Haaven Shared Housing, a privately-run homelessness and addiction recovery provider in Venice. In a nine-part series on her experience with L.A’s. homelessness bureaucracy, Haaven owner Heidi Roberts recounts how her shared housing program successfully moved 80 percent of her clients into independent living facilities. Haaven’s programs were based on accountability and a commitment to sobriety and recovery, something forbidden by No Barrier/Housing First policies. Haaven’s approach is similar to Union Rescue Mission, which also has a success rate far above city/county programs.
Haaven was so successful it received funding from LAHSA and had a service contract with PATH, a large corporate nonprofit. All that ended in 2019 when the LA Time ran an article about Haaven describing Ms. Roberts as “brusque”. PATH quickly pulled its sponsored clients out of the program and LAHSA cut off funding. When Ms. Roberts asked why her facility was being defunded, she was told:
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- Shared housing is “undignified,”
- Asking residents to refrain from using drugs and alcohol in the homes was violating their civil rights, and
- We did not offer a standard California Association of Realtors (CAR) lease.
The irony is inescapable. LAHSA stopped funding an effective program with a high success rate because it did not operate under Housing First’s ideology. Yet an organization like Urban Alchemy, with a troublesome track record and a dearth of substantiated results, continues to make millions in service contracts with the city and LAHSA. This is exactly what Ms. Martinez wrote about; when an organization breaks the mold and achieves success, it is shut out of the homelessness system in favor of a small cabal of organizations that know how the play the game. As Ms. Robets said, when considering why Haaven was shut down, “Another possibility is that we threatened the tight-knit web of homeless housing developers. Afterall [sic], our affordable and immediate solution was way cheaper their taxpayer-funded $800K per tiny apartment model”. Haaven’s model didn’t support the existing system, making it an existential threat to the status quo.
Perhaps the most tragic consequence of failing to question the “why” of how things are done is the inability of Harm Reduction and homelessness policies to address the flood of powerful drugs in our society. The methamphetamine and fentanyl epidemics have hit the homeless population particularly hard, yet Harm Reduction programs remain unchanged. The result is described by independent investigative reporter Sam Quniones in an analysis of the LA mayor’s race. Rather than addressing the new reality of the relationship between substance abuse and homelessness abuse, advocates redefined the problem as being the fault of residents and business owners who did not show sufficient compassion to the unhoused:
“What especially angered people I spoke to was that city officials and progressive activists reacted as if those objecting to all this were insufficiently compassionate. At community meetings, constituents report being dismissed as “segregationists,” “racists,” “NIMBYs.”
“There was a complete blindness to the impacts on a neighborhood of having a hundred people living on the sidewalk,” said Connie Brooks, a Venice-area former social worker. “It was crazy-making. It’s so obvious to virtually anyone else. But city officials and people in charge of fixing it? No.”
Harm Reduction was originally developed to prevent the spread of communicable diseases caused by sharing intravenous drug paraphernalia. It achieved great success in decreasing the transmission rate of the HIV virus among drug users. But, as Quinones writes, that was 40 years ago. What worked for HIV doesn’t apply to the powerful versions of meth and fentanyl readily available on the streets. Harm Reduction has morphed from a disease prevention program into enabling substance abuse. Many field providers do little more than distribute paraphernalia, without offering recovery services or even bothering to collect used needles, which often turn up in gutters and public parks.
As Quinones wrote in another article, the “compassionate” approach of Housing First/Harm Reduction has resulted in the spread of Medieval diseases like typhus. Encampments are often inundated with trash and food and human waste, creating the perfect conditions for the spread of contagious diseases. While advocates lecture taxpayers about compassion, the policies they’ve championed force people to live in conditions unseen outside third-world slums.
The failure to question the system itself is also revealed in a recent RAND Corporation study of three key homelessness areas in Los Angeles. Contrary to Mayor Bass’ and LAHSA’s claims that homelessness has been measurably reduced, RAND found homelessness has remained unchanged in Hollywood, Venice, and Skid Row, while the number of “rough sleepers” (those who sleep with no shelter like a tent) has increased. The Mayor constantly mentions supposed reductions in homelessness, despite the fact her claims are based on questionable--and possibly doctored--numbers.
LA’s homelessness system does not exist to reduce homelessness. It exists to sustain itself. Anyone who questions the “why” of ineffective programs is silenced or ostracized. In true performance-based management, leaders set attainable goals and create programs to achieve them. In process-based management, leaders create procedures to fulfill a set of criteria, regardless of the results. Between now and November, voters should look for candidates who are willing and able to look beyond the process and challenge the entire system itself. Those are the candidates we should pay attention to.
(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.)
