County supervisors consider taking over LAHSA after scathing audit

The ongoing homeless crisis in Los Angeles exposed a rift between the city and county as the Board of Supervisors considers the option of stripping the LA County Homeless Services Authority of hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and creating a new department.

"LAHSA was created as a result of a lawsuit between the city and county some 30 years ago or more," political professor Zev Yaroslavsky said. "In fact, I was on the city council when this lawsuit took place."

Yaroslavsky served on both the City Council and the county Board of Supervisors before becoming a professor at UCLA. He said that LAHSA was created as a joint authority between the city and county. 

"The county is the human service provider, mental health, health, drug rehabilitation, things of that sort," he said. "The city has to provide the housing or shelter for these individuals to get them off the street and to get them back to where they can function in society. One without the other is a prescription for failure, with a capital F. So, I hope that they're talking to each other about the new structure."

The agency has been under fire for years, with accusations of mismanagement, and most recently, an audit found that the agency could not account for tens of millions of dollars. Supervisors in favor of gutting LAHSA of much of its funding said a new county homeless department will consolidate and streamline services while also adding greater accountability. 

LA City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who chairs the Housing and Homeless Committee, described the possible move as a seismic change and voiced her concerns. 

"LAHSA has been hard to coordinate with, but in my experience, especially over the last year, we've actually done a lot better at getting the data that we need for accountability from them and are building out a performance management system at the City that has already yielded improvements in how we serve people who are living on the streets," she said. 

LAHSA has notched some recent victories. Last year's homeless count showed a slight decrease in the number of people living on the streets. It also said that this year's count appears to show a 5 to 10% drop in homeless across the county. However, those numbers have not been finalized. 

"Improving systems like this doesn't happen when you take a hammer to a bureaucracy," Raman said. "It happens when you look for the data that you need for accountability. It happens when you do real coordination work, which is a constant, ongoing process improvement. None of this is sexy, but it can deliver real results."