By admin 
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is starting to resemble a licensed character from horror movies. The whole agency is undead, so lawyers for Dracula might be on it already.
Read more Canadians thank California for support during ongoing Ontario wildfire | Opinion
LAHSA was formed in 1993 as a joint powers authority for the city and county of Los Angeles. It has been the lead agency for the distribution of money from local, state and federal taxpayers. Over the last ten years, a pattern has emerged: the more tax money that is spent on the collection of problems that’s called homelessness, the worse the problems have become.
In 2016, voters in the city of Los Angeles approved $1.2 billion in new debt to build homeless housing. Then in 2017, L.A. County voters approved Measure H, a temporary 0.25% sales tax increase with the revenue earmarked for homelessness services. It brought in hundreds of millions of dollars every year, and then in 2024, voters were persuaded to approve Measure A, doubling the tax and making it permanent.
Tax increase proponents made the argument in the 2024 campaign that the tax was really helping, because homelessness had declined. They cited that year’s point-in-time count in L.A. County showing a 0.27% drop to 75,312.
What they didn’t say is that eight years earlier in 2016, before the Measure H sales tax increase started throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem annually, homelessness in L.A. County was up 5.7% over the previous year – to .
The 2026 point-in-time count found 73,040 homeless individuals in Los Angeles County, an increase over the 2025 count of 72,195.
In the city of Los Angeles, the 2026 count was 45,194, up from 43,699 in 2025, and up from 28,464 in 2016, before the tax increases for homelessness began.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Among other things, LAHSA. In April 2025, after a county audit found an excessively relaxed attitude toward such things as accounting and paying contractors, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to get out of the Homeless Services Authority and take back the roughly $350 million in annual funding that made up about a third of LAHSA’s budget.
The city of Los Angeles is staying in, so far. Mayor Karen Bass has no love for auditors. She blocked the city controller from auditing her monstrously expensive Inside Safe program, one part of the city’s total budget for homelessness of $953 million in fiscal year 2025-26.
Read more Lawsuit questions role of video evidence in prison use of force ruling
There are now bureaucrats in three government entities – LAHSA, the County’s new Department of Homeless Services and Housing, and the L.A. mayor’s program – all pulling down salaries to hand out money to nonprofit organizations and other “providers” of housing and homeless services in L.A. County, each with its own hefty executive payroll.
Those salaries are partly paid with funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD is now investigating to see why the problem in Los Angeles is not getting better despite all the money spent on it. In June, HUD sent a 12-page , with a 13th page listing 34 exhibits, informing LAHSA that it has been suspended from “future participation in procurement and nonprocurement transactions” while the Office of Inspector General investigates “wanton mismanagement of public funds.”
HUD’s letter painstakingly lists previous attempts to audit or review LAHSA’s spending, finding “lack of financial management and internal controls,” “conflicts of interest,” “systemic and repeated failures,” “obvious fraud,” “repeated false statements,” “misused money” and an internal audit program that is “not meaningfully functioning.”
HUD has sent LAHSA $944 million dollars since 2021, but now LAHSA is suspended from receiving any federal funds while the investigation continues. HUD issued a notice telling homeless services contractors to prepare to apply directly to the federal agency, not through LAHSA, for funding.
But despite losing county funding and federal funding, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority will not give up the ghost. Instead, it is spending your hard-earned tax money on lawyers, suing HUD to halt the suspension. It will protect its lush salaries at all costs.
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is undead, eternally sucking the blood of taxpayers wherever it can find any.
Maybe Dracula’s lawyers at Universal Pictures can get it shut down for trademark infringement.
Read more Sacramento OKs Arco Arena finance plan, promises ‘economic driver’ for Natomas
Write [email protected] and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley
Copyright 2026 Tribune Content Agency. All Rights Reserved.