By SUE PASCOE and TIM CAMPBELL
It seems all it will take to end homelessness in Los Angeles is more money. On the November ballot, voters will see the Affordable Housing, Homeless Solutions & Prevention Now initiative, which would end the current quarter-cent sales tax that funds homeless programs in L.A. County, which is set to expire in 2027. Instead, everyone, even the poor, will now pay a new half-cent sales tax.
And the City has spent upwards of $100 million on so-called “Roadmap Programs” for the homeless. Exactly how many have been permanently housed?
Zero.
According to City records, zero.
Judge David Carter ordered a comprehensive independent audit of programs funded or run by the city. As part of the audit, the city has created a website called the L.A. Comprehensive Homeless Strategy click here. The website is intended to show the public the budget and performance of the City’s homelessness programs.
On the website, the stats are available for the “Freeway Agreement,” which lists six City programs and statistics. The programs include A Bridge Home, Other Interim Housing, Project Homekey, Safe Parking, Safe Sleep Village and Tiny Homes. (It does not include Inside Safe.)
From July 2023 to March 2024, according to the City’s own documents, not one homeless person has been permanently housed.
For example, Safe Parking Los Angeles (SPLA) claims it sent 41 percent of its clients to permanent housing. However, the monthly reports SPLA sends to the City show only 18 people from the La Cienega lot, or about 14 percent of its 167 clients, transferred to permanent housing. Worse, the City’s quarterly reports (pages 8, 9 and 10 of this document) show no exits to permanent or temporary housing were completed. In fact, it shows no placements were made from any of the Roadmap programs.
Given the discrepancies in the records, there are only two possibilities: either the records going to a federal judge are wrong or the City has not permanently housed anyone.
The final column in the document is “Number and percentage of exits to unknown.” A huge group of people are unaccounted for (958 across the report’s three quarters), but counting the dead seems to be easier.
“Number of percentage of exits – deceased.” For the Tiny Home Villages, from October 2023 to March 24, 15 people died.
Westchester resident Tim Campbell, who is examining documents for L.A. Alliance, in an email to CTN wrote: “I’ve been going through the documents on the City’s website, and they are incredibly confusing,” Campbell said. “There’s no single report that shows you what a particular program like Project Homekey costs, how many people its housed, and how many have stayed housed. You have to bounce back and forth between several documents to get an idea of how these programs are performing.”
Earlier he had discovered Safe Parking information didn’t agree. “There is an apparent discrepancy in what the City pays per space. If you check the footnotes on page 68 of 71 for the program budgets, it says Safe Parking is $30 per night (footnote 2). But the CAO’s budget memo says it’s $40 per night. It doesn’t seem like much, but the difference is $1,401 per night ($15,360 versus $11,520). For 365 nights, the difference would be $511,365.
Inconsistencies, missing data, and conflicting information seem to riddle the website, making it enormously difficult for member of the public to understand where taxpayer money goes and how effectively it is spent.
The La Cienga parking lot is for Safe Parking. According to City Records not one person had been accepted into permanent housing from Safe Parking.
One can see how effective the programs are simply by driving through any freeway underpass.
Shouldn’t the FBI be called in to see where (and to WHOM) tax payer money went?
ZERO ? Honestly? WTF
Where do I protest?
Who do I vote out of office?
this is completely ridiculous
I was shocked that voters went for another ballot measure to put more tax dollars toward homelessness. Have we not learned yet? The money is always wasted and never used for the intended purpose. Why don’t voters learn?