In its effort to combat homelessness, Los Angeles County and the city itself and other cities in the county will spend more than $2 billion dollars this year on its 70,000 or so vagrants.
That works out to be about $30,000 per drooping head.
And that does not include the state’s direct funding of anti(?)-homelessness programs or the food stamp and Medicaid (called Medi-Cal in California) and direct cash and Social Security disability and other benefits that total up to about another $24,000 a year.
And that does not include the value of the free rent provided to hundreds of people in a number of “permanent supportive housing” facilities, including those that have been recently built at a cost of between $700,000 and, in Santa Monica,$1 million dollars per 600-square-foot studio apartment unit.
Amazingly, in LA and throughout the state, spending on solving homelessness has more than doubled over the past decade or so. What else pretty much doubled while all this money was being spent? The homeless population.
Obviously, no real dent has been made in the problem – the number of homeless people has only increased and, still, three or four homeless people die on the streets of LA every day.
The problem has only grown as the funding has grown – not in any way a coincidence and if you are wondering about the chicken and egg situation, don’t bother: the spending has essentially preceded the rise in the number of homeless people.
More homeless, more money…for the massive homelessness industry that has metastasized in California over the past decade.
The industry – made up of catastrophically, almost comically, inept theoretical non-profits that continue to fail miserably but pay staff very well, political cronies, and actual relatives of the government officials doling out the money – has done very well and made quite a bit of bank off of the suffering of others.
That, however, may finally be put under the microscope with the developments of the past week or so because people in a position to make changes have actually begun to notice the problem.
Well, it’s hard not to. An audit of the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority (LAHSA) – a joint agency of the city and county that is rapidly crumbling – showed the agency really couldn’t explain explain where billions of dollars went.
It got spent, of course, but no one seems quite sure on what; an audit of the state’s homelessness programs found a similar issue, again ranging into the billions of dollars.
Well, at least one expenditure is a certainty: $2 million dollars to a “non-profit” operated by the husband of erstwhile LAHSA chief Va Lecia Adams Kellum.
Before resigning, Adams Kellum said she was not part of the expense’s approval, absolutely did not recall approving the expense, let alone signing the check. Trust me.
Adams Kellum – hired in 2023 as a “change agent’ – was a close ally of Mayor Karen Bass. She advised her directly before and after the election and Bass’s daughter worked at the non-profit Adams Kellum ran before being hired to run LAHSA.
From an LA Times story on the appointment:
Getting a Bass ally into this role does potentially signal a change in the city’s orientation and attitude toward LAHSA — one that views the agency less as an obstruction that should be circumvented and more as one that can aid and augment the resources that city government is already putting forward.
Public officials and services providers — even harsh critics of LAHSA — indicated broad excitement over the appointment, stemming mostly from Adams Kellum’s work in various communities on street homelessness.
“It seemed like the most hopeful time to make change because as all of us have said, the key is the city and county working together,” Adams Kellums said.
Last week, the county pulled out of LAHSA after which Adams Kellum resigned (rather embarrassingly, actually – in defending the agency she was not even recognized as a fellow government person but relegated to the “public comments” period when all the crazies speak…and she had her mic cut off.)
And the other funder of the agency – the city – is almost about to do the same thing and pull out.
Now, fewer levels of bureaucracy are always a good thing, but the idiots who have run LAHSA over the past years will almost certainly be picked to run the separate programs (doncha love civil service protections?) and do not have to worry about soon becoming a client of the city and/or county.
Another nightmare for the homelessness industry is Judge David Carter, who sits on the federal bench and has been trying to act as somewhat of an overseer of the programs since a lawsuit was filed about five years ago (fyi – back then, the homeless lobby loved him because he ordered more beds be created, options given, etc. Now, not so much.)
As part of this effort, he ordered an audit of LAHSA. It did not go well.
In fact, it was so bad that when he asked various and sundry LA area officials to show up in his courtroom to explain themselves, they didn’t turn up (Bass eventually wandered in but said essentially nothing.) As to LAHSA’s efforts, the judge said this:
“If they were going to do it, they should have done it, or they should have given you a road map now of … how they’re going to do it.”
In fact, the audit was even more worser – the judge openly wondered about whether he should put everything into receivership and essentially run everything himself.
But even more importantly worser than the implosion of LAHSA (by the way, it had an overhead budget of about $400 million alone) is the announcement from the new SoCal federal prosecutor Bill Essayli.
He has announced a federal criminal investigative task force to try to figure out the incestual rat’s nest that is LA’s (and California’s) anti(?)-homelessness funding systems.
Note – the question mark after “anti” has been intentional both times it has been used, because the people that pay their mortgages “fighting” homelessness would not be able to do that if they actually solved the problem.
“Taxpayers deserve answers for where and how their hard-earned money has been spent. If state and local officials cannot provide proper oversight and accountability, we will do it for them,” said Essayli, a Republican and former State Assemblymember who was appointed to his post by Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi last week.
The Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force will “investigate crimes related to the misappropriation of federal tax dollars intended to alleviate homelessness” in the Central District of California, which covers an estimated 20 million people across seven counties.
Along with reviewing federal, state and local programs that receive federal grants and funding, the task force will “investigate fraud schemes involving the theft of private donations intended to provide support and services for the homeless population,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s office.
As the entire homelessness industry has been operating in the netherworld of political grease, outright graft, and devastating failure, Essayli’s new effort must have many poverty plutocrats shaking in their well-heeled boots.
This originally appeared on The Point.
