After nearly a decade of unprecedented taxpayer spending on homelessness with little to show in improvement on the streets, the giant nonprofits behind the measures that secured that funding asked voters to double down.
To assuage concerns that past funds may have been dispensed rashly, leading to waste and abuse, the authors of two new tax measures wove into them a complex system of oversight to increase transparency and accountability.
Voters accepted the deal, and this year, $1.5 billion or more from the two measures — ULA and A — will be flowing in orders of magnitude more than the previous ones.
One consequence of the promise of oversight is a new slate of abbreviations for the public to digest: ULACOC, LTRHA, ECRHA and LACAHSA.
Behind those names is a matrix of oversight boards, some made up of experts from government, business, housing development and homeless services and others of city and county elected officials and prominent nonprofit leaders.
The new quasi-government structure created by Measure A has broad goals and specific targets to gauge whether the goals are being achieved, said Miguel Santana, president and chief executive of the California Community Foundation, the measure’s primary backer.
“We’re in Day One of this new chapter on this issue where my hope is that generations from now, it will become instinctual,” Santana said in an interview. “It will be second nature, it will be a given that investments around homelessness will always be evaluated against the goals that have been set.”
But there can be a downside to the proliferation of deliberative bodies that meet at different times and multiple locations and monitor programs that can overlap both in purpose and geography.
For decision makers, there are now two or more regular meetings to attend, and, for the public trying to follow the money, it could all be very confusing.
Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman said she is optimistic that the two new boards she sits on — ECRHA and LACAHSA — will “allow us to improve coordination and communication between all of the different players.”
But so far she feels frustrated.
“I’ve invested a lot of time into it, but so far the time I have invested in it has not necessarily yielded outcomes that I think are better for the city of Los Angeles,” Raman said, who is working on a separate system within the city to monitor its investments in homelessness.
Kerry Morrison, founder of a nonprofit that advocates for change in the mental health system and has sat for years on the oversight committee for the city’s Proposition HHH homeless housing fund, finds all the new groups hard to follow.
“I’m confused by all the different entities,” Morrison said “I’m not sure how they operate in connection with everybody else.”
So what are these new agencies, and how do they fit together or overlap? There’s no official diagram, so a metaphor may have to do.
Imagine two spigots pouring money into three buckets.
One spigot is United to House LA, the 2022 city measure popularly known as the mansion tax. After a slow start, ULA, as it’s called for short, is on track to raise half a billion dollars or more annually for housing and homeless prevention programs.
It has a 15-member citizens oversight committee, the ULACOC, to make recommendations on its use to the City Council.
The second spigot, Measure A, is split into two buckets.
Just under 40% of the money will be under the control of Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (LACAHSA), created by the California Legislature in 2022 as a regional authority, roughly modeled after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Its mission is to develop housing and prevent homelessness countywide, much like ULA is tasked to do in the city. The 22-member board is made up of all five county supervisors, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Raman, elected officials from several cities and nonprofit leaders.
About 60% of Measure A funds will be directed by the Executive Committee for Regional Homeless Alignment (ECRHA) to homeless services. The committee, created by the county Board of Supervisors in 2023, is made up of eight elected officials from the county, the city of Los Angeles and smaller cities and a representative of the governor. Its recommendations for the funds will be subject to a vote by the Board of Supervisors.
To provide advice and technical support to the executive committee on developing a plan to reduce homelessness, the supervisors created the Leadership Table for Regional Homeless Alignment (LTRHA). Its 29 appointees representing business, homeless services, academia, labor, faith communities and veterans were picked by Santana and Peter Laugharn, president and chief executive of the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.
All of the new bodies have had growing pains both from unforced errors and unforeseen consequences of the language that created them.
A requirement that experts in housing development, preservation and finance fill six seats on the ULA committee has made it difficult to find appointees who do not do business with or lobby the city. Several members have had to recuse themselves on votes, and at least two have resigned because of conflicts.
At LACAHSA, the new housing agency, the selection of an interim CEO led to a Times article that raised questions about the vetting of the chosen candidate’s resume. After initially saying he intended to be in “for the long haul,” he subsequently said he does not intend to apply for the permanent job.
The Measure A oversight provides representation to local jurisdictions that have largely been shut of the decision-making. Eager to test their new power, small city appointees on the executive committee quickly found its limit, said Ronson Chu, homelessness manager for the South Bay Cities Council of Governments. The committee asked the supervisors to postpone approval of a 2025-26 homelessness budget and to increase the 15% of services money Measure A dedicated to cities. The supervisors did neither.
“That’s giving members of the executive committee pause as to their effectiveness,” Chu said.
For the public, keeping tabs on the new monitoring bodies can be challenging. They all hold public meetings that are livestreamed. But they are not easy to find in a jumble of spotty and disjointed websites, and the sheer number of them demand significant time to watch.
An unwritten imperative for all the oversight groups is to overcome the disillusionment with prior tax measures that were widely seen as having overpromised and underdelivered as homelessness continued to rise, said Ann Sewill, former head of the Los Angeles Housing Department, who sits on the Leadership Table.
“The things all the committees are trying to do is not only carry out the voters’ intent, but make the public glad they voted for this,” Sewill said.
That tension was palpable during the March meeting of the ULA oversight committee when the Los Angeles Housing Department, which oversees ULA contracting, reported that the first contracts couldn’t go out until at least February.
“We got a lot of skepticism when we proposed this because things take so long,” said committee member Laura Raymond, executive director of the transportation and housing advocacy group ACT-LA, one of ULA’s many nonprofit backers. “We wait so long, and folks think it’s a failure even though things are in the pipeline. We have to think this through and come up with a better plan.”
As with Proposition HHH before it, the impulse to show results has led to over-rosy pronouncements. United to House LA’s website touts 800-plus units under construction. The number, also in a first-year report, refers to ULA’s initial housing outlay of $55 million to complete seven ongoing city-managed projects that either had run out of money or were faltering without enough financing to get started.
While ULA has refrained from setting targets for how much housing it will produce, backers of Measure A set five broad goals such as reducing street homelessness and increasing affordable housing, and promised voters that specific targets would be set for each one.
Calibrating those targets was the work of the Leadership Table. Based on research by the California Policy Lab at UCLA, it created several metrics for each goal and a specific target for each metric to be achieved by 2030.
The proposed metrics, published in January and approved by the county supervisors in March, conspicuously avoid the “ending homelessness” ethos that characterized the earlier measures. According to the plan, for example, unsheltered homelessness would decrease 30% from the latest count of 52,365 to 36,656.
The process was “a combination of analytical work using the available data and consideration of what is achievable,” said Sewill, who participated on the housing subcommittee.
To some extent, the powers of the new oversight bodies are limited by prescriptive language in the measures themselves.
The cost of housing produced by both measures will be higher than it needed to be because of requirements in both that projects of 40 or more units use union labor, said Jason Ward, co-director of Center on Housing and Homelessness at the research institute Rand. Ward recently published a study finding that the union requirement added 21% to the cost of projects.
Ward said the requirements, which the unions that backed the measures pushed for, will induce developers to propose smaller projects and increase the cost of larger ones.
The new oversight structure is developing in a dynamic context in which Los Angeles County will be forming a new homelessness department to consolidate services from several other departments, including Public Health and Mental Health, with the administration of more than $300 million in county-funded services now funneled through the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
A key question facing the new oversight system is how it can overcome the byzantine dispersion of authority and tension between the different levels of government that beset the current system.
Funds to prevent people from becoming homeless, for example, are spread over all three buckets of money. ULA dictates that 30% of its funds go to homelessness prevention programs. LACAHSA also has a mandate to fund prevention. And the supervisors budgeted prevention under its share of Measure A money.
At present, there is no unified plan on how to blend the three sources of money between the city and county and over a range of services that include cash grants, counseling, negotiation and eviction defense.
What’s needed is “a unified system with a single person in charge,” said former Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer, who now advocates for homeless prevention at the Inner City Law Center.
“It requires that there be some ceding of authority over how money is spent,” he said.
Morrison, the HHH oversight member, said she too has concerns about how accountability will work.
“Where does the buck stop with those three entities?” Morrison asked. “Unless the buck stops somewhere, it just ventures into space.”
Santana, who sits on both LACAHSA and the Leadership Table, said he has confidence in collective responsibility.
“This is not a dictatorship,” Santana said. “There is not one person accountable for the failure or one person responsible for the success. It’s going to be our shared failure or shared success.”
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