Bye, Felicia.
No one’s sad to see the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority partially withdraw from the fight against regional homelessness.
The LAHSA Commission this week retreated from key duties it’s long been entrusted with, including the point-in-time count of homeless people and two systems that track homeless people, services and referrals.
Good.
For this group, fewer responsibilities for public-service provision means fewer opportunities to squander taxpayers’ money.Besides, why should a basket-case organization, under federal investigation for alleged mismanagement, compete to retain control of LA’s federally funded homelessness programs?
Los Angeles needs change, not failure as usual.
Kudos to the Trump administration for imposing a measure of accountability on the behemoth, at last.
LAHSA has long been blasted for poor financial management; failure to demonstrate results; missing records; lack of transparency, lax oversight and shoddy spending controls; alleged conflicts of interest; and on it goes.
And then there’s the entitlement.
The agency maintains headquarters in the AON Tower in LA –– a posh building with amenities like a helipad, car service and a cold plunge.
How does that lookfor a group whose mission is (supposed to be) assisting people who dwell in squalid tents?
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While bureaucrats perch in luxury, LA’s homeless crisis grows, despite billions of dollars routed to homelessness each year, on a loop.
By the agency’s own count, the number of homeless people in the past year jumped 3.4% in LA, and 1.2% countywide.
Skid Row in downtown LA comprises 50 square blocks of squalor.
Why keep doing the same things that haven’t worked?
LA County finally said it’d had enough in 2025, when it voted to pull more than $300 million in funding from LAHSA and take over some of its functions.
Even the city of LA, almost farcically inept on the issue of homelessness, has cut funding to the troubled agency, though City Hall has not yet managed a long-promised study on alternatives to LAHSA.
LAHSA is so radioactive that Mayor Karen Bass announced she would step down from its commission on Sept. 8 –– one day after a California Post editorial noted that she’d appointed herself (and others) to the panel and did indeed have oversight responsibility.
The entire is mess is driven, in part, by a sordid homeless industrial complex.
Public officials hand billions of taxpayer dollars to nonprofits and other agencies to address homelessness. Those groups enrich their own officers while further entrenching homeless, to keep the tax dollars flooding in. Repeat on a loop.
Holding the out-of-touch, scandal-plagued LAHSA accountable is a step toward sanity.
So yes: Bye.
The post How LA homeless agency’s retreat is a sign of sanity appeared first on New York Post.
