In early August, data from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority showed only two out of 88 beds at an East Hollywood homeless shelter were occupied, a shockingly low rate in a county where some 47,000 sleep on the streets.
There’s just one big problem, according to the nonprofit PATH, which operates the shelter. The data were dead wrong. Path’s internal data showed 84 beds were filled.
For years, LAHSA has worked on a system to provide “real-time” information on availability at interim housing sites, promising it would wipe away an arcane “matching” process and fill more beds and fill them quicker.
But since the system rolled out, nonprofits that operate interim housing for LAHSA said it can be difficult to work with and the data it produces are frequently inaccurate, providing the public with a skewed view of reality and potentially making it harder — not easier — to get people off the streets.
“You have to know which interim housing sites can take” people, PATH Chief Executive Jennifer Hark Dietz said. “If it’s not accurate, you are actually sending people to a place that doesn’t have availability for them.”
LAHSA, a joint city-county agency established in 1993, has long faced criticism for not adequately tracking its programs and funds, potentially leaving them open to waste and fraud.
According to LAHSA, the process of placing people into shelter beds in L.A. County was cumbersome and time consuming and relied on spreadsheets, phone calls and daily emails to track inventory and get people shelter. While LAHSA directly placed people into many beds, nonprofits handled the process at many other shelters, each doing it somewhat differently.
The lack of coordination, LAHSA said, made it difficult to move fast and ensure the people with the most needs occupied beds.
To fix such issues, LAHSA sought to build an inventory tracking module and take over shelter placement for the beds it didn’t control, looking not only to ensure beds are filled, but also to prioritize people most in need.
In a December news release, then-LAHSA CEO Va Lecia Adams Kellum called the effort “a major step forward” and part of a “new LAHSA” that was “a change agent.”
The agency in its release said it had started working on the effort in 2023 and promised that by July the new system would “significantly reduce the time it takes to match people to open beds.”
But several nonprofits said that, since July, it is taking longer to fill beds; they pointed to data inaccuracies as one possible reason.
“There is lots of email threads [with LAHSA] around what is actually available,” Hark Dietz said.
Across all providers, the August data included 46 sites that had 0% occupancy — and 1,079 available beds — and nonprofits said at least some of those were for shelters that no longer existed.
There were other issues as well. LAHSA data showed that a Union Station Homeless Services shelter in El Monte was 85% occupied and had six available beds, but nonprofit executives said only one spot was available.
The difference was mostly because the site had recently switched from serving only youth to serving adults as well, but that change hadn’t been marked in LAHSA’s new occupancy system, Union Station executives Sarah Hoppmeyer and Jessica Salazar said.
When the nonprofit tried to input that an adult had moved into a bed, Salazar and Hoppmeyer said, the system rejected the person as ineligible and showed a nonexistent vacant bed.
At its East Hollywood shelter, Path CEO Hark Dietz said she didn’t know why LAHSA data said there were 86 beds available when there were actually four.
For all PATH shelters, LAHSA data in early August showed the nonprofit had occupancy of about 70%, while PATH said it was 90%, much closer to a city target of 95% for all interim housing.
LAHSA did not respond to questions about occupancy data at specific sites, but said it has rolled out the new system in phases.
It started working with providers to enter data in January. On July 1, the agency took over the process of assigning homeless people to roughly 5,000 of those beds, adding to 5,000 it already had controlled.
LAHSA said it uses the new occupancy data to find underperforming shelters and has used the data to match people to housing since July 1.
When that data is inaccurate, LAHSA deputy chief external relations officer Paul Rubenstein said, the agency relies on “manual provider reports” of inventory to fill beds.
In mid-August, LAHSA also launched a computerized tool that pulls data from its inventory tracking system to automatically match people to beds. But LAHSA interim CEO Gita O’Neill said the “software behaved in unexpected ways” and that LAHSA workers must follow up on the tool’s matches by calling shelter operators to make sure beds are available — the sort of time-consuming step the system was meant to eliminate.
In her statement, O’Neill said the old matching system was “not transparent or efficient enough to meet the needs of L.A.’s humanitarian crisis,” but acknowledged “growing pains” in the new one. She said the agency is working hard with its vendor to fix problems slowing the new process.
“Providers are frustrated about this, and they should be — I am too,” she said. “I am tracking this closely and working to resolve this as soon as possible.”
Such problems come as the region’s efforts to fight homelessness face big changes.
As the economy slows, government funding available for homeless services is shrinking across the board. Because LAHSA’s occupancy data is published online, nonprofits also raised concerns it gives the public an inaccurate perception at a time of heightened scrutiny over spending.
“The narrative is that these resources are being wasted,” said John Maceri, chief executive of the nonprofit The People Concern. “We have no problem with transparency. … Our issue is it needs to be accurate.”
This year, citing concerns of mismanagement, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted to remove funds from LAHSA and set up the county’s own homeless department that will launch next year.
LAHSA said its new bed matching system will continue to exist for city-funded beds, which are the majority of beds within its system. What happens with the small number of county beds is to be determined.
LAHSA’s online dashboard for occupancy includes a caveat that the inventory system is still new and “data may be missing or incomplete.”
After LAHSA learned The Times was inquiring with providers about the occupancy data, a LAHSA spokesman reiterated the system is working through kinks and sent updated data from early September.
Nonprofits said the September data appeared more accurate in some cases, including at the PATH East Hollywood site. September LAHSA data showed the shelter was mostly occupied, rather than mostly vacant.
Over the entire interim housing system, however, occupancy rates were essentially unchanged between August and September.
In both months, there was about 69% occupancy when shelters reporting zero occupied beds were included. Occupancy rose to 76% if the supposedly empty shelters are removed — which if accurate would still be a failure at a time when thousands sleep on the street and the city, as part of a 2022 settlement, is under legal obligation to create 12,915 homeless beds or other housing opportunities by June 2027.
Nonprofits found some issues with the September data as well.
The People Concern said LAHSA’s data showed that seven beds at a Skid Row site were vacant and available, when they were filled.
Maceri, the CEO, said those seven beds belonged to the county’s Department of Health Services, which placed people in them, not LAHSA.
The People Concern said it was working with LAHSA to make sure the data reflect reality.
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