More than 75,000 people are experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County, with more than 45,000 of them in the City of LA alone, according to the 2024 count by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). Billions of dollars have been dedicated to housing people. However, a new court-ordered audit says LAHSA has failed to account for how much taxpayer money was spent and where it went. Multiple elected officials are now calling for a new approach, including LA City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who chairs the council’s housing and homelessness committee.
Raman says the independent audit is a map for what needs fixing, and claims she was already working on some of those issues, like “performance management and really connecting homelessness spending to outcomes.”
The audit also calls for increased transparency, financial accountability, and a rethinking of how the city monitors its homelessness spending. Raman believes part of the work moving forward is to “improve that tracking and make sure LAHSA’s accounting is much more in line with the way the city spends those dollars, and that those systems are speaking to each other much more effectively.”
One overarching philosophical question is whether relying on permanent supportive housing alone will be enough to address homelessness, Raman points out. There are also questions about the current approach to providing temporary shelter.
“We have less than a third of the shelter beds that we need for our entire homeless population. But if we're investing in all of these shelter beds, what we need is actually information about how those shelters are serving people. So once people are in those shelters, how long are they staying? How many times are case managers and outreach workers going to speak to them? Are they getting referrals to higher need care, like mental health support or substance use services? And if they're getting those referrals, are those referrals being honored?”
She says officials must look across shelter sites and evaluate which ones are providing real outcomes for people, and which are failing, and direct dollars accordingly.
As for changing LAHSA, the organization is poorly structured for its current role, and LA needs to restructure it or move away from it, she suggests. The City Council is also considering whether to take contracting away from LAHSA and redirect it to the city. The county is considering a similar move.
To address homelessness and the affordability crisis, LA needs more housing construction, and rezoning and cutting red tape would make that easier, Raman says.
She adds, “We have to do everything possible in the city to make it faster, cheaper, and easier to build housing. And in many cases, that means getting the city out of the way. … I put forward, after the fires, a city-wide self certification or professional certification process, which means that the very cumbersome process where someone has to take an approval … from department to department, parts of that very long process could actually be certified by licensed architects and engineers who can verify that a particular building meets the building and zoning codes.”
She also supports what she calls “gentle density” in LA’s single-family communities near transit corridors. That type of housing, in the form of smaller multifamily developments, allows the city to add to housing stock in more places without disrupting neighborhood character.
“I think that relying exclusively on large-scale construction along our major boulevards and thoroughfares will not get us to our housing goals. We have to allow for smaller, lightweight construction, smaller projects overall.”