In a unanimous vote last Tuesday, the Los Angeles City Council has taken a decisive step toward dismantling the LA Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) and shifting control of hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to private homeless service providers.
The council’s decision follows two scathing audits that exposed failures in LAHSA’s financial oversight, but the true significance of this move extends far beyond the agency’s mismanagement. At its core, this is not about fixing homelessness; it is about turning the crisis into a lucrative business opportunity for the private sector.
Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who spearheaded the effort, branded LAHSA a “monstrosity,” citing delayed provider payments and failures to track spending. Yet, rather than addressing the deeper systemic failures of the city’s (and, in fact, the state’s) approach to homelessness, the council is using LAHSA’s dysfunction as a pretext to accelerate the privatization of services. This is not a genuine effort to improve conditions for the nearly 50,000 unhoused individuals in Los Angeles, it is a deliberate strategy to carve up public funding and distribute it among politically connected private contractors.