Los Angeles Spends Millions Helping Homeless Remain Conveniently Homeless
Taxpayers fund beds, meals, staff, outreach and apartments so that municipal leaders can protect vulnerable residents from the destabilizing effects of improvement.
Everything Except a Way Out
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA — Los Angeles has invested enormous public resources in a revolutionary homelessness policy designed to ensure that unhoused residents receive everything necessary to remain unhoused under professional supervision.
The system provides shelters, packaged meals, caseworkers, security officers, police responses, paramedics, housing referrals and nonprofit management — a spending profile broadly consistent with the billions tracked annually in the city's own LAHSA budget and funding disclosures. What it does not consistently provide is a reason, requirement or mechanism for leaving homelessness behind.
A former employee at a shelter near MacArthur Park described public money being spent visibly and continuously while residents remained trapped in addiction, disorder and instability. He reported that meals were discarded, drugs entered the facility, stolen bicycles accumulated and an apartment secured for one resident was rejected.
Commitment, Not Results
City Budget Director Graham Puddle defended the spending.
"The public assumes millions of dollars should purchase results," Puddle said. "That is an outdated private-sector superstition. Public spending purchases commitment. Results require a separate appropriation."
Puddle explained that Los Angeles measures homelessness programs according to the number of services offered, not the number of lives stabilized.
"If a resident receives seventeen services and remains in a tent, that person is not a failure," he said. "That person is a seventeen-service success."
The Compassion Interaction
The Department of Homelessness Continuity recently introduced a new unit of measurement called the Compassion Interaction. One Compassion Interaction occurs whenever a salaried professional asks an unhoused person whether they would like assistance.
A refusal still counts.
In fact, refusals count twice because they demonstrate the need for continued outreach — a metrics quirk that would raise eyebrows under the outcome-based standards described by the Government Accountability Office's homelessness oversight work.
A Marketplace Where Everyone Wins Except the Resident
Economist Rebecca Cho said the system had created a marketplace where every participant except the homeless person benefited from homelessness remaining unsolved.
"Nonprofits receive contracts, consultants receive studies, administrators receive promotions and politicians receive ribbon cuttings," Cho said. "The resident receives a plastic fork and another Tuesday outdoors."
The former employee described senior managers who rarely visited the shelter while frontline workers earned $16 an hour. Puddle said the salary difference reflected the emotional burden executives experienced while reading reports about conditions they had wisely avoided witnessing.
"Frontline workers encounter threats, overdoses and violence," he said. "Executives must encounter email. Both forms of service deserve respect."
A Government-Funded Waiting Room for the Street
Security worker Tonya Briggs said the shelter occasionally resembled a government-funded waiting room for the street.
"People came inside, slept, used drugs, fought and went back outside," Briggs said. "We called police, filled out forms and repeated it the next night. The only thing that permanently left the shelter was paperwork."
Local resident Henry Wallace said the city's policies had made homelessness more administratively convenient while making neighborhoods less livable.
"The tents stay, the dealers stay and the theft stays," Wallace said. "But now each problem has a liaison."
Offering Both Simultaneously
Los Angeles officials rejected suggestions that public assistance should be connected to treatment, lawful conduct or participation in a plan toward independence.
"Conditions are coercive," said Outreach Ethics Adviser Serena Moss. "You cannot force someone to choose between accepting help and continuing behavior that destroys them. We therefore offer both simultaneously."
Local philosopher Priya Raman compared the policy to paying for swimming lessons while refusing to ask participants to enter the water.
"The city purchases the pool, hires the instructor and prints multilingual safety materials," Raman said. "Then it declares swimming an oppressive expectation and congratulates everyone for remaining on the bottom."
Managing Inventory
Professor Alan Nafzger said the city's approach had transformed homelessness from an emergency into a protected municipal industry.
"An emergency is something you urgently try to end," Nafzger said. "A system that renews contracts, preserves disorder and punishes accountability is not ending an emergency. It is managing inventory."
Comedian Marcus Bell offered a simpler financial analysis.
"Los Angeles can spend a million dollars helping one person remain homeless," Bell said, "but a working family asking for help with rent is told to download an application that stopped functioning during the Obama administration."
Another Logo
City officials are now requesting another major funding increase. The proposal includes expanded outreach, improved data collection and a new public-awareness campaign reminding residents that homelessness is complicated.
No money has been allocated for making it less complicated.
Puddle said taxpayers must remain patient.
"We did not create this crisis overnight," he said. "It took decades of zoning restrictions, untreated mental illness, open drug markets, bureaucratic fragmentation and political cowardice. Naturally, fixing it will require another logo."
At press time, the city had selected the logo. It depicts two hands gently protecting a tent from an approaching apartment.
Humorous Observations
- A rejected offer of help now counts twice toward program success.
- Executives face email; frontline staff face overdoses. Both are called service.
- The pool, the instructor and the paperwork all exist except the swimming.
- A rent application that broke years ago still outperforms most outreach.
- The new logo protects a tent from an apartment, on purpose.
- Seventeen services and zero housing counts as a seventeen-service success.
Disclaimer: This article is satire directed at wasteful spending, perverse institutional incentives and public policies that maintain suffering more effectively than they end it. It is entirely a human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. https://bohiney.com/?p=44753
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