Part 167: “We have big work to do here” – Housing and Homelessness Accountability in Los Angeles

Published April 18, 2025.

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Apr 18, 2025

Official portrait from the California Assembly for Bill Essayli, the new U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California spanning much of Southern California (from website).

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By Zachary Ellison and Ruth Roofless, Independent Journalists

On April 8, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California announced a new Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force, which promises to “investigate fraud, waste, abuse, and corruption involving funds allocated toward the eradication of homelessness” within its jurisdiction. The news followed the announced resignation of Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) CEO Dr. Va Lecia Adams-Kellum after the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to remove significant responsibilities and funding from her joint powers authority with the City of Los Angeles. The County now promises to create a new Homeless Response agency, official name pending, by July 1. As part of an audit ordered by Judge David O. Carter, LAHSA was unable to provide a consistent list of service providers, and despite signs that there could be criminal or questionable activity, none was identified or referred for prosecution.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined a request for further comment on how it plans to root out suspected corruption or whether it would open a special reporting line for people to submit tips. Carter has ordered a new hearing on May 15th to further review the findings from the Alvarez & Marsal audit and the recoupment of funds from Los Angeles County Measures H advances made to service providers. Measure H will soon be repealed as it was replaced by 202 Measure A, which made permanent a sales tax for homelessness services. The U.S. Attorney’s Office, in its announcement from new U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, noted that “California has spent more than $24 billion over the past five years.” Essayli, an appointee of Attorney General Pam Bondi, vowed to “make arrests” if misconduct is uncovered that violates federal law.

The Task Force promises to include not only the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) but also the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Office of Inspector General (HUD-OIG) and representatives from IRS Criminal Investigation in Los Angeles (CI). Asked for comment on the planned direction of their investigation, none of the agencies provided an immediate response. Even if the U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesman Ciaran McEvoy had no additional comment, the same wasn’t true for Essayli, who quickly found himself on Fox 11 with journalist Elex Michaelson noting that he planned to start from “the bottom up” and asserting that during his walk through Skid Row with Judge Carter, he only saw privately funded aid. The “only government assistance that I saw was people handing out needles and drug kits so that people could ‘safely’ use drugs,” he stated, putting his fingers up in quotation marks. Essayli previously served in the State Assembly in Riverside County and is known for his political outspokenness.

Governor Gavin Newsom has scheduled a special election to replace Essayli, who previously served as a District Attorney and Assistant U.S. Attorney. Newsom is also invited to the next LA Alliance Hearing on May 15th; it’s unclear if he will attend. Essayli is a youthful 39 years of age, and the Central District of California is the most populous such district in the country. He is not without controversy for his conservative views on immigration, transgender athletes, and social media barbs. While such a Task Force may be low-hanging political fruit, delivering the results it promises could be something else legally, most especially without the optics of unfair prosecutions or the assistance of the affected members of the public. Newsom himself has turned into a target for many critics, including Essayli, who called him “unfit” and also has said about Mayor Karen Bass that she “has to go!”

Unquestionably, Essayli’s predecessor, Martin Estrada, was more even-tempered and less political. Culver City Assemblyman Isaac Bryan took a shot at Essayli, telling Politico that “I will miss his willingness to politicize any and everything to try to score political points while simultaneously accomplishing no legislation.” Back in 2005, Essayli actually went as far as to sue the California Department of Motor Vehicles as a 17-year-old after speeding and causing an accident, contesting having his driver's license restricted. The unhoused are often victims of reckless drivers, with Los Angeles County experiencing such a death roughly every other day. Essayli has promised to assign the best prosecutors to the new task force; the results will be interesting.

The criticism made in particular of LAHSA is that, relatively speaking, it’s accomplished nothing. Recently, LAHSA added an “Accountability and Progress Tracker” to its website with 3 new items addressing the recoupment of advances made to non-profit providers. Dr. Va Lecia Adams-Kellum will remain in her position as Chief Executive Officer for another 120 days or longer through a transition period. It wasn’t immediately clear how a successor would be selected. Adams-Kellum was appointed on January 23, 2023. Her annual salary was a notable $430,000; before leading LAHSA, she was CEO and President of St. Joseph’s Center, a large nonprofit homeless services provider in Venice Beach.

In her resignation letter dated April 4th to LAHSA’s 10-member Commission that oversees the budget for the City-County “joint-powers authority,” she described, “During my first year as Executive Director of St. Joseph Center, my then-husband’s severe alcoholism forced me and my two young daughters into a motel.” Adams-Kellum defended her record, writing that “Our work was guided by challenges we identified from the start – none of which were new revelations in audits that primarily reviewed the period before my tenure.”

Adams-Kellum had faced recent scrutiny for signing multi-million dollar contracts for a service provider for which her current spouse now works. However, previous LAHSA CEO Heidi Marston and her partner Ian Musa of Inner City Law Center did similar self-dealing, although they commissioned professional legal advice on insulating themselves from controversy. A mild one at the VA inspired Marston to leave in February 2019, gliding into LAHSA as Chief Program Officer the same month and quickly ascending to interim CEO and then CEO.

As of yet, Adams-Kellum isn’t the target of investigation. Nor are there any signs yet that anyone in particular is about to be investigated. Perhaps the ripest potential target revealed in the A&M audit would be payments for overtime to the Los Angeles Police Department as well as other unallowable expenses identified. Numerous jurisdictions have prosecuted law enforcement officers for falsifying such records, which is a crime in California and a potential federal violation as well. In 2022, California Attorney General Rob Bonta pursued felony cases against 54 officers from the California Highway Patrol only to see them falter in court. Securing convictions can be difficult, and it’s not clear that Essayli’s Task Force would go in such a bold direction.

Asked about the Task Force, the Attorney General’s Press Office issued the following statement: “Attorney General Bonta will continue to fight for the rights of every Californian.” Further adding, “Beyond that, to protect the integrity of our investigations, we’re unable to comment on, even to confirm or deny, a potential or ongoing investigation.” Essayli has openly criticized Bonta too over transgender rights for school children in regard to the Chino Valley Unified School District, stating on August 28, 2023, that “He will lose in both the court of law and public opinion,” and I implore the Attorney General to instead focus on tackling the massive crime wave California is experiencing.” State and Federal cooperation will undoubtedly be important going forward.

The overall question of whether such a Task Force can move the ball on improving services, much less reducing the occurrence of homelessness in LA County, remains to be seen. The widespread demand for greater accountability is important, no doubt, but perhaps the greatest encumbrance is that even as many are slowly taken off the streets, even more people are landing on them in no small part because of evictions, job loss, familial challenges, and mental health issues. While it’s undoubtedly slightly invigorating to watch Judge Carter question elected officials in court about the lack of progress, meaningful solutions to these social challenges is a bigger question. Disentrenching the bureaucracy is a start to a greater community discussion that ultimately ebbs into fundamental questions about private property rights and rule of law.

That’s what happened today at the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (LACAHSA), now occurring on the second floor of the Metropolitan Water District headquarters. Under fire with Los Angeles Times journalist Liam Dillon questioning the resume of its Interim CEO Ryan Johnson, the new intergovernmental agency responded with a collective groan. Long Beach Mayor and Chair Rex Richardson began by announcing, “We have big work to do here,” quipping that they were in the newspaper now. The mood was just slightly adjusted.

Supervisor Holly Mitchell went even further, asking what was “newsworthy” about the story, which sought to cast doubt on Johnson’s past employment successes and decision not to seek a permanent role. The agency is now funded by County Measure A and has been staffing up to 8 personnel as increased sales tax collections have set into the jurisdiction in some places.

LACAHSA differs from LAHSA in that it integrates other jurisdictions in LA County as well as nonprofit leaders and experts at a greater and more informal scale. LAHSA at present actually has a vacancy on its Board of Commissioners, whereas LACAHSA seems to be filling out seats and is backed by a Leadership Table, which includes representatives from foundations and nonprofits. This intergovernmental model has been employed in support of the Executive Committee for Homelessness Regional Alignment (ECHRA). While LACAHSA is still in the buildout phase of its organization and is seeking to hire both a Chief Financial Officer and a permanent CEO, it has more expansive governance and, with any luck, better accounting.

The question of how LACAHSA, much less ECHRA, would interact with a new Homeless Response agency, or LAHSA, remains, and Johnson, even as he has begun staffing out the agency, still needs to develop its government relations and civic engagement capacity. LACAHSA hopes to leverage philanthropy with tax dollars to meet its side of the housing coin that’s thoroughly interrelated with the crisis of the unhoused. The new agency is supposed to launch July 1st, and Los Angeles County Human Resources is currently running a survey seeking input on a new Executive Director. The agency, while not a full replacement for LAHSA, has the goal of ultimately getting roughly 75,000 people living on the streets of Los Angeles housed.

The current LA Alliance lawsuit only requires a 60% success rate across Council Districts in the City of Los Angeles, and it expires in June 2027. While undoubtedly confronting a human crisis of this scale is challenging, it’s debatable how much meaningful encampment reduction through permanent housing is occurring. Councilmember Nithya Raman expressed concern to LACAHSA that the expiration of up to 3,000 Emergency Housing Vouchers, originally funded by the American Rescue Plan in 2021, could put as many people or households back on the streets of Los Angeles.

The frustration level of the electorate has been increasing as billions have gone out the door for limited results. The biggest missing piece is undoubtedly improved job-development programs. Homeless people and formerly homeless people are frequently discriminated against in both the job and housing markets. Getting to where there’s effective leadership happening that is producing the type of dramatic results the LA Alliance demanded won’t happen overnight, and not without innovation and improved feedback.

The discussion at LACAHSA featured the likes of Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who perhaps has been the biggest advocate of defunding LAHSA in favor of a new agency, Miguel A. Santana, President & CEO, California Community Foundation, but also Mayor Jorgel Chavez of Bell Gardens and Jason Gibbs, Mayor of Santa Clarita, among others. Even the best and the brightest minds of Los Angeles have the same questions as many others: how to navigate the complexity of building housing at an affordable cost by leveraging different sources of funding and, in the end, actually get people moved in with the support that they fully need.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is what was termed the “eviction crisis.” It’s much easier to get someone moved out, really, than it’s become to move them in, and the cards are stacked in favor of landlords. Roughly 94% of evictions are for non-payment, and even if tenants show up in court with the rent, landlords can even then choose not to accept the money late. Landlords win by default in the eviction process. LACAHSA is considering a multitude of project sizes to address this crisis, but even with an estimated $400 million in funding coming, it can’t change the laws or the totality of a housing market that is underproducing and, in the end, capitalizing.

A big push was made among public commenters for the expansion of the recently passed City of Los Angeles right-to-counsel law to meet countywide demands. One public commentator stood out: former City Attorney Mike Feuer, who is now with the Inner City Law Center. Whether getting lawyers for all tenants is even possible and would stem the flow of evictions is a big question mark. A recent audit by City Controller Kenneth Mejia found that Los Angeles’s tenant anti-harassment ordinance “was not effectively designed, resourced or implemented.”

Out of nearly 11,000 complaints from August 2021 to December 2023, only 23 were forwarded to the City Attorney’s office under Feuer and current City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto, with only four cases resulting in administrative fines. Perhaps this finding too should be reviewed by the U.S. Attorney’s office as much as the question of where the money went. Bill Essayli had mumbled a “$2 million” dollar figure with Elex Michaelson as the total unaccounted funds. Over on Figueroa at the California State Bar, Feuer’s name was brought up several times in discipline hearings for his Chief Deputy City Attorney James Clark relating to extortion and fraud that occurred between Special Council in the 2014-15 LADWP overbilling scandal during testimony.

This seems like a lowball considering that the outstanding balance of Measure H advanced funds at last count was $37,010,267. LAHSA has maintained that these funds disbursed in 2018 were never meant to be recouped until 2027. A spokesperson for LAHSA, Ahmad Chapman, previously told us in response in reference to a formal statement from a “lawyer” that questions around these advances “were designed to support Measure H start-up costs and ongoing cashflow needs for service providers as the system rapidly ramped up and sustained a higher level of services.” Return payments seem to be slowing down, and clearly there’s a question about the capacity of nonprofit service providers to ostensibly settle up with the taxpayers even before 2027. At what point does the U.S. Attorney’s Office turn into the de facto service grant collections office for the Bank of LAHSA?

Judge Carter had insisted at the last hearing on March 27th emphatically about the initial $50.8 million outlay: “These parties owe you that money, period.” What happens next in the world of Los Angeles housing and homelessness policy isn’t likely to be pretty. LAist journalist Nick Gerda is now reporting that in 2024, under Va Lecia Adams-Kellum, LAHSA paid out $800,000 in legal settlements to two employees to settle allegations of high-level wrongdoing, including whistleblower retaliation. The nature of the claims wasn’t clear, as LAHSA has refused to release documents that would detail the allegations. Whatever is going on over at LAHSA, the seemingly ultimate failure of the 33-year-old agency to limit its own dysfunction is shocking. Voters and taxpayers alike can only hope that the light at the end of the tunnel comes soon.

To report fraud, waste, and abuse related to housing and homelessness services in Los Angeles or suspected criminal activity related to such areas of concern, please responsibly contact: