Will Homeless Legal Battle in L.A. Impact Long Beach?

The City and County of Los Angeles are under great pressure to report what’s happening to funds and programs intended to take on homelessness in the area. How might this affect Long Beach?

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in April called on L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and L.A. County Board of Supervisors Chair Kathryn Barger to fix the broken system by May, which could mean appointing a receiver to run the city’s homelessness programs.

A few days later in April, United States Attorney Bill Essayli separately announced the formation of the Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force, which will investigate fraud, waste, abuse and corruption involving funds allocated toward the eradication of homelessness within a seven-county jurisdiction of the Central District of California. That jurisdiction includes Los Angeles and Orange counties.

The legal struggle started with a lawsuit filed five years ago by the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, a nonprofit organization made up of business owners, property owners and residents. An order and settlement agreement required L.A. to create nearly 20,000 new beds for the homeless and to remove about 10,000 tents and vehicles from the streets.

Another settlement in the suit requires L.A. County to create 3,000 new mental health beds and to pay for some of the services for the city beds. Last year, the case took a hard turn when L.A. Alliance’s law firm, Umhofer, Mitchell and King, accused the city of noncompliance and asked the judge to fine it $6.4 million, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Judge Carter declined to go that route and instead ordered an outside audit to be conducted accounting for billions of the dollars the City of Los Angeles had spent on homeless services. The audit was released in February and charged that there have been disjointed service and inadequate financial controls, which did leave the city’s homelessness programs and services vulnerable to waste and fraud.

United States Attorney Bill Essayli’s Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force has focused primarily on homelessness in L.A. County in its statement on creating this task force. It cited the audit results and stated that the county has a homeless population of more than 75,000, of which more than 45,000 are within the city limits of Los Angeles. The total homeless population of the remaining six counties of the district exceeds 20,000.

The task force refers to the region as the Central District of California that is comprised of approximately 20 million residents within the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura.

One organization that has been under pressure through that audit has been the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), a joint agency formed in the 1990s to manage homeless services for the City and County of Los Angeles. Measure H, which passed in L.A. County in March 2017, brought in a 1/4 cent sales tax increase dedicated to funding homeless services and short-term housing in the county. Measure H has grown LAHSA’s budget more than seven times over to its current $875 million.

Last week, LAist reported that L.A.’s top homeless services official, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, may have engaged in major misconduct, including hiring unqualified friends into powerful positions, trying to destroy public records and behaving inappropriately at a conference. That came from letters written by an attorney on behalf of two former LAHSA employees who alleged they were wrongfully fired for speaking up against wrongdoing by Adams Kellum.

Homeless Services in the City

The City of Long Beach’s 2024 count showed 3,376 people experiencing homelessness in the city. This number signified a 2.1% decrease from 2023 – the first time the city had reported an overall decrease in homelessness since 2017.

All of this is taking place within the context of California voters passing the comprehensive Proposition 1 in March 2024 and L.A. County voters approving Measure A in November 2024, which affects homeless services. The funds and resources are available in the state and its cities and counties. Questions keep arising about how likely it will be for services to be in place that can resolve some of the conditions around homelessness and how it impacts local residents and businesses.

The City of Long Beach, like many others in California, has begun enforcing ordinances over the past year that would stop people from setting up campgrounds in public places like city parks. The downtown is seeing more of these tents set up in places such as Lincoln Park outside the Billie Jean King Main Library. The Long Beach Police Department has been directed to take a gentle approach to communicating with the homeless community and enforcing the laws.

In August of last year, the City of Long Beach established the Office of Homeless Strategy and Partnerships, a new office that is expected to further the city’s efforts to reduce homelessness in Long Beach through strategic planning and implementation of key initiatives and building partnerships with external agencies, service providers and community stakeholders.

“Over the last year and a half, we’ve made significant strides to address homelessness here in Long Beach and, while we are proud of what we’ve accomplished, we know there is more work to be done and more people to help,” said Mayor Rex Richardson at the time of the announcement. “The establishment of our new Office of Homeless Strategy and Partnerships will focus on the importance of interdepartmental and community collaboration to ensure a strategic, thoughtful and well-rounded approach to addressing homelessness over the next five years.”

The Office of Homeless Strategy and Partnerships, located within the Office of the City Manager, is comprised of a dedicated team of one manager and two program specialists who will partner closely with city departments such as the Health Department’s Homeless Services Bureau to coordinate their work, direct services and governance structures addressing homelessness.

The office is working on an interdepartmental structure focused on streamlining homelessness response, expanding and improving the city’s homeless services system and increasing housing affordability. The city says it will facilitate urgent citywide projects and build connections with community partners and external agencies.

The city’s Multi-Service Center is playing a central role in all of these services. It operates homeless outreach teams, currently budgeted with 27 positions that both proactively engage people experiencing homelessness as well as respond to community request for engagement.

The city says that outreach is a vital part of our homeless response as it allows the city to meet people where they are at and develop trust and rapport, while informing people of the resources available to them. For anyone trying to help someone experiencing homelessness through outreach, you can contact the city services at (562) 570-4672 or by email at HomelessServices@longbeach.gov.

Jon LeSage is a Long Beach resident and a veteran business media reporter and editor. You can reach him at jtlesage1@yahoo.com.