On eve of homeless count, LA County unveils new county homeless department, service call center
The staff of Los Angeles County’s newly created Department of Homeless Services and Housing and its many partners worked in cubicles Tuesday morning in a one-stop services call center on the seventh floor of the Hall of Records in Downtown Los Angeles.
The Emergency Centralized Response Center (ECRC) was touted by county officials as a coordinated, faster approach, directed by the 20-day-old county department tasked with battling homelessness in a smarter, more efficient way than when the much-criticized Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) was in charge.
“We recognize the buck will stop with us,” said Fifth District Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who along with Third District Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, led the way for the county to take the reins in the homeless fight. “It allows us to pivot, where we see things are not working. We will be far more nimble in terms of how we deal with the homeless crisis. Plus, we are setting the tone for accountability, something that had not been done before.”
L.A. County officials told the media that ECRC and its new department would be more efficient, quicker at responding to needs, and more transparent in how taxpayer dollars are spent to move homeless people off the streets and into shelters, and ultimately, permanent housing.
“It is financial best practices that are long overdue,” said Horvath, saying the board created the county-led oversight after findings became public from a county audit blaming LAHSA — a joint-powers agency between the county and the city of Los Angeles — for not responding to the homeless crisis in a timely manner and not always accounting for expenditures of taxpayer dollars.
The county’s Auditor-Controller’s Office released an audit on Nov. 20, 2024, spelling out numerous deficiencies regarding the fiscal practices of LAHSA. These included no agreements with partners for repaying cash advances from the county; failing to timely reimburse nonprofits in the field for services even when money was available; inadequate controls over contract reviews or cash payments; and inappropriate use of funds.
LAHSA interim CEO Gita O’Neill defended the agency on Tuesday.
“As a routine process by its funders, since fiscal year 2020, LAHSA has been subject to 43 audits each focused on areas such as financial reporting, internal controls, programmatic performance, and contract monitoring. None of these audits found fraud, waste or abuse,” she said in a statement.
Barger said said the final straw for her came when she heard that LAHSA was paying to house people from the streets in a certain house but they quickly learned no one was actually living in it. “That is the point where we said something has to change,” Barger said.
In May, providers of services from nonprofits testified before the Board of Supervisors about not getting paid by LAHSA. The managers of LA Family Housing, The People Concern, People Assisting the Homeless, Special Service for Groups, and Homeless Outreach Program Integrated Care System, all testified they had to take out lines of credit at high interest rates — or even use their own credit cards — just to stay afloat and maintain services.
Horvath said with the county department in charge, “that is a thing of the past.” She said the county initiated that change before the new department launched. Now, contracts for homeless services are under the county’s umbrella, not LAHSA’s, she said.
O’Neill, who called LAHSA “a partner of the ECRC,” said financial systems improvements have been made since her arrival.
“In the past, accountability was too complex,” she said. “I’m a systems person. I love a system that works, and that’s my work here. I’ve found efficiencies in the agency and consolidated departments to make the agency work better.”
The first public test of the county’s new department began on the eve of the 2026 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, the largest unsheltered homeless count in the nation. The count of the homeless in the county starts Tuesday night and is run by LAHSA, a joint-powers agency between Los Angeles city and L.A. County established in 1993. The audit will not include Long Beach, Glendale and Pasadena, which operate their own independent counts.
LAHSA will run the count and had signed up 3,000 volunteers as of Jan. 14 for the count which runs through Thursday. The data is reported to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, so homeless services funding can be released from the federal government and also from Sacramento.
When the count figures are released in late spring or early summer, the numbers help the county and cities pinpoint areas of need, and also may determine the amount of federal and state dollars for homeless services. Until this month, LAHSA was the lead entity that coordinated and managed federal, state, county and city funds for shelter, housing and services for people experiencing homelessness throughout the L.A. Continuum of Care.
When the two supervisors were asked if they would attend the official opening of the homeless count, they didn’t say specifically. Barger said she would go to a count in her Fifth District. L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, and Mayor Karen Bass were scheduled to attend the press conference before the count’s launch along with LAHSA officials tonight at the Inner City Law Center, at 1309 E. 7th St in Los Angeles.
Horvath responded: “I care about what my residents want to see,” but added that she had invited L.A. elected officials to the press conference Tuesday morning but no one was in attendance. She said L.A. leaders have met with county officials as the county formulated its department’s budget. And L.A. city officials are working at the ECRC, as one of the county partners that include LAPD and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
The ECRC receives about 50 to 80 outreach requests every day, said Victor Hinderliter, director of street-based engagement for the LA County Department of Health Services who gave a tour of the ECRC Tuesday. Some come from city and county departments; others come from 2-1-1 operators who direct homeless services calls to the Center in order to send out a housing services team, Hinderliter said.
The new L.A. County HSH department was created in April as a counter-punch, taking away much of the power and dollars away from LAHSA — including many front-line employees — who are in the process of transferring to the county HSH Department. HSH will also manage new dollars from a Nov. 2024 county one-half cent sales tax, Measure A, which will produce about $1 billion every year. This takes over from the expiring Measure H.
“We know the status quo was failing and doing nothing was not an acceptable option,” Horvath said. “We confronted a simple truth: The public was paying billions of dollars without accountability.”
LAHSA denied many of the allegations of mismanagement of funds and services found in the county audits. Its leadership said they were working on better transparency of where the dollars went, and more timely payments to vendors who meet the homeless in encampments, build trust, and help them move into temporary housing.
In April, LAHSA CEO Va Lecia Adams Kellum resigned just days after the troubled agency was told it would be losing most of its funding and employees to the new county homeless services department. The new county department would siphon away the $350 million it sends to LAHSA annually and instead, use it to seed its own department. Also, the new county department would be directly responsible for spending Measure A dollars.
Before her resignation, Adams Kellum and others from LAHSA defended the agency by telling key results. LAHSA has said that for the past two years, homelessness has declined, according to the results of the last two homeless counts.
LAHSA pointed out that there were 72,308 people experiencing homelessness countywide by the 2025 count and that included 43,699 in the city of Los Angeles. Those numbers mark a 4% decline in the county, and a 3.4% decrease in the city of L.A. as compared to 2024.
The count distinguished between people living on the street and people living in shelters — both were counted as being homeless. People on the streets dropped by 9.5% countywide, and 7.9% in L.A. city. Again, the past two years showed the percentage of unsheltered homelessness dropped by 14% across the county, and 17.5% in L.A. city.
The number of people placed in temporary and permanent housing across L.A. County went up. In 2024, there were about 28,000 people in permanent housing in L.A. County, representing a 2.5% increase from the previous year, LAHSA reported.
In October, Rand Corp. concluded the LAHSA point-in-time count in 2025 was an undercount because it missed so-called “rough sleepers” who are in the streets but without a tent or vehicle and harder to count. Barger said she knows the count is an estimate and will use the count data, the Rand studies and her own eyes to know where to direct the new county department for services.
“We will have to figure out where is the best use for our resources,” she told the media. “Where we get the best bang for our dollars.”