Los Angeles has spent years promising to “solve” homelessness with record budgets, yet the tents and RVs keep multiplying along freeways and storefronts. The county has approved more than $840 million for its homelessness bureaucracy while unsheltered homelessness has still surged 10 percent over two years. The pattern is unmistakable: a fragmented system that fails to track money, leaves hundreds of millions idle, and then slashes services when the bill comes due.
What looks on paper like a massive investment has functioned in practice like a case study in how not to run a safety net. Audits, criminal complaints and emergency budget votes now show a city and county locked in turf battles, unable to coordinate basic data, and vulnerable to fraud. The result is a humanitarian disaster that is not just underfunded, but mismanaged at scale.
The numbers say it plainly: more money, more people outside
The most damning evidence that the strategy is failing is visible on sidewalks. Even as Los Angeles County has poured unprecedented sums into homelessness programs, the 2025 count found unsheltered homelessness in the county up 10 percent over the last two years, with the city itself seeing a 51 percent jump in people living outside compared with a decade earlier. That is not a marginal miss, it is a sign that the system is structurally incapable of turning dollars into exits from the street at the pace the crisis demands.
At the same time, county leaders have signed off on a homelessness spending plan that includes over $840 million for their own Department of Homeless Services and Housing, separate from the regional Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA. The county’s own homeless department acknowledges that folding a bed rate increase into this budget alone cost more than $100 million, a reminder that a large share of the money is being absorbed by the system’s own infrastructure rather than new housing. When spending climbs this high while tents proliferate, it is hard to argue the problem is simply a lack of cash.
Audits expose a decade of untracked billions
Behind the headline budgets sits a quieter scandal: for more than a decade, the city did not properly track how billions in homelessness funds were spent. A court-ordered audit found that Los Angeles had failed to properly track homelessness spending for more than ten years, leaving officials unable to say which programs worked, which failed, or even where large chunks of money ended up. That is not a minor bookkeeping error, it is a fundamental breach of public trust that makes any claim of “data-driven” policy ring hollow…