iAUDIT! – Last year, I wrote about the hellish conditions in many local homeless shelters. Unsanitary facilities, assaults, property crime, and a lack of support services are common throughout the shelter system. In August 2025, independent reporter Sam Quniones detailed the dangerous conditions at a shelter in Los Feliz, where the chaos culminated in the murder of a shelter resident. More recently, in November, LA Public Press published an investigative article on complaints about the conditions in many of the city’s tiny home villages. Hoarding, drug abuse, and physical violence were common themes in incident reports filed by residents and village staff. Tying these stories together are the findings from a review by Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) that found the City and LAHSA paid providers regardless of performance. Among the problems A&M found were providers billed for unverified staff time at some shelters and charged for three meals per day while serving only two.
A lack of adequate facilities and support services is not unique to Los Angeles. For the past few months, CalMatters has been running a series of reports on the state’s CARE court system. Touted as a way to get people with the most serious mental illness off the streets, it has underperformed over its two-year implementation. One of the biggest problems is that only about one-third of the petitions filed for acceptance were made on behalf of the unhoused. The rest came primarily from family members who lacked other resources to obtain care. In Los Angeles County, home to at least 75,000 homeless people, about half of whom may have some kind of mental health problem, only 511 CARE court petitions have been filed, and 270 (52.8%) have been dismissed. Only 106 (20.7%) have progressed to the agreement stage (where the client, court, and providers agree to a recovery plan), and only six (1.1%) have had CARE plan imposed by a court. Despite its imposing title, participating in CARE Court is voluntary, and a client can leave at any time, which they often do. A family member described the futility of trying to get someone who needs help to agree to it, “You have to be at your worst for them to help. It kind of makes no sense. They expect you to be at your worst to be accepted. At the same time, they expect autonomy from patients to make their own decisions when they’re at their worst.”
The CARE Court’s problems can be attributed to several causes. It was, and continues to be, opposed by many advocacy groups, including the ACLU, who argued it was denying “personal agency” to the mentally ill by wresting away control over treatment decisions. Advocates raised the specter of pre-1970’s California, when family members sometimes had relatives committed to state institutions on the flimsiest of grounds, usually as a way to gain access to the relative’s assets. The CARE legislation was watered down to make the program voluntary and to make it more difficult for family members to force relatives into a treatment plan. Eligibility is limited to only those with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, excluding those who may benefit from treatment before they have a full-blown crisis. Counties, some of which (including Los Angeles) delayed implementing the system until the deadline of December 2024, have been slow to enroll people in their programs, either due to a lack of resources or because fewer petitions than expected have been filed. Due to the complicated eligibility criteria and the program’s voluntary nature, a statewide average of 45 percent of all petitions are dismissed without the client completing the program. Although there is a provision for court-ordered treatment, only 14 mandatory treatment plans have been implemented statewide in almost two years. Like many homeless programs, the CARE Court was advertised as a path to success when in fact it is so flawed and contains so many loopholes, it has been rendered virtually ineffective…