West Hollywood has been skeptical of LAHSA for a while now. So when Los Angeles city leaders gathered Wednesday to debate pulling roughly $300 million in annual funding from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority — the joint city-county agency created in 1993 to coordinate homeless services and distribute funding to providers – it was not exactly breaking news inside the City Hall on Santa Monica Boulevard.
At a City Council meeting last November, Councilmember John Erickson made it plain. He said he would feel more comfortable not moving forward with LAHSA and saw no point in participating in the agency’s homeless count past 2026. Vice Mayor John Heilman backed him up. “We can’t rely on county agencies to provide assistance,” Heilman said after the meeting. “We need to focus on what we can do in West Hollywood.”
That was November. Nobody in LA City Hall was paying much attention…