Los Angeles isn’t ending homelessness — it’s financing it, spending $418 million in 2025 with just 10% of that going toward getting people permanently off the streets.
A bombshell City Hall report delivered Tuesday revealed a city that has poured hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into making street homelessness more comfortable, more serviced — and more permanent.
The analysis — produced by the City Administrative Officer, the mayor and City Council’s chief financial watchdog — was ordered as Los Angeles is now being forced to slash homelessness spending by 10 to 15 percent. Not by choice, but by necessity.
“We’re hemorrhaging money on a homelessness system that was never designed to succeed — and no one is being held accountable for the failure,” said councilwoman Monica Rodriguez, who represents parts of the San Fernando Valley and has been one of City Hall’s most vocal critics of homelessness spending
Los Angeles spent $417.8 million last year largely on programs that don’t move people off the streets, but instead seem to sustain and entrench homelessness where it already exists.
A review of the report by The Post shows $3 million was spent last year on hygiene stations, mobile showers and even laundry trucks. Another $4.3 million funds Operation Healthy Streets in Skid Row, a program focused on sidewalk cleanups and to provide medical services and hygiene products.
“If we really wanted to do something about this crisis, we would be advancing real oversight, demanding results, and shutting down programs that don’t work — not protecting a system that keeps spending more while delivering less,” said Rodriguez
More than $13.6 million goes to supportive services like street medicine and moving assistance. Nearly $19 million pays for navigation systems that help people get into permanent housing.
Safe Parking programs — where people live in vehicles under city supervision — cost another $3.56 million, despite the organization that runs it, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, acknowledging they produce “low outcomes.”
That same logic runs through the city’s massive interim housing network, which devoured $319.3 million this year alone. Nearly $250 million went to service costs. Another $61 million was spent simply leasing beds and rooms. These placements allow City Hall to say people are being “served,” even when they remain stuck in temporary housing with no permanent exit.
The most extreme example is Inside Safe, the mayor’s marquee homelessness initiative. Long promoted as a humane alternative to encampment sweeps, the program has become one of the most expensive ways imaginable to warehouse homelessness.
“We know where a big pot of money is that isn’t being used wisely — and that’s Inside Safe,” Rodriguez said. “We know the redundancies. We know the malpractice that occurred under emergency contracting. And yet there’s been zero change.”
According to the CAO, a single Inside Safe motel room now costs taxpayers an average of $82,421 per year — roughly $226 per night — once lease and service costs are combined. That is more than double the cost of other interim housing beds citywide, which average about $31,500 per year. The gap is driven largely by expensive motel lease rates that the County will not reimburse.
A major reason the report was presented Wednesday was because the city had to find places to cut up to 15 percent of the money spent. The CAO projects funding gaps exceeding $181 million next year, ballooning to nearly $247 million the year after — even after proposed cuts.
Outside City Hall, longtime homelessness watchdog John Alle says the numbers only confirm what he’s seen firsthand — and paid for himself.
Alle has spent his own personal money helping reunite families and move people out of homelessness, a contrast he says underscores how little the city’s service-heavy model delivers.
“Services are a band-aid,” Alle said. “The numbers never go down. There are no results — and no consequences for mismanagement, because the same people who run the system get to investigate themselves.”
Alle said the lack of transparency makes it impossible to calculate how much taxpayer money has been misused or wasted.
“We can’t even begin to calculate the total fraud until officials open their books,” he said. “These are public funds, and they’re hiding from audits and accountability.”
