LA Squawk Box for Friday, June 26, 2026

A Bridge Home and Tiny Home shelter contracts up in council today, more funds for CARE+ sweeps, people reliant on housing vouchers say communication is poor on pending July 1 move-out, and more.

What’s happening today?

The LA City Council is finally taking up the mayor’s declaration of emergency on the Lineage cold storage warehouse fire, which was put out nearly two days ago. The declaration allows city officials to access additional resources, and to be skipped for contracting with vendors. They’re also taking up contracts for Hope the Mission to operate an “A Bridge Home” shelter, and John Wesley Center for Health to operate a “tiny home” shelter.

Also, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass will be attending a meeting of a committee set up by the Board of Supervisors that’s aimed at “aligning” homelessness response, and it looks like they’re taking up some items about how Measure A funds will be used. Measure A is a half-cent sales tax voters approved in November 2024 to continue funding homeless services. This Executive Committee for Regional Homeless Alignment also includes LA Council member Nithya Raman, County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, and others. The Board of Supervisors motion that created this committee is here, and it was adopted at their Aug. 8, 2023 meeting.

What just happened?

‘I fully admit, we have not been told anything else.’

Speaking of committees on homelessness, the Los Angeles Homeless Strategy Committee met on Thursday, and Council member Nithya Raman was in attendance, after all. Sometimes, elected officials send representatives to such meetings.

The committee received reports on the status of the city’s Homelessness Oversight Bureau’s 12 contracts. Ten of those contracts are with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and amount to around $345 million. They’re executing additional contracts for the next fiscal year. A chart of those contracts can be found here.

The meeting drew the most public comment from advocates who said people now housed under a short-term voucher program, known as “time-limited subsidies,” could potentially be losing their current housing at the end of this month.

Advocates, from LA CAN and the Downtown Women’s Action Coalition, who attended and spoke at public comment were getting messages from residents on time-limited subsidies about how their housing situation under their current programs was ending after June 30, and that there was not much clarity on what would happen to them in just a few short days, once July 1 rolls around. Peggy Lee Kennedy, with the Venice Justice Committee, also called in, saying she was concerned that “time-limited subsidies” often lead to people going back out onto the streets after the two years the funds are good for. It can be difficult to keep up with LA’s rents after those subsidies are gone, she said, especially if people aren’t able to find other ways to assist with their rent.

The Homeless Strategy Committee heard an update on those subsidies, including a ramp-down of one program, and the ramp-up of another. Homeless services officials at the meeting assured that they did have a plan to transition people to other housing. Despite this, advocates said residents have been reporting that those assurances hadn’t actually been conveyed to them personally.

Queen AJ, who The LA Reporter spoke to after the meeting, said she was being told that her current housing situation was coming to a close at the end of the month, but she also said received very little information about why that was occurring and what might happen next. FYI, if her name sounds familiar, that might be because Queen AJ was a write-in candidate in the mayor’s race for the primary election that just ended.

Queen AJ said that even though officials are making assurances, the move is adding a “layer of unnecessary trauma and stress” for herself and others, and the lack of information has not helped. She gave The LA Reporter a disclaimer about the level of detail she was able to personally provide to a reporter, because beyond being told “the move at this point is July 1…. I fully admit that we have not been told anything else.”

The report on time-limited subsidies also included a chart on the units that homeless services officials were able to identify, broken down by council districts. Interestingly, the 14th Council District, where Skid Row is located, included no units found at this time — and that elicited some surprise from some of the high level officials, at the committee meeting, as well as some in the audience.

Meg Barclay, a staffer in the City Administrative Officer’s department, led the meeting (she started to get up when CAO Matt Szabo showed up part way into the meeting, but he ceded to Barclay, who then continued to lead the meeting). Barclay last month returned to work for the CAO’s office, after years ago leading the city’s homelessness programs as that office’s “first homelessness coordinator.”

When Barclay asked about the lack of “rent-reasonable” units in the 14th District, the homeless services officials at the meeting told her that “we are out there, of course, engaging with owners and developers.” They said they have to explain to people what the program is, in order for people to want to give it a chance. They gave the example of being able to increase the number of units just that morning from the three units listed on the chart, to 14 units, in the 4th Council District (which happens to be overseen by Raman).

Barclay returned to the CAO’s just last month, she told The LA Reporter. She is listed in city documents as an Assistant City Administrative Officer. After Barclay had left her post at LA city, back in 2021, she’d gone on to work in Seattle, Washington, where she was chief administrative officer of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.

The committee also took in a presentation on this update on the city’s homelessness response.

[Note: I corrected the name of the Downtown Women’s Action Coalition, which I had written as the name of another organization with a very similar name. I regret the error!]

A few more things…

More money for CARE+ sweeps: Council member Curren Price earlier this week submitted a motion calling for $618,000 to be transferred from an account labeled “additional homeless services” to another account in order to “convert” CARE operations to CARE+ operations. There were no details in the motion as to why the use of the money for more intense sanitation sweeps at homeless encampments was being requested. Although such operations are described as being used to clean up streets, CARE+ operations in particular are often accompanied by police presence. The more intensive CARE+ operations include orders for people to move their encampments out of the way, which might strike some as a fairly atypical approach for city sanitation services to be delivered to the city’s residents.

Measure ULA untouched in state Howard Jarvis deal: The Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association measure that would have repealed Los Angeles’s Measure ULA, a transfer tax on high valued properties that funds affordable housing and tenant protections, has been withdrawn. The organization instead took a deal that allowed for a ballot measure that if approved by voters would close a loophole to allow for more tax measures to require a two-thirds vote threshold.

Mistrial in Palisades fire case: After the jury deadlocked on Thursday in a case in which Jonathan Rinderknecht, a former Uber driver, was accused of starting the Lachman fire that later led to the Palisade’s fire erupting on Jan. 7, 2025, the judge in the case on Friday declared a mistrial. Rinderknecht was described by the prosecution as someone who was “spiraling mentally and seeking vengeance against the wealthy when he hiked to a clearing overlooking Pacific Palisades and allegedly used a lighter to set the Lachman fire last New Year’s Day,” Brittney Mejia with the LA Times wrote. Rinderknecht’s attorney meanwhile pointed to other possible reasons for the fire, including teens setting off fireworks, and argued that the prosecution needed to “prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the lighter ignited the fire, because that’s what they claim happened here… They don’t have any evidence at all that Jonathan started a fire on that hill with a lighter.”

Drug-related deaths data released: You can find additional information about the latest report that drug related deaths have continued to drop in Los Angeles County at the county’s Public Health website. That’s where you can find the data behind what was being reported on in the LA Times and other publications. Overall, the decline is 6% from the previous year, when there was an even bigger dip. Public officials are attributing this downward trend to harm reduction and prevention programs.