LA Squawk Box for Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Two reports to understand how LA deals with homelessness, LA city leaders say they may sue to wrest control of key homeless services roles, my voting recommendations on state measures, and more.

What just happened?

Two reports to help you better understand how LA city deals with homelessness

A couple of reports out this week from UCLA and a collaboration between USC and UCLA provides some data that sheds light on LA city’s homelessness policy. They include the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy’s Storaging the Homeless, which analyzes and looks at the history of the city’s homelessness policy, and raises concerns about both public oversight and accountability, as well as the influence of the LA Alliance for Human Rights case on LA’s homelessness policy.

The other report is part of a series put out by PATHS, which is a longitudinal survey and study of the same group of people who are unhoused that was started in 2023. The latest report, Clearing Encampments or Resolving Homelessness, examines encampment sweeps and encampment resolutions. They found that not only do sweeps and encampment resolutions rarely lead to shelter or housing, those percentages haven actually gone down since the last time they surveyed people. Both studies incorporate research done by people who are closest to the issue of homelessness, such as poor people and unhoused people. I also posted some thoughts about these reports on X and Bluesky (they are the same, but giving two options for those who aren’t on X).

LA city says they’re ready to sue, to wrest control of key roles in delivering homeless services

A fight to gain control over how homeless services are delivered in Los Angeles County escalated on Wednesday, with LA city leaders saying they were ready to take legal action to wrest control of two highly consequential roles that involve managing unhoused people’s case files and matching people to services and housing.

“This body is formally requesting that the City Attorney develop options for litigation to protect the city and to protect our constituents, both housed and homeless,” Los Angeles City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said after he and others emerged from a closed session on the matter earlier today.

Right now Los Angeles County is the favored candidate for those duties, and was recommended for those two very powerful roles by a 21-person panel that’s involved in designating them, known as the Los Angeles Continuum of Care board. But LA city leaders have complained that they have not been getting their fair share of services – even when they managed those roles together with the county as part of the current “joint powers” agency run by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, also known as LAHSA, and they also applied for that role. And it doesn’t seem like they plan to give up too easily.

This is all happening because the Trump Administration suspended funding from LAHSA earlier this year. Even though the homeless services agency sued and was able to prevent this year’s funding from getting pulled, the federal government’s actions have touched off a scramble to find a replacement for LAHSA by next year.

The City Council’s instructions appear to signal that the city wants to get LA county to the table to try to negotiate for one or both of those two roles. Szabo stated that he understood the instructions of the council to be that “as an alternative to the initiation of litigation,” his office, along with the chief legislative analyst’s office and the housing department “would negotiate with the county potential terms for co-management of the CoC [Continuum of Care] programs, which could include city leadership of HMIS and/or CES.”

The “continuum of care” is a fancy name for an area where services are delivered. And HMIS, or Homeless Management Information System, is the database where unhoused people’s case files are kept, and CES stands for Coordinated Entry System, which is the system that is used to match people to services based on a preset criteria to make sure they are handed out fairly.

Harris-Dawson also shared the council is asking staffers to “revisit” plans for LA city to go their own way, by setting up their own homeless services agency, which means to the federal government to set up their own continuum of care. Three cities within LA County – Glendale, Pasadena and Long Beach – actually already run their own homeless services “continuum of care” agency that’s separate from the wider LA region’s homeless services delivery cooperative.

Meanwhile, the general membership of the LA County on Tuesday, Oct. 13, was designated for the role that would allow them to apply for federal HUD dollars to pay for homeless services, known as the “collaborative applicant.” LA city did not apply for that role, and the county was the only entity to submit an application for it. I wrote about the voting process here (Bluesky version). Anyone in the Los Angeles Continuum of Care who was “interested” in addressing homelessness was essentially able to vote on this matter during the meeting. The number of ballots cast was 331 (X version).

That meeting was a re-do of last Friday’s of the Los Angeles Continuum of Care that got shut down abruptly last week. While this entity has long been seen as advisory, it turns out that it can have a pretty powerful role in deciding who gets to lead certain duties in delivering homeless services. The chairs at that meeting had adjourned the meeting, saying that because their Zoom capacity of 1,000 had been reached. This followed a text blast sent out by Mayor Karen Bass’s office mobilizing people to vote against awarding the HMIS and CES duties to LA county.

Doug Smith of the LA Times also has an overview of what’s been happening that you can read here.

A few more things…

Mike Bonin talks to CalMatters’ Jeane Kuang about the state tax measures on the ballot, on his latest What’s Next Los Angeles? podcast episode.

Check out how I’m voting on some of the state ballot propositions in this roundup by Golden State, which also includes how other journalists are voting.

LA City Council members heard an update today on the city’s unarmed crisis response program, which is expected to be expanded citywide, and replace the need to send police officers out on nonviolent 911 calls. You can catch up here.

Karen Bass’s campaign appears to have inched up on matching funds recently. They were just under a million dollars, and now Bass’s campaign is up by just over $200,000 to $1.18 million, which means she raised about $30,000 in small dollar donations, which are donations of at most $257 each, although can be as low as $5. Bass’s campaign still has some room left to get to the matching fund max of $1.507 million.

Jeremy Louwerse of the California Post reports that the legal team for former LA fire department chief Kristin Crowley, who is suing Mayor Karen Bass for defamation, is seeking a deposition from the mayor to ask her questions about statements she made at mayoral debate in May that referenced Crowley. The judge is scheduled to hear the discovery motion from Crowley’s team on Nov. 2, the day before the election.

Nithya Raman said at Tuesday’s NBC4/Telemundo52 debate with Mayor Karen Bass that she planned to remove police chief Jim McDonnell, potentially before his term is up in 2030, but she declined to say when she would do that. Bass has argued that there shouldn’t be any changes in leadership before the Olympics Games in 2028. You can catch up on the full debate here, and the LA Times’s report on the report, from Noah Goldberg and David Zahniser, here.