Results today come five months after the count took place — They claim “tremendous success” — How stupid do these people think we are?
Mayor Bass to LA: We’re doin’ great!
I know that I speak for the vast majority of Angelenos when I say that I am So. Damn. Sick. Of. The lies.
At a hastily-called Zoom press conference at 11:30am today, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass reported the results of the 2024 homeless point-in-time (“PIT”) count. The Los Angeles Times dutifully “broke” the story about 90 minutes before Bass’s official pronouncement that homeless is down by 2.2% in the City compared to 2023. Bass and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (“LAHSA”) also claimed the count showed a 38% decrease in makeshift shelters and a 10% overall decrease in street homelessness.
Bass declared, “For the first time in many years, the count is down.”
No, Madame Mayor, it is not.
No one in Los Angeles with eyes and a scintilla of common sense believes these magical numbers. Perhaps that explains the hastily-called presser more than five months after the count took place, when they’ve known for weeks or months when the results were coming (Bass thanked people for attending “on such short notice”). Perhaps it’s why Bass and her team made the announcement not just on a Friday, but the day after the presidential debate when even fewer people than normal are paying attention to local news. Perhaps it’s why the Mayor took pains to urge the 250-odd people on the Zoom to to “amplify the message” on social media. She said there is “misinformation” about L.A..’s homelessness crisis circulating on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and the rest, and that “good people” need to combat it. Bass’s little army of propagandists.
That word, propaganda, gets tossed around a lot these days. But it’s hard to think of a better descriptor. I don’t think there was a single honest statement in the 45-minute event.
What does one call these magical numbers, if not propaganda for a failing regime (also, note that they claim the count decreased for the first time in six years, but only show five years of results; they’re not just dishonest, they’re sloppy).
It’s actually disconcerting – do Bass and her team of “experts” believe that some made-up numbers and political spin can counter what 3.8 million Angelenos see with our own eyes and experience in our own neighborhoods every single day? Are she and her staff really that delusional, insulated, and out of touch with reality? Can they possibly be that blinkered?
Also, why does it take half a year for the City and experts (always with the experts) at USC to do what amounts to arithmetic? Sure, it’s moderately complicated arithmetic, but it’s not abstract algebra. The results used to be released within a month, six weeks at most. What’s changed?
Why all the maneuvering when it comes to such a high visibility, highly impactful issue?
Fact check: The 2024 Homeless Count was (another) fiasco
I participated in the count back in January. It was an even bigger mess than the trouble-plagued effort in 2022, which was the first year LAHSA had volunteers use a smartphone app to record their counts. As I reported at the time, the app was a bug-plagued mess. Two friends and I volunteered to count on the Venice Boardwalk. We recorded 279 people on the streets and in public spaces in a half square mile tract. When LAHSA released the results six months later they reported zero in our tract. ZERO. According to a robust analysis by Daniel Flaming at an L.A.-based think tank called The Economic Roundtable, as many as 30% of tracts may have had their data deleted that year. We have no way of knowing for certain.
As a result of my reporting (along with CBS investigative reporter David Goldstein) LAHSA selected a new vendor to create a new app for 2023 (I did not participate in the 2023 count). The agency previously worked with a shady tech startup called Akido. For 2023 and 2024 they called in the big guns, hiring a software company called Esri. Esri is “the world’s leading supplier of geographic information software (GIS), web GIS and geodatabase management applications.” It’s a billion dollar multinational company with more than 3,800 employees that controls nearly 50% of the global GIS market. The company customized its flagship product, ArcGIS, for the PIT Count.
What could possibly go wrong?
As it turned out, pretty much everything. In January I wrote about the fiasco that was the 2024 count. Somehow the new ArcGIS app crashed worse than Akido. You can read the story here. About the crux of the matter, the failed app, I wrote:
It was when we got back to the staging site and tried to upload our numbers that the problems started. The biggest one was the app’s location feature. It appears to have beendesigned around the “general vicinity” theory of GPS locating. It only recorded about a third of the count in the correct sub-tract, and sprinkled the rest at random among five other adjoining ones. Worse, the numbers kept changing. At one point when I pulled up the screen, the app reported that we’d counted 19 individual adult homeless people in our assigned sub-tract – except the number vanished a second later and the app reverted to zero.
The LAHSA employees were blindsided. There were two IT staffers, one of whom unfortunately gave off the cliche “I know about computer stuff therefore I’m smarter than everyone in this room” vibe. His assistant was more helpful but was marginalized. At no point was there a general announcement as to how volunteers should try to work around the failed app.
Everyone’s app was doing the same things, meaning the entire exercise was meaningless from a data integrity standpoint. After about 45 minutes of troubleshooting (while volunteers stood around chatting, eating cold chili, and killing time) the LAHSA officials gave up. They instructed volunteers to just write their counts on their paper maps (those who had used the paper along with the app, which was not part of the instructions) and turn them in. My team had long since stopped trying to upload the data.
We had extremely low confidence in the number that we ultimately submitted. Several volunteer groups without turning anything in — they didn’t have the patience to wait another 45 minutes as the clock approached midnight on a Wednesday.
“Data,” LAHSA-style.
Funny, no one on this morning’s Zoom mentioned anything about the app. Nor was the fact of more than 1,200 units of “permanent supportive housing” that remain vacant more than two years after the city purchased them. Hundreds of units have been vacant for four years. Along with westsidecurrent.com Editor-in-Chief Jamie Paige I broke that story nearly two months ago. It has since been the topic of expanded reporting, City Council discussions, and Neighborhood Council meetings. Today, silence.
During the meeting I asked about these issues — trouble with the app and the empty units — in the chat. No one responded.
An honest reporting, an honest City government, would have acknowledged these issues. Of course, with vanishingly few exceptions, we do not have an honest City government. So instead of an honest reckoning we got spin and fluff. Bass was positively ebullient. She effused, “Nothing motivates me more, nothing centers me more, than going out with the Inside Safe team.”
The Mayor begged off just a few minutes into the meeting, claiming she was under the weather (apparently Her Honor is taking a page from Joe Biden’s playbook). She offhandedly referred to a “little COVID issue” in the office. Her Chief of Housing and Homelessness Officer Lourdes Castro Ramirez took over and immediately punched the propaganda to 11, effusing that Bass is, ““Our ray of hope, our ray of light.” Soviet premiers would have envied such fawning adulation.
Unless and until the City of Los Angeles, starting with Mayor Bass, takes honest stock of its myriad failures related to the homelessness crisis, the crisis will continue to spiral. Neighborhoods will continue to be terrorized, and people will continue to die.
Last year, in the first budget she presented to the City Council as mayor, Bass asked for $1.3 billion for homelessness. Last year L.A.’s homeless population — “officially” — was 46,260. This year the count is 45,252, for a difference of 1,008 people. For the mathematically inclined that works out to $992,063.49 per person. On one hand that number is misleading. The entire homelessness budget includes everything from permanent supportive housing to emergency winter shelter, services, and outreach. But the point is results, and the fact remains taxpayers shelled out $1.3 billion to get barely 1,000 people off the streets.
If Mayor Bass, LAHSA Director Va Lecia Adams Kellum, and the rest of the City establishment believe this qualifies as anything resembling success — and quite obviously they do — our city is in for more rough years. As for Bass, who came into office with such promise and with high hopes from voters, she is proving to be a massive disappointment.
the all aspect report 