Budgets reflect warped priorities

Los Angeles officials apparently have decided that the people on the right are considerably more valuable to society than the ones on the left.

According to the official 2023 homeless point in time (“PIT”) Count there are 75,518 homeless people in Los Angeles County. This fiscal year the County and its 12 largest cities will collectively spend at least $2.01 billion on that population, or nearly $28,000 per person. That is in addition to significant portions of other County agencies’ budgets that go directly or indirectly to addressing homelessness, including the Fire Department ($4.7 billion budget), the Sheriff’s Department ($4 billion), Metro ($9 billion), the Department of Mental Health ($4.7 billion), the Department of Aging and Disabilities ($500 million), and others. According to some estimates, for example, up to 80% of emergency calls involve homeless individuals. Finally, that baseline figure does not include hundreds of millions, possibly more, spent by nonprofits, philanthropies, charities, and faith groups, and unknown millions in individual donations and handouts. Overall, according to a June 2023 analysis by Cal Matters, at the state level California will spend $7.2 billion on its homeless population of 171,000, or more than $42,000 per homeless individual. That compares to $23,791 per public school student spent by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) in 2023-24.

Suffice it to say, there is something very, very wrong in a City — in a society — that spends more attempting to house and service homeless people than it does educating young people and preparing them to lead productive lives. That is, ensuring the next generation doesn’t end up on the skids and on the dole. Not that LAUSD does a particularly good job at that basic function; quite the opposite. The district’s educational outcomes are notoriously, scandalously, appallingly awful. Barely 18% of eighth graders are proficient in grade level reading and writing, and only 16% are proficient in math. Those are horrifying numbers in an era in which education is crucial to even most entry level and minimum wage jobs. It’s almost as if L.A. isn’t preparing kids to flourish, but to become dependent upon government handouts. Any surprise the City spends more on homeless people? It almost starts to make a perverse, macabre sort of sense.

It gets worse still: LAUSD’s budget is set to shrink by some 25% next year when the last temporary federal emergency COVID funding runs out. The district’s current budget already forecasts significant layoffs in the coming two years. Per pupil spending will drop to around $18,000 per student. That funding drop will come as hundreds of thousands of students continue struggling to make up for educational losses during COVID. Many never will.

Homeless spending, in contrast, shows no signs of letting up. It appears that California’s credulous voters narrowly approved Proposition 1 in the March 5 primary (it’s ahead by 0.1% as of this writing) which will unleash another $6.5 billion, allegedly for mental health treatment and veterans services. Do not hold your breath for a sudden turnaround in the crisis when that money starts flowing. Do, however, expect more faceless bureaucrats and various public agency executives pulling comfortable six figure salaries, and more outside experts and consultants cashing their seven figure contracts. Expect the crisis to continue to get worse.

Individual programs are likewise eye-wateringly expensive, and give further credence to the overall homeless spending estimate. For example, according to a recent independent audit, Mayor Karen Bass’s signature “Inside Safe” program is costing nearly $22,000 per month per individual. The audit found that the program has cost $67 million to house just 255 people, which works out to $262,745 per year, or $21,895 per month. You could rent a princely estate in Pacific Palisades for that much money, but the City is spending it to house people in fleabag motels near LAX, many of which would otherwise be have been renting their rooms by the hour.

The auditor concluded that the numbers, “paint a picture of a system that has no idea of the population it serves, how many it shelters our houses, how long they stay sheltered, and what happens to them when they exit the system. And yet agencies insist they need more funding and more building.”

It’s important to remember that a majority of homeless people in Los Angeles, and in California generally, are from elsewhere, meaning L.A. taxpayers are shelling out all those billions to care for other counties’ and states’ problems. Even other countries’.

Speaking of which, California’s political class has further demonstrated who they really care about. Governor Gavin Newsom’s office claims that the state has provided temporary and/or permanent shelter to more than 520,000 migrants since 2021. Many, if not the majority of those migrants are here illegally. Somehow, the state is more effective at housing those people than it is at taking care of its own. How can the wealthiest state in the wealthiest nation in history be so incompetent at housing Americans, and so good at housing people who should not even be here in the first place? Again, it starts to make a grotesque sort of sense.

In a particularly cruel irony, in January investigative journalist Daniel Guss exposed that Mayor Bass quietly has been shuffling migrants into Inside Safe shelters meant for L.A.’s homeless. In one instance officials commandeered a community center that had hosted 12-step meetings twice weekly for more than 100 recovering narcotics addicts. The Narcotics Anonymous meetings were suspended, as were other community events and functions, as the space was used for temporary shelter for recently-arrived migrants. He followed up a month later, revealing that City Council President Paul Krekorian and his staff ignored emailed pleas from the NA group’s leaders.

So, in sum, the City and County of Los Angeles spend more — far more — to not house and serve 75,000 homeless people than they do to educate and nurture the next generation. They play shell games with funds, resources, and even individual shelters and beds, quietly housing recently arrived illegal aliens in spaces that taxpayers were told would be dedicated to Angelenos. At the end of the day the results are more illegals, more homeless people, and hundreds of thousands of young high school graduates who cannot even fill out a McDonald’s job application without help.

Keep these realities in mind the next time someone in L.A.’s political class drones on about equity and equality. If our they could muster the courage they could solve homelessness. That they do not is a conscious choice they make every single day.

Voters may yet come to the rescue. Up in San Francisco they approved several ballot measures that, among other things, bolster the police department’s resources and technology and require mandatory drug screening for certain city benefits programs. Here in L.A. the mood was decidedly more moderate than two, much less four years ago. Calls to “defund the LAPD” have been replaced by calls for more sworn officers. Soros-backed District Attorney George Gascon survived the primary, but 78% of County voters cast their ballots for someone else. And several moderate candidates will face progressives in City Council races, most importantly Ethan Weaver’s bid to oust the noxious Nithya Raman in District 4.

Angelenos can only hope that those moderate voices and trends have longevity. As homeless and public school spending prove, our priorities currently are warped beyond recognition.