Last week the Los Angeles County Auditor-Controller’s office released a damning audit of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA). The conclusions, including lack of accountability and transparency, as well as faulty or nonexistent internal financial and contracting controls, should surprise no one.

The bigger problem is that the audit makes it seem like LAHSA is the problem, and if only the county and city had a more effective agency the problems would go away. In this way the Auditor-Controller’s analysis gets the problem precisely backward. The audit is also curiously down in the weeds, identifying failures with specific programs and initiatives while offering little in the way of an overall assessment of the agency’s flaws at a macro level.

LAHSA is a symptom, not a cause, much less the cause, of the county’s and city’s dysfunctional approach to homelessness. By clinging to the “housing first” model obstinately and in the face of all contrary evidence, L.A.’s political and bureaucratic class guarantee the same dreadful results over and over, year after year. It doesn’t matter what agency or entity is in charge, because the entire premise is blinkered. The theory rests on circular logic, a tautology: Homeless people are homeless because they don’t have homes. Give them a free home, for life, along with loads of free services, for life, and presto, bingo, problem solved.

Anyone who’s been paying even the slightest attention to the crisis knows this theory is as simplistic as it is absurd. We’ve been trying it for two decades in L.A. and throughout California. It started with Gavin Newsom when he was running for mayor of San Francisco in 2002. As that city’s homelessness crisis began spiraling out of control Newsom pitched a policy he called “Care Not Cash.” The idea was that giving general assistance-style cash handouts to homeless people didn’t work because they’d just spend it on alcohol and drugs. What they really needed was housing and services. And thus the Homeless Industrial Complex was born.

It has been a manifest, abysmal failure. Yet with vanishingly few exceptions the establishment insists that “permanent supportive housing” is the only possible solution. At this point their insistence is delusional (aside: as the grandfather of the HIC, it’s been pretty rich to see Newsom galavanting around the state over the last six months haughtily demanding that cities “do their part”).

That delusion is on full display in the response of L.A.’s political class to the audit, which is just one of many internal and third party analyses of the many failings of L.A.’s homeless policies over the last several years. City Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez and County Supervisor Lindsay Horvath have introduced motions in their respective chambers that would dissolve LAHSA and replace it with new entities that would be accountable to the city council and board of supervisors, respectively.

That’s right: The Bold New Idea is to replace one dysfunctional, bloated, unaccountable public entity with two new dysfunctional, bloated, unaccountable public entities that would report to elected bodies that cannot balance their own budgets or keep the sidewalks from falling apart. To ask a basic question, how long would it take to shut down LAHSA and start up those new agencies, and how much would it cost? How ugly would the fight be as the City and County try to fire LAHSA’s 840 unionized employees, more than 100 of whom make six figure salaries?

The City in particular is at the edge of a fiscal cliff and struggling mightily not just to prepare for the 2028 Olympics but to avoid global humiliation. And we’re to believe that when it comes to homelessness, this time they’ll stick the landing? If you believe that, I have a monorail through the Sepulveda Pass to sell you.

The only solution is a complete rethink and overhaul. Time and again, Angelenos have displayed a deep well of compassion for the homeless, most recently in this month’s election when County voters approved yet another sales tax increase that is expected to generate over $1 billion per year. 

But compassion must be balanced with accountability and, when appropriate, a dose of cold-heartedness. The drunk passed out half naked next to a children’s playground everyday should be treated differently than the woman sleeping in her car after fleeing an abusive partner. The healthy 25 year old male who just got off the Greyhound from Minneapolis with nothing to his name but a bag of meth and a sense of entitlement is in a completely different world from the 75 year old Vietnam combat veteran with severe PTSD who grew up in L.A. In particular, those who use homelessness as a shield and excuse for habitual criminality and antisocial behavior that harms the communities where they’ve decided to pitch their tents should be dealt with harshly; the young family whose landlord just evicted them to sell the property to a developer should be treated with goodwill, patience, and empathy. And a lot of people should be given one way bus tickets back to where they came from.

Most importantly, we need to cure the delusion that the vast majority of homeless people are our “unhoused neighbors.” The vast majority of homeless in L.A. are not from L.A., or even California. I’ve yet to meet a single homeless person in Santa Monica who is actually from here originally – and I’ve talked with a lot of them. There’s no such thing as an absolute, inviolable right to live wherever one pleases. I’d love to live in an estate in Bel Air, but I don’t have Bel Air estate money so I don’t. I have no more right to a mansion on St. Cloud Road than the vagrant from St. Louis has to camp out in a children’s park in Hawthorne.

We don’t need to replace LAHSA, though it should be wound down eventually. What we really need is for the political class to start living with the rest of us in this place called Reality.