(The Center Square) – The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority plans to issue layoff notices Thursday to 284 employees.
LAHSA has already notified its union, Service Employees International Union Local 721, as well as the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and the state of California. That notification is designed to comply with the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.
Of the employees being laid off, 216 are union-represented. The remaining 68 are non-represented staff. Their final day of employment is scheduled for June 30, although that could be extended in June when the city of Los Angeles’ budget is finalized.
When asked for comment, LAHSA provided The Center Square with a press release stating that layoff notices are the result of Los Angeles County’s decision to establish a new County Department of Homeless Services and Housing. This will result in a restructuring of LAHSA, which was jointly funded by the city of Los Angeles and the county until the latter pulled its money in April 2025 following the agency’s failed audits.
Interim CEO Gita O’Neill thanked employees for their “unwavering dedication” and hard work.
“Our staff has been the driving force behind the historic reductions in street homelessness we’ve seen over the past two years,” said O’Neill in the press release. “Though our agency’s structure is changing, the monumental impact of their work — housing nearly 80,000 people over three years — speaks for itself.”
Not everyone is a fan of LAHSA.
Susan Shelley, vice president of communications for the Los Angeles-based Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, said the layoffs are long overdue.
“The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority has been failing for a long time. And the county has now pulled its funding, something like $300 million a year, and so how many different agencies are there going to be?” Shelley told The Center Square. “The county is setting up its own agency to do homelessness services, and yet LAHSA continues, so how many different bureaucracies should Los Angeles pay to work on the same problem?”
Shelley added that the city of Los Angeles is also in the business of managing homelessness, housing and services.
“The mayor has her own program, her own bureaucracy, so that’s three. And in the county and city governments, there’s a housing agency, there’s mental health services. There’s so much duplicative effort,” said Shelley. “Why do we even need LAHSA at all?”
Shelley said it is possible that people being laid off could possibly be rehired for the county office, but she still questions whether Los Angeles needs so many layers of bureaucracy and salaries to “fail to address the problem” of homelessness.
“It’s a huge bureaucracy paying a lot of executive salaries to be director of and administrator of, and the people on the street are not necessarily seeing the money or the help,” she said.
LAHSA was created in 1993.
In its press release, LAHSA said that it has been achieving several historic milestones including two consecutive years of overall reductions in homelessness. LAHSA also claimed a 14% countywide reduction in street homelessness and an 18% drop in street homelessness within the city limits.
