The question seemed simple enough: Was the witness’ use of the word “makeshift” merely shorthand for “makeshift shelter?”
But for defendant’s counsel it was a miscarriage of law: “Objection. Calls for legal conclusion. Calls for expert opinion. Relevance. Lacks foundation,” she interjected, prompting a weary, “Overruled,” from the judge.
Over two weeks ending earlier this month, more than 2,000 objections punctuated a high-stakes hearing in federal court to have a judge decide whether to take the unprecedented step of seizing control of Los Angeles city’s homelessness programs.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered the parties to file written briefs by Tuesday and then will rule on the petition by a group of business owners, property owners and residents asking him to appoint a receiver over the roughly $1 billion the city spends addressing homelessness each year.
In a show of how far it will go to protect its authority, the city brought in the heavyweight law firm Gibson Dunn to take over for in-house attorneys who previously handled the five-year-old case. The firm fielded a seven-lawyer team headed by Theane Evangelis, who argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the city of Grants Pass and won the decision that reopened the door to citing and arresting homeless people for illegal camping.
The defense team called no witnesses, but raised the threat of appeal minutes into the proceeding with the first of what would be 262 objections overruled that day, a transcript of the hearing shows. The peak for the seven-day hearing came on day three when Carter overruled 440 objections, mostly speaking in a barely audible whisper.
Attorneys for the LA Alliance for Human Rights argued the city has breached settlements reached in 2020 and 2022 requiring it to provide nearly 20,000 new “housing solutions” for homeless people and to remove just under 10,000 encampments from the streets.
“Breached and broken, your honor. That’s what we’re here to talk about today,” LA Alliance attorney Matthew Umhofer argued. “The system is broken and demands extraordinary judicial action.”
Evangelis dismissed that contention as a gross inflation of facts and law.
“In short, the alliance has attempted to turn this narrow proceeding … into a referendum on the city’s policy choices relating to homelessness,” she said. “And the alliance did not put on any evidence showing that the city won’t meet its targets, … nor could it.”
A third perspective, focused on the removal of encampments, portrayed both the alliance and the city as insensitive to homeless people.
“Your honor, removing tents does nothing to reduce an encampment,” said Shayla Myers, representing two groups intervening in the case on behalf of homeless people. “When a city takes a tent, it just means that in the heat of the day in Skid Row that unhoused residents have nothing to shelter them. But it doesn’t mean that an encampment has been reduced. It just means that unhoused folks have lost their belongings.”
Highly anticipated testimony from Mayor Karen Bass and two City Council members failed to materialize after Umhoff, alerted of an imminent appeal, withdrew them from the witness list.
Instead, long segments of testimony, broken up by nearly constant objections, zeroed in on fine distinctions in the settlement agreement: What is the definition of an encampment? If a couple receive a rental subsidy, does that count as one bed or two? What is the difference between “encampment resolution,” “encampment reduction” and “encampment removal”?
How a case nominally about getting homeless people inside escalated into an assault on the city’s fundamental powers is an 18-month saga of wrangling over the settlement terms. In February 2024, the alliance petitioned the court to fine the city $6.4 million, alleging it “obstructed efforts to establish critical encampment milestones and created far fewer beds than it promised to.”
Carter, who had frequently indulged in monologues in court on the failings of what he has called the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” of the homeless services system, was skeptical about the sanctions but seized on the alliance’s request for an audit. After a flurry of city-court diplomacy, the city agreed to pay $2.2 million, a figure later upped to more than $3 million, for an independent audit.
Released in February, and rebranded an “assessment” because the Alvarez & Marsal firm that conducted it was not a certified public accountant, it found that the city’s homelessness programs were disjointed and lacked adequate data systems and financial controls, leaving them vulnerable to waste and fraud. Though it pointed to no specific fraud, it found discrepancies that suggested some beds were double-counted, and it found no documentation to validate hundreds of others existed.
The report fed a rising cry for reform of the three-decade-old Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority that oversees contracting for the city’s and county’s homeless services. In April, the Board of Supervisors voted to shift the county’s $300-million annual contribution from the agency into a newly formed homelessness department. For now, the city is sticking with LAHSA, but the City Council voted in March to explore forming a new bureau within the Housing Department to oversee its performance.
Neither move mollified Carter, who gave Bass until May to fix the broken system, vowing to become “your worst nightmare” should she fail.
On May 8, the alliance filed a motion declaring that “having exhausted the full panoply of remedial measures within the Court’s authority, no further options remain but receivership.”
Carter ordered an evidentiary hearing to begin May 27.
Alliance attorneys opened the hearing with Emily Vaughn Henry, a former LAHSA chief information officer. She testified that its homelessness data system was “smoke and mirrors” and that she had been instructed by her supervisor “to do whatever we can to make the mayor look good.”
Laura Frost, a director at Alvarez & Marsal, testified that much of the data the firm requested from the city was missing or never responded to, so the firm’s analysts assumed it didn’t exist.
“We found the system was not functioning,” Frost said. And, in answer to a follow-up, “We do not believe, in the state that it was in, that it could achieve a substantial and meaningful reduction in unsheltered homelessness in the city of Los Angeles.”
Two downtown residents testified on the scarcity of services in Skid Row.
“Daily life is survival,” said Don Garza, a frequent spectator in Carter’s courtroom. “People are languishing, dying on streets of Skid Row. … There’s enough money for housing, shelters. There’s enough money to do all of it. … Where did the money go? Why are these people dying on our streets?”
The alliance suggested that the city has overloaded its plan with permanent housing that costs more and takes longer to build than other forms of housing.
Los Angeles City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo stoutly defended the city’s performance and, in particular, the housing in its plan which he said reflects the voters’ will in approving the $1.2-billion Proposition HHH housing bond.
In testimony spread over four days, Szabo steadfastly denied allegations that the city has falsely reported any beds created under the 2020 agreement and insisted the city would meet its obligation in the 2022 agreement to provide 12,915 additional homeless beds by June 2027. Szabo acknowledged that LAHSA has faced issues with data collection. But he insisted that the city has “taken steps to ensure that the data we are reporting is accurate.”
In closing, Umhofer reminded the judge of his own words from a 2021 ruling:
“‘This court cannot idly bear witness to preventable deaths. This ever worsening public health and safety emergency demands immediate life-saving action. The City and County of Los Angeles have shown themselves to be unable or unwilling to devise effective solutions to LA’s homeless crisis.’”
Myers, representing the advocacy group LA CAN and the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, argued in favor of the portion of the settlement agreement to provide housing but against the encampment removals and against a receivership. The onus, she said, should be on the judge himself to ensure that the city creates all the housing required in the agreements.
“Doing that, your honor, requires oversight,” she said. “It requires not a receiver, but it requires verification and data. It requires more information, your honor, not less about the city’s obligations.”
In her closing, Evangelis invoked the Grants Pass case.
“It’s as though the Supreme Court were talking about this very proceeding,” she said. “This is very complex. No one has the answers. And certainly, it’s not up to all of us to decide these huge issues right here. It’s up to local governments, elected officials and dedicated public servants … not the alliance.”
She ended with a litany of the questions she said were endless.
Among them: Would the receiver have the power to appropriate money from the city’s general fund? If so, at what cost to other priorities? Would the receiver take control of the L.A. Housing Department? The L.A. Police Department? The L.A. Fire Department? The Department of Sanitation?
The case is now in the hands of a judge who makes no secret of his commitment to curtailing homelessness and has repeatedly shown that he is willing to act under certain threat of being appealed.
Times staff writers Jack Flemming and David Zahniser contributed to this report.
