The Brief

A federal court hearing with potentially far-reaching ramifications kicked off Thursday as a judge weighs whether to seize control of L.A. city homelessness spending and hand it over to a court-appointed receiver.

Why it matters

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are asking U.S. District Judge David O. Carter to find the city in breach of its obligations to create more shelter and to hand control of spending to a receiver. The city objects to the idea, writing in court filings that its due process rights are being violated because it has not been given enough time to respond.

Carter also has been pushing for a new audit into where taxpayer money went for homelessness programs, including Inside Safe, which L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and the city attorney pushed back on. Carter has said he would take “drastic” measures if city officials didn’t agree to the audit.

The backstory

A recent, independent court-ordered audit found major failures by the city in tracking more than $2 billion of homelessness spending. Much of those funds flowed through the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, otherwise known as LAHSA. Auditors found inconsistent data and a lack of oversight for service providers.

L.A. County has since planned to pull more than $300 million out of the agency and into a new county-controlled department. The L.A. City Council voted unanimously to explore a similar departure a week later.

Why now

Carter has continually criticized a lack of transparency and accountability at LAHSA, including for the recent point-in-time homeless count. The agency released incomplete data months earlier than expected, which Carter called “political gamesmanship” and expressed skepticism about the accuracy of the results.

He also ordered LAHSA to give an update during Thursday’s hearing on how much of the roughly $50 million in cash advances paid to service providers the agency has been able to recover.

Who’s who 

In orders, the judge has repeatedly asked city, county and state officials — including Gov. Gavin Newsom, Bass and outgoing LAHSA CEO Va Lecia Adams Kellum — to attend Thursday’s hearing.

But Bass and L.A. City Council President Marqueece Harris Dawson will not be there, according to a filing the city submitted Tuesday. City officials were lambasted by Carter for failing to properly track billions of homelessness spending at the most recent hearing in March.

How to observe

The hearing starts at 9 a.m. Thursday in Courtroom 1 at the First Street Federal Courthouse in downtown L.A.

What’s next

This week, Carter set another hearing for May 27 to gather evidence about whether the city violated two major agreements in the lawsuit to create new shelter beds, known as the Roadmap agreement and the L.A. Alliance settlement.

The L.A. Alliance, a downtown business group, alleges that city officials falsely told the court they created nearly 2,300 new housing units when they “unequivocally did not.”

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Homeless outreach workers are now roaming daily across the Eastside, including Boyle Heights, to provide hygiene kits and tents and connect unhoused residents to temporary housing.

The effort is part of a new year-long program launched last Thursday by Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, which works in partnership with Urban Alchemy, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that provides services to unhoused people.

The program — Leading Outreach with Valued Engagement, or LOVE — will be in effect through March 2027. The program costs $300,000 and is funded through Jurado’s discretionary funds. The team is made up of three people, which includes two on-the-ground outreach practitioners and a third person directing their operations.

Boyle Heights has seen a recent rise in homeless encampment reports. In the first quarter of 2025, 635 encampments were reported in Boyle Heights, compared with 379 during the same period in 2024, according to an analysis by The Eastsider.

Homeless encampments were also a source of discussion at January’s Community Police Advisory Board hosted by the Hollenbeck Community Police Station. 

Attendees expressed frustration about unhoused people living in an alley behind the Benjamin Franklin Library and a growing encampment near Hollenbeck Drive and South Boyle Avenue, according to a summary of the meeting. 

Encampments move from one place to another, said Susana Betancourt, a member of the Community Police Advisory Board. Betancourt talked about pressuring property owners to clean up. “They not only have tents, the encampments there, but they put their vehicles,” she said.

Jurado, in a statement to Boyle Heights Beat, said her office works with service providers “to respond to encampments thoughtfully.”

“We coordinate every two weeks to prioritize areas of greatest need, making sure neighbors get consistent support and that unhoused residents are connected to housing, health care, and other services,” she said. 

Jurado touts the new program as giving unhoused residents better access to “life-saving health care, stable housing, [and] pathways to recovery.” The LOVE program, Jurado said, will help “reach neighbors before situations become emergencies.”

“Addressing homelessness isn’t one-size-fits-all. I invested in the LOVE Team because every person’s needs are different,” Jurado said. “The team is out in the community every day, visiting every neighborhood in the district each week, building trust, and connecting neighbors to housing, health care, and support services that help them regain stability.”

Outreach workers are tasked with providing crisis intervention and de-escalation, assessing individual needs and connecting people to interim housing referrals. They will also distribute food and Narcan, as well as offer “post-placement follow-up to help people remain housed.”

Jurado said workers will exclusively offer daily outreach to CD 14 neighborhoods, which include El Sereno, Lincoln Heights, Boyle Heights, Eagle Rock, Highland Park and downtown Los Angeles. 

Mason Santa Maria, a spokesperson for Jurado, said outreach workers have already identified unhoused residents who are not yet logged into the Homeless Management Information System, an online database tracking services accessed by people who are unhoused or at risk of homelessness. 

“It’s hard to keep track of people when they don’t have a stable address,” Santa Maria said. “This is a way to keep track of them.”

The post Outreach team hits Eastside streets with health kits and housing referrals for unhoused residents appeared first on LA Local.

Los Angeles County broke ground Friday on a project that will bring dozens of new mental health beds and supportive housing to the sprawling, 110-year-old Metropolitan State Hospital campus in Norwalk.

Led by Supervisor Janice Hahn, the project includes a renovation of some of the decaying buildings on the site into 32 treatment beds within locked facilities. The $65 million in funding comes from Proposition 1, the state’s mental health funding bond passed in 2024.

“One of the biggest challenges we face in Los Angeles County right now is that we simply do not have enough places where people can get the compassionate, professional mental health care that they need,” Hahn said before the groundbreaking.

In all, county leaders plan to have 162 beds at the so-called Mental Health Care Campus, ranging from locked psychiatric beds to permanent supportive housing.

California State Senator Bob Archuleta (L) and LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn stand in front of a rendering of a remodeled bedroom at the Metropolitan State Hospital Campus in Norwalk.

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Robert Garrova

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LAist

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Hahn said part of the idea is to get help for people who have been cycling out of emergency rooms and incarceration.

“This Care Village really is a big step forward showing people that there’s a different way that we can get help to the people who need it most,” she told LAist.

At a meeting last year, county supervisors voted to sign off on a lease with the state for a 13-acre portion of the campus. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill from Sen. Bob Archuleta in 2024 that cleared the way for the lease.

One of the buildings that will be renovated into supportive housing at the Metropolitan State Hospital campus in Norwalk.

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Robert Garrova

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LAist

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The historic site 

Run by the state, the psychiatric hospital opened in 1916 and at its peak housed thousands of patients. These days, with its 162 acres, overgrown grass and boarded up buildings, the place feels mostly abandoned.

Some of the buildings feature large windows that architectural mock ups provided by the county show will remain intact, allowing light to flow into large indoor communal spaces. Officials have also said the plan is to preserve the architectural features of the buildings, which have historical landmark status.

The interior in one of the future 16-bed facilities at the Metropolitan State Hospital.

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Robert Garrova

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Laist

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What’s next

The plan is to bring several levels of care together on one campus. In all, the project calls for renovating six of the buildings on the site.

That includes:

• 32 locked psychiatric care beds, which will serve young adults between 18-25 who have acute mental health needs.
• 70 interim housing beds and short-term housing with on-site mental health services.
• 60 permanent supportive Housing apartments. These will be reserved for adults with serious mental illness who were previously unhoused.

The county’s plan also includes a shared community building with a kitchen and communal dining space.

The county estimates the interim housing will be completed late next year, with the locked beds coming in early 2028. The county did not yet have a timeline for the permanent supportive housing beds.

Long Beach residents can now receive harm reduction supplies like fentanyl test strips and overdose reversal medication for free — in the mail.

This represents an expansion of the city’s harm reduction program, launched in December 2023, which already offers in-person pick-up of supplies at several locations. More than two years later, the Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services has distributed over 6,500 doses of Narcan — an opioid overdose reversal medication — and over 21,000 test kits to check for fentanyl and xylazine — a veterinary tranquilizer that has made its way into the illicit drug supply.

Mailing supplies will allow the Health Department to reach more and different people, said Ish Salamanca, with the Health Department. The hours and locations of the department’s distribution sites don’t work for everyone, Salamanca said. And discreetly delivering the kits by mail allows the city “to reach folks who might feel a little stigmatized” picking up supplies in person.

In a November 2024 city council meeting, council members recommended expanding access to harm reduction resources in order to address what Councilwoman Suely Saro called “the crisis of our time.”

“We don’t want to take our eye off the ball on fentanyl and opioids,” Mayor Rex Richardson said in the meeting.

Months later, council members allocated $70,000 from the California Opioid Settlements, a pool of money from pharmaceutical companies and others found responsible for fueling the opioid epidemic, to fund a pilot program to mail fentanyl detection kits to 5,000 residents.

Now that pilot program is live. Within hours of the launch, Salamanca said he had received 30 requests to mail kits, compared to the five to ten requests that come in daily for in-person pick up.

Preliminary data show that fentanyl-related overdose deaths are declining in Long Beach, which the Health Department partially attributes to expanded prevention efforts, and free testing and overdose reversal supplies.

Yet non-fatal overdoses are “not dropping as much as I would want them to,” Salamanca said. And while the city’s efforts have been focused on people experiencing homelessness and using substances, he is also “seeing folks overdosing at their homes or residences,” he said, according to data from first responders.

Despite all the inroads Salamanca and his team have made, “there’s a huge hurdle that we’re about to have to overcome, which is stigma,” he said, describing future plans to hold workshops and presentations in settings ranging from high schools to senior living facilities. While the focus on fentanyl has increased awareness of its dangers, Salamanca called for broader, more transparent conversations on substance use and access to resources.

Long Beach residents can order (and customize) harm reduction kits from the Health Department and access resources here.