The Brief

The Los Angeles region is at a critical juncture in how it approaches perhaps its thorniest crisis: homelessness.

County elected leaders voted last week to defund the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA, which has been the subject of multiple audits uncovering serious financial and oversight failures.

That agency’s chief executive, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, announced Friday that she would step down after a tumultuous two-year tenure.

Her decision comes at a time when the L.A. City Council is also weighing plans to pull funding from LAHSA. Meanwhile, county leaders are deciding how to spend more than $1 billion per year in expected revenue from a sales tax approved by voters for homeless services and affordable housing production.

How did the region end up losing its top homelessness executive and deciding to forge a different path on efforts to house more than 75,000 people living on the streets and in shelters?

Here are five key events leading up to Adams Kellum’s resignation.

Resignations at LAHSA precede Adams Kellum’s arrival 

When Adams Kellum took the reins at LAHSA in 2023, the agency was not known for stable leadership. Before her term, LAHSA had been overseen by a string of short-lived executives and acting directors.

The last LAHSA chief who lasted more than a couple years was Peter Lynn, who led the agency between 2014 and 2019.

Heidi Marsten took over as executive director in 2020 and stepped down in 2022. In her resignation note, she said she received pushback over her efforts to freeze LAHSA executive compensation in order to give raises to the agency’s lowest-paid workers.

“Leaders at the helm of the homelessness crisis are quick to state they want to end homelessness,” Marston wrote at the time. “But when given the opportunity to create housing security, I have watched those same people refuse to make the sacrifices necessary to effectuate that change.”

Next, LAHSA was led by a pair of acting co-executive directors, Kristina Dixon and Molly Rysman. Following their tenure, Stephen David Simon acted as LAHSA’s interim executive director before Adams Kellum’s arrival.

Late payments to service providers

Multiple audits of LAHSA have identified one recurring problem: frequently delayed payments to the providers who work directly with unhoused people.

Even before the release of the latest round of audits, the issue came to a head last year in a county Board of Supervisors meeting where service providers said LAHSA’s late payments had in some cases forced them to take out private loans in order to make payroll.

John Maceri, CEO of the nonprofit the People Concern, said during the meeting that the late payments had brought his organization and others to “the breaking point.”

Adams Kellum said the long-standing issue predated her time as CEO.

“This issue right here is my primary focus,” she told county supervisors at the time. “I'm losing sleep, as you can imagine. And I should, because this must get addressed.”

County audit finds un-recouped loans and lack of oversight 

In November, the L.A. County auditor-controller’s office released an audit that confirmed LAHSA was indeed routinely paying service providers late. And it found much more than that.

The audit concluded that LAHSA had failed to track whether providers followed the terms of their contracts. It uncovered that the agency had in some cases distributed funds set aside for specific purposes to providers for completely different purposes. The agency also failed to establish repayment agreements with service providers it gave $51 million in advances.

Shortly after the audit came out, Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said she would introduce a motion to redirect county funding away from LAHSA and into a new county department responsible for homelessness response.

“The audit findings make clear the structure we have for service delivery is not working. We need greater accountability and bold action," Horvath said at the time.

Adams Kellum signs $2.1M contract to her husband’s employer

Public officials are generally banned from getting involved in contracts in which they have a financial interest, according to state conflict-of-interest laws. That includes contracts that financially benefit their spouse.

Adams Kellum told LAist late last year that she had disclosed the fact that her husband was employed by a local homeless services provider. She said she had been “completely recused” from contracts involving that provider.

But LAist found through a public records request that Adams Kellum signed a $2.1 million contract to Upward Bound House, the Santa Monica provider where her husband, Edward Kellum, works in a senior role.

A LAHSA spokesperson told us agency employees mistakenly sent the contract to Adams Kellum for her signature. But her failure to designate an alternate signer was criticized by Supervisor Kathryn Barger in a recent Board of Supervisors meeting.

“This is about just plain old sloppy work by [executives at] LAHSA, and quite frankly the executive director who signed it,” Barger said at the time. “If my spouse was working for ABC Corporation and I saw something come across my desk, I would know I shouldn't sign that.”

Adams Kellum tries to save LAHSA’s county funding 

As scrutiny of LAHSA intensified, agency officials made the unusual decision to release early, incomplete data from this year’s homeless count.

In March, Adams Kellum said that preliminary data suggested that when the full results of the 2025 homeless count are released this summer, they would show a 5% to 10% drop in unsheltered homelessness across the county. She said that would build on a 10% drop in the city of L.A.’s unsheltered population the previous year, according to her agency’s count.

But those numbers were not enough to stop elected leaders from moving forward with plans to pull county funds from LAHSA.

When Horvath’s motion came up for a final vote last week, Adams Kellum showed up at the Board of Supervisors meeting to argue against the move. Instead of being welcomed by the board to share her perspective at length, Adams Kellum spoke from the public comment podium like any other county resident lining up to voice their opinion on board votes.

“I made promises — one would be a reduction in unsheltered homelessness, which we’ve seen now two years in a row,” Adams Kellum said. “To enhance transparency, I promised that we would improve our operations, and we have. We’ve implemented 20 new data dashboards that provide unprecedented insight into how our system functions.”

Adams Kellum said she had also made progress on fixing LAHSA’s late payments to providers.

“We’ve made a lot of the changes that you proposed,” Adams Kellum told the board, shortly before her public comment time ran out and her microphone was cut off.

The board ended up voting, 4-0 (with one abstention), to pull nearly $350 million in county funding from LAHSA.

Three days later, Adams Kellum announced her resignation.

This story was originally published by Boyle Heights Beat on Wednesday.

As the holiday shopping season approaches, many small-business owners across Los Angeles are looking for a much-needed boost in sales after months of financial strain tied to immigration raids.

In Boyle Heights, for example, more than a dozen local restaurants reported losing 50% or more of their customers or revenue in the weeks after federal agents began conducting sweeps, according to a Boyle Heights Beat survey. 

One business owner said he lost more than $10,000 in revenue. Another estimated a loss of around $15,000.

Leading up to Black Friday, the merchants association known as Somos Los Callejones and the Los Angeles Tenants Union are teaming up with Councilmember Ysabel Jurado to host a street festival Saturday in the L.A. Fashion District’s Santee Alley. Olympic Boulevard between Santee Street and Maple Avenue will be shut down for the festival, which will feature music and vendors.

Event organizers aim to bring business back to the callejones, where vendors have noticed a decrease in foot traffic since immigration sweeps began in the summer. The Fashion District was among the locations that experienced the first workplace raids in early June.

Jurado, who represents Boyle Heights in District 14, will be attending the event.

The councilmember helped facilitate the opening of the city’s Small Business Administration’s Business Recovery Center at 1780 E. First Street. There, small businesses and nonprofit organizations affected by the raids can access information and resources about loan programs available to those experiencing financial hardship, a CD 14 spokesperson said.

On the Eastside, small businesses and community groups are launching holiday markets, hoping to boost local sales. Check back with Boyle Heights Beat soon for a full list.

Los Angeles is on the hook if there are cost overruns for the 2028 Olympics, but that was not the case the last time the city hosted the Games.

In 1984, city officials pressured the International Olympic Committee into making an exception to its rule requiring that host cities foot the bill if the Games were unsuccessful. That fierce public battle guaranteed L.A. wouldn't pay to bring the Olympics to town.

The IOC faced a crisis in the run-up to 1984. Los Angeles was the only bidder to host the Games. The cost of the 1976 Olympics in Montreal exploded from an initial estimate of $120 million to $1.6 billion, leaving the city with debt that took 30 years to pay off. Montreal's mayor had promised his constituents that running a deficit was impossible.

"This essentially scared everybody away except for Los Angeles," said Rich Perelman, who led press operations for the 1984 Olympic Games. "Because of that deficit nobody wanted to bid."

Tehran had considered entering the fray to host the Olympics, but it pulled out due to political turmoil that would soon spark the 1979 Iranian Revolution. That left L.A. as the sole option for 1984.

A "tax revolt" in California

Then-mayor Tom Bradley and other L.A. officials wanted the Games to come to Los Angeles, but they couldn't afford to put city money on the line.

As L.A. was vying to host the Olympics, Californians were in a tax revolt that led voters to pass Prop 13, limiting property taxes. The public made it clear that it also didn't want tax dollars paying for the Olympic Games.

A 1977 survey of 1,200 Angelenos found that 70% supported bringing the Games to L.A. in 1984, according to an official report from the 1984 Olympic organizers. Only 35% remained supportive if the bid required city or county money.

"There has been so much bombastic rhetoric, all negative, about the Games, all predicting huge deficits, all voicing pessimism and gloom," Bradley says in a Sports Illustrated article in 1978, blaming Prop 13 and the media. "The atmosphere has been poisoned."

Making a deal

Public sentiment meant that L.A. officials had no choice but to broker a deal that did not include public monies backing the Games.

This presented a challenge to the IOC, because past Olympic Games had relied on government funds and a public backstop in the case of financial losses. It was the city of Montreal, not the International Olympic Committee, that took the fall when the cost of the 1976 Games ballooned.

The 1976 Games in Montreal left the city $1 billion in debt – a price tag that took 30 years to pay off.

(

Tony Duffy

/

Getty Images Europe

)

The IOC intended to require this of Los Angeles as well, but L.A. had more leverage than past host cities.

"The IOC has usually dictated its will to the host city, and its will has been followed," a New York Times article reported at the time. "But Los Angeles is attempting to use the advantage that goes with being the only runner in a race."

Tensions between the two sides continued to rise. One city councilmember was quoted in the press saying that the IOC could host the Olympics in Timbuktu if it didn't want to agree to the city's terms. Mayor Bradley threatened to pull out of the Games entirely.

Eventually, the IOC gave in. It pretty much had no other option.

In the fall of 1978, the two sides inked a contract that put a local private organizing committee, not the city of Los Angeles, in charge of the Games. The local committee and the U.S. Olympic Committee became the financial guarantors instead of L.A.

"The mayor, whose political fortunes have become closely identified with the OIympics, flashed a big smile, clapped his hands over his head and, in a high-pitched voice, said 'Yeah-hhh!," L.A. Times reporter Kenneth Reich wrote in October of 1978.

One month later, Angelenos overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure blocking public funds from being used on the Olympics unless they were reimbursed.

This sealed the fate of the 1984 Games. Los Angeles would have its cake and eat it too.

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley holds the official Olympic Antwerp flag during the closing ceremony for the XXIII Olympic Summer Games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

(

Steve Powell

/

Getty Images Europe

)

A privately organized – and financed – Olympics

The deal between the IOC and the city of Los Angeles meant that for the first time, a private entity was responsible for staging the Olympic Games. That effort was led by businessman Peter Ueberroth, who took the helm in 1979 and needed a lot of money, fast.

The local Olympic committee controlled the lucrative television rights for the Games, and Ueberroth had broadcasters put down a refundable deposit to be considered. Five companies wrote checks for $750,000 each, according to Ueberroth's memoir. The organizers promptly put all that cash in a bank account earning interest, and used that interest to run day-to-day operations.

ABC eventually scored the T.V. deal and paid $225 million for it. Some of that had to be paid to the IOC eventually, but most of it went to the organizing committee. The local organizers used the interest from those funds to keep doing business. After 1984, the I.O.C. learned its lesson – now the international committee is the one that controls television rights.

Ueberroth and his team also changed the way Olympics sponsorships were brokered. In years past, hundreds of sponsors had kicked in small amounts to play a part in the Olympic Games. He shifted the strategy, instead having corporations bid against each other to be the sole sponsor of different parts of the Games.

Here's one example: When Kodak failed to offer at least $4 million to be the official film for the Olympics, Ueberroth gave Fuji Film 72 hours to sign on instead. Fuji locked in its place with an offer of $7 million.

"These checks started rolling in from sponsors," said librarian Michael Salmon, who works in the 1984 Olympic archive. "Bills were being paid and salaries were being paid."

In the end, the organizing committee made a killing – more than $230 million in profit. It also created a new model for financing the Olympics through huge corporate partnerships that continues today.

Renata Simril, the president of LA84 Foundation, the legacy organization founded with some of those profits, told LAist that that corporate legacy proved a new model for the Olympics could be successful.

"But I do think in some ways it has commercialized the Olympic Games to a degree that hurts my heart," she said. "We have to work harder to see the underlying value of the Olympic Games."

2028 v. 1984

International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach (center) poses for pictures with Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo (left) and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti during the 131st IOC session in Lima in 2017.

(

AFP Contributor

/

AFP

)

Los Angeles faced different circumstances when it bid to host the Olympics this time around. There was competition.

Budapest, Hamburg, Los Angeles, Paris, and Rome all wanted to stage the 2024 Olympics. Then-Mayor Eric Garcetti said a bid would be “dead on arrival” without a guarantee that the city would financially back the Games.

In 2017, the IOC gave the 2024 Olympics to Paris and 2028 to Los Angeles. To secure its third time hosting the Games, L.A. agreed to what it vehemently opposed in 1984. It became the financial guarantor for the Olympic Games.

A protest of New York’s Museum of Modern Art — over a 1984 exhibition that included only 13 women among a group of 169 artists — was a bit of a blip at the time.

The bigger impact was that the protestors would go on to found a long-running activist collective called the “Guerrilla Girls,” that would become known around the world for its outspoken calls for equity for women and people of color in the art world.

Now the anonymous group, who don gorilla masks and assume names of women artists of the past to maintain their anonymity, has its own exhibition at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, called “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl.” 

Though that doesn’t mean the collective is sparing the Getty when it comes to calling out how museums perpetuate inequity through their acquisitions and exhibitions.

How the “Guerrilla Girls” got the art world’s attention

Using straightforward language, glaring statistics and humor and disseminating their messaging through protest signs, flyers, letters and postcards, eye-catching billboards and numerous media appearances, the Guerrilla Girls gained worldwide attention.

Guerrilla Girls posters on display at the "How to Be a Guerrilla Girl" exhibition at the Getty Center.

(

Monica Bushman / LAist

)

The gorilla masks (and sometimes gloves too) didn’t hurt either. The use of the disguises grew out of one members’ confusion between the words “guerrilla” and “gorilla,” and became an essential part of the group’s collective public identity.

What’s on display in “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl”

The “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl” exhibition draws from the first 15 years of the Guerrilla Girls’ archives, which the Getty acquired in 2008, to show the stages of development — from lists and drafts to final products — of the various methods the collective has used to spread their calls for change.

"The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist" is one of the Guerrilla Girls' most well known works. Early drafts of it are included in the "How to Be a Guerrilla Girl" exhibition.

(

Monica Bushman / LAist

)

Some of the group’s best known works are posters that read “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met[ropolitan] Museum [of Art]?” and another titled “The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist,” which lists things like “Having an escape from the art world in your [four freelance] jobs” and “Not having to undergo the embarrassment of being called a genius.”

Zanna Gilbert, one of the exhibition’s lead curators, says that while there have been many other Guerrilla Girls exhibitions, what makes this one unique is how it shows the behind the scenes work and thought processes that led up to these final products.

 “We have a lot of their brainstorming notes so you can really see the process of how they did their activism,” Gilbert says. “So we see it as a kind of toolkit for other people to learn from them.”

Not sparing the Getty from criticism

The exhibition also includes excerpts from the group’s media appearances through the years (like this one on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2016) and an interactive digital display titled “What about Getty?” that reveals stats on how the Getty Museum and Research Institute measure up when it comes to the inclusion of women in collections and exhibitions over the years.

One example: “In the Getty Museum’s painting collection: 81.15% are by men, 18.03% are by anonymous, and less than 1% are by women (0.82%).”

“Institutional reflection is a strategy often used by the Guerrilla Girls when they're invited to do a project at an institution,” Kristin Juarez, also a lead curator of the exhibition, explains. “That if you're inviting the Guerrilla Girls to kind of bring what they do to your institution, you should also be open to reflecting on the work that they're doing.”

A portion of the new Guerrilla Girls work in the "How to Be a Guerrilla Girl" exhibition.

(

Monica Bushman / LAist

)

The Getty also commissioned a new work from the Guerrilla Girls, which features their takes on the content of some of the paintings and sculptures in the Getty Collections, using cartoon speech bubbles to add commentary from the imagined perspectives of the women depicted in them.

The relevance of the Guerrilla Girls today

“ We think that this is an interesting moment, 40 years later, [when] some of the work still feels like it was made today,” Juarez says.

Taken together as a whole, she hopes the exhibition offers viewers a sense of “what it means to form a group and use your voice together.”

What to know before you go

The “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl” exhibition is open at the Getty Center now through April 12, 2026 and is presented in both English and Spanish.

Admission to the museum is free but requires a reservation. Parking is $25 ($15 after 3pm, $10 after 6pm, and free after 6pm on Saturdays). Metro bus 761 stops at the Getty Center entrance.

The Trump administration on Thursday released its plan to open up federal waters off the coast of California to oil drilling, taking a momentous step that state leaders and environmentalists had long expected.

The Interior Department’s proposal, which sets up a direct confrontation with Sacramento on energy and climate change, would also allow drilling in federal waters off the coast of Alaska and the Southeastern U.S. It would rip up a ban on new offshore drilling in most of these places that President Joe Biden signed a few weeks before he left office.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order repealing that ban on his first day in office in January, and last month, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled Biden had overstepped his authority.

Administration officials argued that the move to open federal waters to new oil and gas leases will help restore energy security and protect American jobs.

“By moving forward with the development of a robust, forward-thinking leasing plan, we are ensuring that America’s offshore industry stays strong, our workers stay employed, and our nation remains energy dominant for decades to come,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a press release.

Gov. Gavin Newsom previously said the plan would be “dead on arrival” and promised attendees at an international climate conference last week that California would immediately sue.

On Thursday, his office quickly blasted the proposal as “idiotic” and “reckless.” He added that it “endangers our coastal economy and communities and hurts the well-being of Californians.”

Companies have drilled very little oil off the coast of California since the 1969 Union Oil platform blowout spilled 4.2 million barrels of crude into the waters 6 miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, catalyzing an environmental movement.

Newsom’s press release included a photo of a bird covered in crude oil, with a caption that said, “If Trump gets his way, coming to a beach near you soon!”

Numerous California lawmakers, including Sen. Alex Padilla and Rep. Jared Huffman, hastily convened a media call to push back on the plan.

Padilla called it “another outrageous announcement” from an “out of control administration.”

Rep. Jimmy Panetta compared the proposal to Trump’s controversial renovation of the White House.

“The California coastline is not the East Wing of the White House,” he said.

The Democratic lawmakers are supporting legislation that would prohibit new oil and gas leases off the West Coast.

The public will have a 60-day window to comment on the plan when it appears in the Federal Register on Monday.