The Brief

If you’re trying to address homelessness in L.A., there is some foundational information you need in order to evaluate what’s working and what’s not, such as:

• How many unhoused people is the city moving into housing? 
• How many of those people are staying housed?
• How has this changed from the number of people housed last year?

For almost a year, we’ve been hunting down answers to these seemingly simple questions for the Promise Tracker, a project to hold L.A. Mayor Karen Bass accountable to her campaign pledge to house 17,000 unhoused Angelenos by the end of her first year in office.

For most of the year, we couldn’t get accurate answers. In fact, no one has been able to give clear answers to these questions for years, so this was a problem long before the current administration. But the Bass administration set their goal of housing 17,000 Angelenos without a thorough understanding of how such data is tracked and logged, meaning that for much of her first year in office, they — and therefore us at LAist — were operating without a clear picture of how much their interventions were working.

We revealed in late April that council members were not receiving the data reports they had ordered months earlier about the mayor’s signature homeless housing program Inside Safe, which would show exactly where the money is going and how many people have been sheltered. Council members then pressed the mayor’s office for the data, and numbers eventually started being provided to the council about two months later.

Until November, the overall housing numbers reported out by the city were rife with duplicates and other issues. As we investigated each of these issues, we learned that there were two key reasons why:

• The data collection process for some housing programs left room for many errors and missing information, and there wasn’t a system in place to ensure accuracy.
• Data on people entering housing was collected separately by program, so it wasn’t clear how much overlap there was among people moving between programs or cycling in and out.  

Although government officials say they have been working to address both issues, this was the obstacle in front of us all year: Even though we received updates on how many times people were housed, the numbers were likely inflated, and we had no idea by how much.

We also didn’t know how many of those people were still housed, or how many returned to the streets. Nor how this year’s numbers compare to previous years. All this made it impossible to have a clear picture of how progress was or wasn’t being made.

The city has allocated $1.3 billion for this year alone to invest in solutions for the homelessness crisis — a budget Bass called “unprecedented.” The state of emergency she declared as one of her first acts as mayor increased her powers to tackle the crisis.

Getting clear and accurate answers on how many people are being housed is essential to holding the Bass administration accountable on this problem. Government entities are calling out data issues as well. Just last week, the city controller’s office released an audit report showing that the lack of accurate data has prevented people who are unhoused from accessing available shelter and temporary housing.

L.A. City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez also referenced this problem during an August city council meeting about Bass’ signature temporary housing program: “There's a fundamental problem with getting some very basic information here, and it's costing taxpayers millions of dollars.”

Tracking programs, not people's overall path

There actually is a lot of data about how many people are being housed, but it’s tracked by program, making an overall picture of progress challenging to get.

The government funds several programs to place people into temporary and permanent housing: Bass’ Inside Safe program, tiny home villages, family shelters, permanent housing vouchers issued by the federal government, vouchers for veterans, and more. Different agencies track data for certain types of programs — the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) manages data for temporary housing, the Housing Authority of the City of L.A. (HACLA) oversees vouchers, and the city’s Housing Department tracks how many people live in new permanent housing units funded by the city’s Proposition HHH.

Because a person might be a part of more than one homelessness program over time, they might be recorded more than once. And because these agencies don’t have direct access to each other’s data, this leads to duplicates, which can lead to inflated numbers.

At a Dec. 6 press roundtable showing homelessness progress numbers for Bass’ first year, city officials urged reporters not to add up the number of people housed in each program to get a total number of people housed because they had not removed any duplicate records.

The data is set up this way because individual programs are tracked separately.

Tracking the outcomes of programs makes sense — there are a lot of taxpayer funds on the line. Inside Safe alone has a budget of $250 million for just this fiscal year. And the city’s HHH housing program is authorized to borrow up to $1.2 billion, with additional funds for this housing coming from other levels of government. So it’s important to make sure that money is being spent effectively.

Program-oriented data answers questions like:

• How many times did people enter a particular housing program?
• How many times did people leave?
• What do numbers look like at specific shelters?

This can tell you whether services are being utilized and how much it costs, on average, to provide a service, like housing one person in one Inside Safe motel room.

But when the numbers only tell a story about programs and not people, it’s hard to get a sense of what’s happening overall. It prevents government leaders — and the public — from getting answers that measure overall progress, such as:

• How many people moved into housing across all programs this year?
• How many moved from one program to another? 
• How many returned to encampments? 
• How many left for other housing alternatives not provided by the government? 

Bass summed up the problem when she spoke with our radio program AirTalk in November.

“The data is process-oriented — how many people came into housing,” she said. “It’s not outcome oriented, meaning: How many people stayed in housing and what happened to them four to five months down the line? That data is not available.”

The numbers themselves were often inaccurate

In fact, there were many data points we couldn’t get at all — and neither could the City Council for nearly the first half of the year. As we reported in April, the Bass administration said the numbers couldn’t be trusted.

For example, in a July report the Bass administration said that when it looked at the March 2023 numbers for Inside Safe collected by LAHSA and compared it to reports from people running various shelters, they found that only 59% of Inside Safe’s data on people entering the program matched what was in LAHSA’s system.

The accuracy rates were far worse for permanent housing data and program exit data: 4% and 0%, respectively, according to the report.

Although LAHSA collects and maintains data across all the temporary housing programs in L.A., LAHSA officials usually aren’t the people handling the data entry of when someone enters or leaves a shelter or housing program. That responsibility falls to the service providers, usually nonprofits paid by LAHSA to run the shelter or housing under a contract.

According to LAHSA officials, there are about 6,000 people across different service providers who enter data into this system, making it challenging to ensure consistency and accuracy across the board.

When service providers record a new intake — that is, someone entering one of the government housing programs — sometimes the information they have is pretty limited, perhaps just a first name or a physical description, according to Bevin Kuhn, LAHSA’s senior advisor for IT and data management. These incomplete records of individuals are another challenge that leads to duplicates, Kuhn says. LAHSA officials say they constantly work to de-duplicate by merging profiles that have similar information.

Since we launched the Promise Tracker in May, we had been warned there were duplicates, and we flagged this in our earliest updates. It wasn’t until November, six months later, that the Bass administration shared numbers that it said were de-duplicated for temporary housing.

Providing detailed data entry while trying to move people out of encampments and into housing is “a lot for on-the-ground workers, especially if I’m a caseworker and I’m not data savvy,” said Kuhn. “It’s really hard to capture all those data elements perfectly.”

Most shelters don’t have much day-to-day turnover, Kuhn said. But one Inside Safe operation — in which an encampment is cleared and people living there are offered temporary housing — can lead to dozens of new housing placements in one day, making it a lot more challenging to enter data efficiently.

The L.A. Grand Hotel in downtown, one of the sites used as temporary housing for Inside Safe.

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Brian Feinzimer

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LAist

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LAHSA requires service providers to enter data on people entering and exiting shelters within 24 hours, according to the recent city controller audit. But the audit found that “LAHSA does not monitor or enforce their data entry requirements” to make its bed reservation system function properly.

For the Inside Safe motel program, providers also are required to log when unhoused people exit the motel room program, but LAHSA doesn’t enforce this requirement, a LAHSA executive told city council members in August. This means that a lot of service providers skip this step, she said at the time.

That meant the city might have been unknowingly paying for empty motel rooms, nearly eight months after the program had launched, council members were told by the mayor’s staff.

The mayor’s staff say they worked closely with LAHSA to deploy a system to resolve the discrepancies, and that LAHSA started using a revamped tracking methodology in June that improved the accuracy rates. And Kuhn said the agency beefed up their teams on the ground to work alongside providers to verify the accuracy of data.

It took most of this year to put the necessary changes in place and for the data to reach what the Bass administration considered an acceptable rate of accuracy for sharing with the public.

We're finally getting some clarity

Many of the data problems we encountered appear to be longstanding issues that Mayor Bass inherited when she came into office. She’s expressed frustration multiple times over these systems and the quality of the numbers. And she’s said her administration is working to establish new and better data systems, with the help of a new LAHSA CEO, Va Lecia Adams Kellum.

Bass is also taking on more of a direct oversight role at LAHSA — in a way that prior mayors have not — by putting herself on its governing commission. County supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Kathryn Barger have done the same, with Horvath now serving as the commission’s chair.

They’ve already made some changes to address some of these issues. LAHSA and the mayor’s office confirmed that they removed duplicates from their temporary housing numbers. We now know how many individual people moved into temporary housing.

As of Dec. 1, they reported that 21,694 people had moved into temporary housing in the year since Bass came into office in December 2022.

They also reported a 65% retention rate across all temporary housing programs — that is, 65% of the people who entered temporary housing are still housed as of today in either temporary or permanent housing.

But when it comes to the overall picture, we still don’t have reliable numbers.

There could still be double-counting of people who went from temporary housing into a permanent housing program. We don’t know how many people have left permanent housing and fallen back into homelessness. And we don’t know if that 65% retention rate is an improvement over prior years, because we don’t have a retention rate for 2022.

However, officials say more clarity is on the horizon. According to the mayor’s office, LAHSA and the city Housing Authority (which keeps data on permanent housing) have agreed to share more of their data going forward, so that everyone can better understand how many individuals are being housed across all types of housing, not just temporary housing.

What we know today

Here are the current, best-available answers to those simple, foundational questions that we’ve spent all year trying to figure out:

How many unhoused people has the city moved into housing?

At least 21,694 people as of Dec. 1, according to temporary housing numbers from LAHSA and the mayor’s office. Adding people who’ve used vouchers or moved into new permanent housing units, that number could be as much as 11,000 higher — but because there’s likely some overlap with those in temporary housing, we don’t know how much higher it actually is.

How many of those people are staying housed?

A 65% retention rate for 21,694 people suggests that around 14,000 people who moved into temporary housing this year would still be housed. We don’t know what the retention is for people who have moved into permanent housing.

How has this changed from 2022?

The mayor’s office provided these numbers on Dec. 6:

• 21,694 people moved into temporary housing in 2023, up from 16,931 the year before
• 7,717 people moved into housing using vouchers in 2023, up from 5,223 the year before
• 3,551 people moved into new permanent housing units in 2023, up from approximately 1,361 the year before

This suggests increases all around, but because there are still potential duplicates between different types of housing across both years, we still don’t know what the actual change is in the overall number of people housed.

Heading into Year 2 of Bass’s term, here are the questions we’ll be asking:

• How many people are being moved from temporary housing into permanent housing, especially in Inside Safe?
• What is the retention rate and how does it compare to retention for 2023?

Are there other questions we should be asking? Let us know by submitting your question below.

Health officials are advising residents to take precautions after a ruptured pipeline released more than 2,000 gallons of crude oil in East Los Angeles on Friday, with oil entering nearby storm drains and the Los Angeles River.

The pipeline burst near East Cesar E. Chavez and North Eastern avenues as crews were installing a fiber optic line, according to the LA County Fire Department. 

The leak has been controlled and is no longer releasing crude oil in the streets, health officials said.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health issued guidance for residents as agencies continue with cleanup efforts.

Avoid contact: Do not touch or walk through spilled oil or contaminated debris. Keep children and pets away from affected areas.

Skin exposure: If your skin comes into contact with oil, wash the affected area immediately with soap and water. Remove contaminated clothing.

Odor exposure: If you smell odors outdoors, close windows and doors, turn off HVAC systems and air conditioners that pull in outside air and stay indoors until the odor has passed. After the odor outside is gone, open the windows and doors to air out your home and turn on fans or HVAC system to help ventilate indoor air.

Try to limit exposure to strong odors as much as possible. Odors may cause or worsen:

• Headaches
• Nausea
• Eye, nose, throat irritation
• Dizziness
• Breathing problems (asthma)

Brief exposures usually do not cause long-term health effects, but if you experience severe or persistent symptoms, talk to your medical provider. If you don’t have a medical provider, call the Public Health – Community Health Complaint Line at (626) 430-9821.

Indoor air precautions: Local residents should do their best to prevent odors inside their homes by closing windows and doors and turning off HVAC units until the odor outside has dissipated. After the odor outside is gone, ventilate the home by opening windows and doors, and keep the HVAC system blowing air to vent the home. Limit exposure to odors as much as possible.

At-risk individuals: Monitor those most at risk of developing symptoms, such as older adults, children, pregnant persons and those who are immunocompromised.

Report odors: Complaints of odor can be reported to the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD): (800) 288-7664

With the early history of soccer first documented in England, that's where you'll find the roots of the sport. Not always easy to get there from Los Angeles — but a local British pub with a few locations to choose from brings you close.

The operators of Lucky Baldwins Pub joined AirTalk Friday host Austin Cross to explain what makes their atmosphere special — it's all about the sports and traditional British bites, pints and pasties.

About the owner

Owner-operator Peggy Simonian was working for the British Tourist Authority when they decided to bring a pub to Pasadena. Three years after opening, they got their following after hosting their first Belgian Beer Festival.

What sets their food apart? The beer batter

"I think there's this stigma around British food that it's a little bland," said general manager Patsy Sutton.

She says the fish and chips knock people's socks off — and it all comes down to the beer batter.

They use locally sourced Pacific cod instead of its Atlantic relative and an undisclosed pale ale. This combo drives the taste.

Lucky Baldwins' most popular dish is the fish 'n' chips.

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Courtesy Peggy Simonian

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The ultimate experience in the eyes of the owner

 "I like it when it's a nice sunny day outside our patio in Old Towne ... enjoy a nice Belgian beer ... listen to the music and enjoy the California weather," Simonian said.

She added that her go-to beers currently include a Belgian lager, blonde or tripel. It's all about the mood.

Restaurant details

• Lucky Baldwins Pub first opened in 1996 and now has two Pasadena locations and one in Sierra Madre.
• They're an official bar partner with LAFC.
• They host: Pasadena Reds, a local Liverpool FC support group; Los Angeles Hammers, a West Ham FC support group; and Eastside Gooners, a local support group for Arsenal FC.
• They also have special events tied to the Belgian Beer Festival and Oktoberfest.

Menu items we tried

• Fish 'n' Chips — cod dipped in ale batter with a side of steak fries and tartar sauce
• Bangers and Mash — two pork sausages with peas and mashed potatoes (also available with fries).
• Cornish Pastie — a handheld pie with minced meat
• Chicken Curry Pastie — a handheld pie with traditional British chicken curry

What should we try next?

A 2-acre slice of parkland that runs diagonally between 8th Street and 10th Street near Wilson High School is slated to get new trees, landscaping and seating — a project that will complete its transformation from an old railway right-of-way into a welcoming greenspace.

The land was once used by Pacific Electric, whose Red Car trains used to slash diagonally across the area from Wrigley to the Colorado Lagoon. For years, Long Beach has been slowly converting a 9.2-acre stretch of the former railway into parkland between 4th Street and Park Avenue to 11th Street and Loma.

This portion, called the 10th Street Greenbelt, runs between Termino and Grand avenues. It was outfitted with a 900-foot concrete path in 2022. This next phase will add 48 Redbud, Oak, and Sycamore trees, native shrubs, solar lighting, boulder and bench seating, and several granite auxiliary trails that connect the surrounding neighborhoods to the path. There are no plans for restrooms or tables, officials said.

The city of Long Beach provided this rendering of plans for the revamped 10th Street Greenbelt.

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Courtesy the city of Long Beach

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Plans were informed largely by a survey and feedback gathered over the last four years by the Greenbelt Heights Neighborhood Association. Officials say surveys consistently pointed out a need for more seating, native plants and improved drainage in the nearby neighborhoods.

Sharon Turner, the association’s president, said it’s been a 15-year effort that originally inspired the creation of the neighborhood group. For years, the path was “a dumping area of tall grass,” she said. Now, the association is planning to hold meetings at the park.

“It’s been a long haul,” Turner said. “We’ve been really happy with the support, but it definitely started as a local resident push, and we got some support once it got legs.”

Planned for construction in early 2027, it is hoped to be finished by that fall. The project has a $2.58 million budget, mostly funded by a $1.5 million county grant.

Public Works staff are planning to unveil detailed plans at a meeting on May 28, starting at 6:30 p.m. at the Recreation Park Community Center (4900 E. 7th St.) Members of the public are encouraged to ask questions and share their thoughts. Interpretation services in Spanish, Khmer and Tagalog are available upon prior request.

Click here for more updates on the project.

About 40,000 residents in Garden Grove and surrounding Orange County cities on Friday were told to evacuate an area around a tank full of a toxic, flammable chemical that public safety officials say will almost certainly either leak out or explode.

Public officials said they have run out of options for securing the volatile tank after discovering a faulty valve early Friday morning.  

"To everyone still in evacuation areas, please leave immediately," Garden Grove Mayor Stephanie Klopfenstein at a news conference.

Evacuation zone

The evacuation area is between Trask Avenue to the north, Ball Road to the south, Valley View Street to the east and Dale Street to the west. It encompasses parts of Garden Grove, Cypress, Anaheim, Buena Park and Westminster.

Evacuation zone announced Friday.

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Screengrab from city of Garden Grove website.

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Two evacuation centers have been set up:

• Garden Grove Sports and Recreation Center, 13641 Deodara Drive, Garden Grove
•  Cypress Community Center, 5700 Orange Ave., Cypress

How we got here

On Thursday afternoon, vapor began seeping from storage tanks holding an industrial chemical used in plastics manufacturing at aerospace manufacturing facility GNK, which is about a mile north of the 22 Freeway in Garden Grove. Evacuation orders were issued but later lifted after officials thought the situation was under control. But this morning, evacuation orders were reissued and expanded because hazmat teams were unable to secure the largest tank, officials said.

Officials say it's almost certain the tank will either explode or crack and spill out toxins into the surrounding area.

" At some point, this is gonna fail, and we're doing our best to figure out the when or how we can prevent it," Craig Covey, division chief with Orange County Fire Authority, said Friday.

He said the tank contains around 7,000 gallons of a chemical called methyl methacrylate, which is used in manufacturing plastic for the aerospace industry.

Covey said barriers had been placed around the tank to try to contain the chemical in case of a spill and to keep it from getting into storm drains and out to the ocean.

What's in the tank

Methyl methacrylate, known as MMA, is highly flammable and toxic, safety officials said. Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong, Orange County's chief health officer, said the substance can cause skin and eye irritation and respiratory illness. She said there are few case studies of the effects of exposure to the chemical on humans.

"This is where we really need everybody to heed all of the evacuation orders," she said. "We don’t know the long-term consequence."

The company's response

The tanks are owned by GKN Aerospace. In a statement, a spokesperson for the company wrote:

How to stay updated

• Orange County Fire Authority on X or Facebook
• County public information hotline: (714) 628-7085 
• City of Garden Grove, emergency line: (714) 741-5444

LAist reporter Destiny Torres contributed reporting.