The Brief

Around five years ago, when Micah Mumper relocated from New York to Long Beach where he knew no one besides his wife, he found himself, as he puts it, in a funk.

“Depression would be the emotion,” said Mumper, 33, who moved to the area for a job. “It was kind of a dark place — not a very fun place.”

While he had a brother he saw occasionally nearly 40 miles away in Orange County, he and his wife fell into a rough pattern that would last for several years.

They hardly left the house or interacted with anyone besides each other, he said, and generally lacked motivation to do basic things like clean up after themselves.

“We were just sort of going through the motions,” Mumper said. “It would cause friction between us.”

He desperately needed to find community, he added, but couldn’t quite get himself to take the first step.

It wasn't until last year at his brother’s 40th birthday party in Orange County that he noticed his brother had something he was missing: a large group of friends.

And there was a trend: most of them, it seemed, met by playing pickleball. Sure, it feels like everyone — and their literal mother — has embraced the sport as of late. But as it turns out, pickleball would be the catalyst for Mumper to get out of his funk.

The pickleball prescription

His brother’s friends were all quite welcoming and encouraged him to start playing, Mumper recalled. “I thought, OK, I want what they have, why not.”

He found a local league in Long Beach, and forced himself to show up to a pickup game one Wednesday afternoon. It pretty quickly turned things around.

Plckelball players Ryan Benson and Maile Sterling bump each other in support while playing at the Santa Monica Pickleball Center.

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“It gets me out of the house, it gets me around other people," he said. “I'm really hitting my stride and pickleball has been a really big part of that.”

At a time when more and more people say they are experiencing feelings of loneliness — particularly in a huge, fast-moving city like Los Angeles — many like Mumper struggle with feelings of isolation and yearn to make meaningful connections with others.

Through the whacking of a ball that sorta resembles a wiffle ball, hundreds of thousands of people have found fulfilling friendships and an overall sense of community through the sport that’s blown up in recent years.

“Basically 90% of my friends are through pickleball,” said Sona Kim Davis, the marketing director at Santa Monica Pickleball Center. “It’s really crazy, like people really do come together for this sport.”

The power of moving in sync

It’s not just pickleball that can pave the way for community building. Group physical movement in general, like sports leagues and dance classes — particularly in adulthood, when there are less natural opportunities to make friends — offer an especially effective route to make strong connections and soothe feelings of loneliness.

“We have pretty good data to suggest that behavioral synchrony can lead to feelings of higher closeness and trust with the people we're in sync with,” said Jamie Krems, an assistant professor of psychology at UCLA who specializes in human friendship. “That’s particularly the case when you’re in sync in larger groups.”

While most group activities boost one’s sense of belonging, studies show that moving in sync can build even stronger social ties and promote a deeper sense of well-being.

To understand why moving in unison with others promotes closeness, Krems said we must look to our evolutionary past. Doing hard work in coordination together, for example, would have been imperative for survival and protection against outside threats, she said. Moving in sync also creates a similarity in how those within the same group perceive and respond to the world, leading to feelings of closeness and rapport.

“That feeling of rhythm and coordination and synchrony might be one of the best ways to engender these feelings of closeness and pro social behavior,” she said.

Part of it has to do with endorphins, which some researchers have called the “neurochemical glue” of human relationships. Scientists have found that moving in sync triggers the endorphin system, which enhances good feelings, more strongly than the effects of the activity itself.

As for Micah Mumper, finding such an activity flipped his entire world upside down, for the better, he said.

“I feel a hundred percent better than I did before I started playing pickleball,” he added. “I feel not as depressed. I feel a whole different view of my abilities to go out and socialize. It's given me this new confidence.”

Patrons play pickleball at the Santa Monica Pickleball Center.

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Dancing and the 'feel good' hormone

On a recent Thursday night at The Victorian in Santa Monica, dozens of patrons with wristbands filed into an oblong-shaped room with a disco ball hanging from the center of the ceiling, salsa music blasted from the speakers.

Nicole Gil, a dance teacher and founder of Dancer University, walked to the middle of the room, a pop-star microphone strapped around her head.

“We’re gonna make two circles, ladies on the inside, gentlemen on the outside,” she said as those in the crowd, a bit timid, took their places.

Instructor Nicole Gil leads in a salsa class at the The Victorian.

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Each week on Thursdays at The Victorian — and most other nights at various clubs around L.A. — Gil teaches salsa and bachata classes to groups of mostly beginners.

While she’s passionate about these forms of dance for their artistry, she said what’s most special about it is the community that’s corralled around it.

“Everyone's laughing about it together, feeling silly together, out of place and out of their comfort zone,” said Gil, who also met her fiancé through dance. “I think that is something that really helps you connect with people.”

And researchers agree. Studies show that dancing in sync — more so than just dancing alongside others — boosts the production of endorphins and leads to social closeness and bonding.

Patrick Padilla, a 27-year-old engineer who recently moved from Saint Louis to Lawndale, attends class as a way to meet people in a new city.

“I like the energy,” he said. “Getting to meet a bunch of new people outside of work. It's really a great way to stay active and then also meet new faces.”

As a bonus, he said he gets to channel his “inner child.”

“As a little kid I liked getting onto the dance floor and just doing my stuff,” he said. “When I grew up, I'm like, what if I could put a little bit of form to all that energy?”

Dancers participate in a salsa class at the The Victorian.

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While the classes are meant for beginners, many come week after week. Each class starts with a lesson, followed by “social dancing,” or freestyle dancing with a partner (which is the standard format for salsa and bachata classes anywhere).

“I've definitely made friends here,” said Joseph Blakey, who lives in Venice and has attended the class several times. “It’s something that requires a partner, so you're always looking for more people to do it with. People want to talk. People want to hang out with you. There's just something about going out dancing with people. And there's something very welcoming about this space.”

Aside from the social engagement, Blakey said learning a new form of dance is sort of like a meditative practice, helping him to stay present.

“You’re engaged in this activity and you’re just enjoying it, the moment,” he said. “It gets me out of my head.”

Gil emphasized that it's not unusual to come solo — many of the attendees did show up alone. In fact, she recommends it.

“You might actually have a better time, so you can focus on your partner and being musical for the duration of the song,” she said.

And for those who feel daunted by the idea of dancing with or in front of others, Gil urges people to just show up — once — even if you have no intention of dancing.

“You might build it up in your head like ‘Oh I’ve got to look for parking, then I’ve got to walk there and it’s cold,” she said. “But once you do it, once you realize that it really wasn’t that bad, I think that helps you get off the couch. And after that you’ll be hooked.”

The magic of a studio

Through a breezeway lined with a melange of palms and desert plants at Hyperion Arts in Silver Lake, a small, eccentric studio tucked in the back of the building is filling up dancers for Intermediate Ballet.

They're in their 20s, in their 60s, in leotards and classic pink tights, or leg warmers and sweatshirts. They are mostly women (one man). Some were once professional ballet dancers, others have only started dancing here.

There’s a whimsical feel about this room, one of the two studios that make up Studio A Dance. It's old — the building was constructed in the 1920s — and quiet, with stained glass windows and string lights lining the ceiling.

In the middle of one of the busiest enclaves of L.A., it’s like you’re entering a place where time stands still.

“Nothing else matters when we’re in there,” said Cat Moore, who is the director of belonging at the University of Southern California and took ballet classes at Studio A for several years. “It’s just you and your body. And by just being there, the other dancers give you this strength and support in just really powerful ways.”

About 10 years ago, in the middle of a “shocking, terrifying” divorce, Moore said she was barely able to eat, sleep or otherwise function in her day to day life, now a single parent to her young son.

She said she was living in survival mode, and felt like her life was slipping through her fingers.

Then, randomly, she stumbled upon a dance studio on a walk home from her local coffee shop and “felt a pull” to sign up for a ballet class: “The last thing I wanted to do was move or exercise, but I sort of knew if I didn’t take a first step, things would get really, really bad,” she added.

The studio, which has gone through several iterations since it was established 41 years ago, offers a variety of classes for adults and kids throughout the week, from ballet to hip hop to contemporary dance.

Throughout this time and no matter the type of class, the mission behind Studio A, as established by its owner Bill Brown, has remained the same: to be a safe haven for Angelenos to not just dance, but to find happiness, as Brown states in a mini film about the studio.

Moore recalled walking into her first class never having danced ballet before and immediately feeling at ease. She said it was the welcoming atmosphere, and how the other dancers were eager to help her with the basics like how to stand at the barre and encouraged her to follow their footwork.

But she said there was also something about the teacher, Cati Jean: “It was like she just had magic coming out of her, is the only way I can describe it. She just had this presence that is so full of life.”

Jean, who is originally from France and has lived in Silver Lake for 25 years, said that's intentional.

“When you bring this aliveness, this openness, it has a ripple effect,” she said, “And that’s what dance does anyway. The artistry, the physicality, the emotion. It brings you alive.”

Moore said that during this traumatic time in her life, Jean’s classes helped her build strength — physically, of course, but more so emotionally.

“I can say for sure that it’s one of the main things that kept me alive during that time,” she said. “Getting back into your body is one of the most fundamental ways to reconnect to yourself.”

Since the publication of the New York Times best seller The Body Keeps the Score in 2014, the idea that our bodies store emotions and trauma has become somewhat mainstream. Dance therapy and other forms of physical or “somatic” techniques have been established as effective tools to help unlock, process and release these difficult emotions that are stored in the body.

Yet the power of dance classes to create a sense of community is perhaps the most healing part.

“I had just such a profound experience of feeling connected to this group of women, and we were hyper focused on doing these moves,” Moore said. “It gave me something to focus on during the worst period of my life.”

COVID made the effect of the community aspect particularly apparent, when Jean continued to teach classes over Zoom so her dancers could at least work on their technique at home. But it was missing “la magie,” she said in French. The magic.

“We need to feel each other’s energy, in the same room, focused on the same thing, together,” Jean said. “It’s like a nutrient. We can’t live without it.”

A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected the Trump administration’s latest attempt to sideline the L.A. region’s lead homelessness agency from a $239 million federal funding process, clearing the way for the agency to complete an application due next month.

The three-judge Ninth Circuit panel denied the federal government's request for a stay pending appeal, which would have paused a lower court's order blocking its June suspension of LAHSA.

The decision Thursday allows LAHSA to continue to function and steer funding for local service providers who rely on that money to offer services and housing for unhoused people.

“This ruling provides greater stability at an important moment for Los Angeles,” Stephanie Graves, chair of LAHSA’s governing board, said in a statement. “Most importantly, it gives our region the opportunity to keep people housed, help more people find a path home, and give people hope,” her statement continued.

The judges wrote in the latest decision that the federal government failed to adequately explain why an immediate suspension of LAHSA in June was necessary to protect the public interest.

That suspension was put on hold in August by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, who ordered the federal government to restore LAHSA’s role in the region’s federal homelessness funding process while the case plays out.

Carter's injunction on LAHSA’s suspension is currently set to expire on Oct. 27.

The question of whether HUD’s suspension of LAHSA was ultimately lawful is still headed for trial, with a hearing before Carter expected in February.

What’s this fight about?

The legal dispute, at this stage, has focused primarily on who gets to control some key decisions about how $239 million in federal U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grants are spent on housing and services for unhoused people in L.A.

The nationwide deadline to apply for that funding is next week, on Sept. 30, although HUD recently extended the deadline to Oct. 14 for L.A.-area applicants.

HUD’s rules require service providers and public agencies in places like L.A. County to form local geographic bodies called “continuums of care” and designate one agency to apply on behalf of the whole region for federal funds dedicated to solving homelessness.

L.A.’s regional body designated LAHSA as that one agency.

This year, LAHSA staff have been working since April with homeless service providers and other municipal partners to prepare a funding application according to HUD’s guidelines.

Then HUD’s June suspension of LAHSA stymied that process.

The appeals court said the timing of HUD’s suspension left the Los Angeles region in the lurch since the suspension came after a deadline to name another designated applicant had passed.

“HUD chose to suspend LAHSA at a time when it would leave the Los Angeles region particularly vulnerable,” the panel wrote.

Ben Kay works for a homeless services nonprofit and leads L.A.'s Continuum of Care Board. In a statement shared with LAist, Kay said "HUD’s attempts to impose its agenda on our community have created uncertainty and chaos in Los Angeles."

He said the Ninth Circuit ruling recognizes that there is a local legal right to set priorities for addressing homelessness.

Alternatives considered

HUD’s proposed alternative — allowing individual service providers to apply directly for federal funding — was “extremely difficult if not virtually impossible to implement,” the judges wrote.

That approach, according to HUD’s lawyers, would ignore much of LAHSA’s prior decisions about how to spend federal dollars.

“HUD, in the direct to HUD process, will not rely on any priorities set by LAHSA,” Weili Shaw, a U.S. Department of Justice attorney, said at a hearing in the case held Tuesday in San Francisco. “That's expressly what HUD wants, is not to have to rely on LAHSA’s allocation and prioritization decisions.”

Thursday’s court decision means that the direct-to-HUD process is off the table, at least for now.

On Wednesday, a regional homelessness body recommended that, in case LAHSA remained suspended, L.A. County departments could handle the region’s application instead. That body, the L.A. Continuum of Care, is also soliciting applications for organizations to take on LAHSA’s key federal roles beginning next year, including the annual federal funding application and the homeless count.

LAHSA has indicated it will not compete to keep those roles itself next year. Other local government agencies, including L.A. County’s Department of Homeless Services and Housing, have applied to take those roles sometime in 2027.

What LAHSA said in court

At Tuesday's hearing in San Francisco, the panel focused on the fast-approaching deadline.

Keri Curtis Axel, LAHSA's attorney, argued her client is the only entity actually prepared to make that deadline.

She also said dozens of local homeless service providers who rely on LAHSA to apply on their behalf wouldn't qualify to apply under HUD's alternative process, potentially cutting them out of guaranteed funding entirely.

Attorneys for the Los Angeles Continuum of Care, the regional body responsible for coordinating the application said that HUD never gave it a real opportunity to name a replacement for LAHSA for the process happening now.

Attorney Shayla Myers told the panel her client formally asked HUD whether it could designate a new collaborative applicant during a 30-day response window this summer. HUD never responded, she said, instead proceeding with plans for its own direct-to-HUD process.

The fight over LAHSA's suspension took on new urgency since the First Circuit Court of Appeals revived HUD’s controversial funding guidelines last week. That cleared the way for HUD to reopen this year's funding competition on a tight timeline.

Gita O’Neill, LAHSA’s interim CEO, said the agency “is moving full speed to finalize” the L.A. region’s federal funding application, due Oct. 14.

“Our priority has always been keeping frontline services running and ensuring that federal funding reaches our service providers,” O’Neill said in a statement.

LAHSA’s leader also said the agency will work with HUD to make sure that previously approved grant funding is promptly disbursed and will continue to prepare for January’s 2027 homeless count.

HUD has until Dec. 1 to announce this year's awards under a congressional deadline.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said in a statement that it “stands by the lawfulness” of its suspension of LAHSA.

“The Department will comply with the Ninth Circuit's temporary order, which was made in part due to the quickly approaching deadline for CoC applications,” a department spokesperson said.

“HUD looks forward to seeing the Ninth Circuit's full resolution on the merits,” the statement continued.

A status conference in the original case — which will ultimately decide whether HUD’s suspension of LAHSA was legal — is currently scheduled for Sept. 30 in Judge Carter’s courtroom.

The Ninth Circuit is scheduled to hear oral arguments Oct. 19 on HUD's appeal of the preliminary injunction. The appeals court Thursday declined to pause the injunction while the case moves ahead, keeping it in effect. But the October hearing is where the judges will decide whether to uphold or overturn it.

If you're a fan of Indian food, there's a good chance you head to places like Artesia or Orange County when the craving strikes.

But there's a growing destination for Desi food you may not have heard of: Downtown Los Angeles.

Several Indian chefs have put down roots there in the past few years, and are doing their best to convince Angelenos there's more to the cuisine than the standard takeout or lunch buffet offerings.

Drawing on both street food tradition and a new confident creativity, they're producing dishes that arguably belong in a fine dining category.

Brick Lane

Take Brick Lane, a new Indian restaurant on the outskirts of the Arts District, near the 6th Street bridge, which opened earlier this year. The server arrives with a steaming plate holding what appears to be a large pie. The golden crust is topped with black sesame seeds; the server places it on the table and immediately begins carving a circle around its edges. Steam rises, and a rush of aromas and spices fills the air.

But it isn’t a pie; it’s dum biryani, a layered mixed-rice dish featuring marinated wild mushrooms, sealed and slow-baked, topped with a crispy puffed naan crust.

Executive Chef Sanjay Rawat at Brick Lane uses modern cooking techniques to execute beloved Indian flavors.

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It’s the kind of dish that Sanjay Rawat, the executive chef, wants to showcase on his new restaurant menu. Originally from New Delhi, he left at 17 to train as a chef in Malaysia. Before opening Brick Lane, he ran Kahani at The Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel. In his Arts District space, Rawat is using a variety of techniques he’s picked up during his tenure, such as using his Santa Maria grill to prepare Malaysian-Indian branzino and offering his delicate take on dessert: Valencia-orange-cardamom tarts.

Cali Chilli

Tandoori Chicken Wings from Cali Chilli's downtown L.A. location.

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At Cali Chilli, on the border of Little Tokyo and downtown, owner Parveen Nair and Michelin-starred chef-collaborator Manjunath Mural have carved out their own path. They opened their Long Beach location in 2022, and their DTLA location in 2024. Mural also leads Song of India in Singapore, which has held a Michelin star since 2015. The pair experiment with their menu, which they dub "unauthentic Indian" — a series of dishes rooted in traditional Indian cuisine and expanded through the lens of a street-food narrative. Think nachos and quesadillas made with tandoori chicken alongside butter lobster in a Thai panang curry.

Baar Baar

Baar Baar's tasting menu begins with pani puris, a popular Indian street snack made with tamarind, mango, yogurt mousse, and raspberry chat masala.

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Further west, a short walk from Crypto.com Arena, is Baar Baar, which has been open since 2023. Executive chef Sujan Sarkar’s restaurant portfolio spans the U.S., including a sister Baar Baar location in New York, Tiya, a restaurant in San Francisco, and Indienne in Chicago, which holds a Michelin star. Sarkar has built a career pushing the boundaries of contemporary Indian cuisine. Diners can take advantage of their $55 prix-fixe menu, including a dahi puri canapé (tamarind, yogurt mousse, raspberry chaat masala), Cauliflower 65 (a riff on Chicken 65, with carrot pachadi, peanut chutney, thecha) and beef short ribs in Madras curry.

Why DTLA

Speaking with Nair and Rawat, I found that each chef saw an opportunity in downtown’s changing character: a steady flow of travelers for Nair and a growing, still-forming community for Rawat.

“In downtown, we get 60% travelers and say about 40% ... from the neighborhood," said Nair.

He says the area’s possibilities sparked Cali Chilli's innovative approach: "There was a vacuum ... the idea [of the restaurants] was conceived pretty much at the same time."

A look inside chef Sanjay Rawat's open kitchen at Brick Lane in the Arts District.

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Meanwhile when Rawat first visited the future site of Brick Lane, near the 6th Street bridge, he wasn’t sure exactly where he was. “Looking from the outside, it made me think, where am I going?”

But when he entered the space, he knew he’d found the right place. With high ceilings and surrounded by large windows, the interior is filled with natural light.

“It's such a beautiful space. Whatever food you put into this space, it's just gonna shine.”

Just a ten-minute walk from Crypto Area, Baar Baar offers modern Indian cuisine with a unique twist.

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He also appreciates the location, too. “Arts District is a beautiful community, which is growing. ... Plus, it's a destination too,” he said.

Still, the chefs understand they have their work cut out for them to make their menus seen as high-end dining, beyond the traditional form Indian food has taken till now.

It’s going to take Indian cuisine in L.A. time to continue to modernize, Rawat said, to a point “where it is acceptable by other cultural groups or even by Indian people.”

The Legislature is forcing the city and county of Sacramento to try something unusual in their fight against homelessness, and both critics and supporters of the controversial plan say it could have broad implications for the rest of the state.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 802 on Sunday, which requires Sacramento, as well as all smaller cities within the county, to coordinate and form a joint powers authority that will lead the region’s homelessness response.

“Homelessness does not stop at jurisdictional boundaries,” Newsom wrote in a signing message, “and no city or county can solve this crisis alone.”

A joint powers authority is a public partnership where two or more local governments or agencies team up to jointly manage something. In Sacramento, the idea is that this new framework will allow the cities and county to better communicate and work together on homelessness – hopefully leading to more people getting off the streets.

Supporters say it’s a no-brainer, and they hope it will be an example to fix an age-old problem playing out in regions across the state: Cities and counties must work well together to effectively address homelessness, but they often don’t. On the other hand, opponents say forcing local governments to work together sets a bad precedent: Cooperation works best if it’s voluntary.

Meanwhile, this new experiment in co-governance is highly atypical for a number of reasons.

For one thing, this appears to be the first time the California Legislature has forced anyone to form a joint powers authority. Typically, those agreements are voluntary. In Sacramento, local jurisdictions chafing under this new mandate worry the new law will embolden the Legislature to do this again in other regions.

“This would be unprecedented, so it could have ramifications in 57 other counties,” said Sacramento County Supervisor Patrick Kennedy, who opposes the legislation. The county is threatening to sue the state to stop its implementation.

In addition, while it’s not uncommon for local governments to form joint powers authorities to manage other things that cross city boundaries — such as sewers or public transit — it’s very rare for this type of structure to govern a region’s homelessness response. In 2020, there were only three examples in all of California, according to Joe Colletti, chief executive officer of the nonprofit research organization HUB for Urban Initiatives. The most well-known is the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which recently has been reduced to a shell of its former self as a result of one headline-making crisis after another. In the rest of the state, a region’s homelessness response usually is led by a county or nonprofit.

Squabbling between cities and counties

This legislation was controversial from the beginning. It took Sen. Angelique Ashby, a Democrat from Sacramento and former city councilmember, two years of tense negotiations and multiple amendments to get it across the finish line. The final version allows the county and participating cities to keep control of their own funds, rather than pooling everything together — a major sticking point for the local governments.

The Sacramento region needed this legislation, Ashby argued during a recent committee hearing, because its various agencies have eight boards and nearly 90 board members working separately on homelessness without coordinating. The result is duplicated and inconsistent services, leaving people who are homeless in Sacramento County with no idea where they should go for help, she said.

It’s a problem the city and county have tried to fix for more than two decades. In 2010, the county board of supervisors and city council approved resolutions that supported creating a joint powers authority, but it didn’t happen. Two separate grand jury reports, one in 2019 and another in 2023, said the region’s homelessness response was dysfunctional and recommended better coordination.

It’s hardly an issue unique to Sacramento. Across California, cities typically provide shelter beds, while counties are responsible for the other services homeless residents need, such as mental health and addiction treatment. That’s because counties receive state funding for social services, and cities don’t. So, neither can effectively address homelessness unless they work together. But, frequently, they don’t. Instead, they often squabble over who should pay for what, and who isn’t doing their fair share.

Fighting between neighboring cities is common, too. As unhoused people move across city lines, local governments argue over who should have to provide shelter beds and other resources.

It was a major frustration for former Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg. His constituents saw people on the street in mental health crisis, suffering. Voters demanded he do something, but his hands were largely tied, he said, as he had no control over the county’s mental health services.

“There was just a major gulf between my accountability to the people and my authority to be able to actually make the difference that the people expected,” Steinberg said.

During his time in office, which ended in 2024, Steinberg negotiated a partnership between the city and the county. But it lacked a governance structure that would have forced them to make decisions together. That’s the missing piece that this law brings to the table, he said.

Under the new law, the city and county of Sacramento, as well as Elk Grove, Rancho Cordova, Citrus Heights and Folsom, have until January 2028 to finalize their joint powers authority. They recently convened a joint task force of elected officials, and have started working together on homelessness issues.

But there’s some lingering tension. While the city of Sacramento is on board with the legislation, the county and the city of Folsom are opposed. Neither is against the idea of collaboration, but they don’t like that it’s being forced upon them.

“It’s an unnecessary cost,” county Supervisor Kennedy said. “It’s an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy, it's an unnecessary burden that’s just going to slow down processes.”

Staffing and running the new joint powers authority is expected to have an annual price tag of anywhere between the mid-hundreds of thousands of dollars, to the low millions, according to a Senate analysis.

Examples in Los Angeles and Solano counties

As the Sacramento region gears up to create this new power structure, it has two main examples it can turn to.

One, in Los Angeles, is a cautionary tale. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a joint powers authority between the city and county, was the target of recent audits criticizing its handling of homelessness funds. A downward spiral followed. LA County pulled its funding from the authority and the Trump administration now is prosecuting homeless services providers that it alleges misused money from the agency.

Kennedy said the parallels between LA and Sacramento’s new agency worry him “very much,” and clearly show that a joint powers authority is hardly a panacea for homelessness.

But Steinberg believes the new Sacramento agency can do better. The LA agency didn’t have enough authority, and as a result, the city and county weren’t governing effectively together, he said. He hopes that will be different in Sacramento.

The other example Sacramento leaders can turn to is in Solano County, which created the current version of its joint powers authority in 2022. Local leaders pushed for a collaborative agency after hearing reports that other cities were dropping off their homeless residents at parking lots in Fairfield, assuming that services would be available because it’s the county seat, said Doriss Panduro, a Fairfield city councilmember and chair of the joint powers authority.

Now, the authority is made up of two elected officials from each city and the county, and they meet once a month to discuss how to spend money and how many people are receiving services.

“It is a big undertaking,” Panduro said. “We started the work in 2021, 2022, and here we are four years later just getting paid staff on board. It’s been a big lift.”

But, she said, it’s been worth it.

Recently, the county and all the cities involved in the joint powers authority applied together for state funding to clear one encampment along a flood control basin in Vallejo. Even though Vallejo would be the only city to get that money, it arguably would benefit everyone since it targets the largest encampment in the county, Panduro said. And Vallejo wouldn’t have had the resources to manage the state grant without the support of everyone else, she said.

“Homelessness is such a big issue, and I think finding an out-of-the-box way to approach it, for me, I can only say it’s a positive,” she said. “Everyone felt like we had been doing the same things over and over and nothing was changing.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.