Federal judge finds LA failed to create enough shelter for unhoused people as required in agreement

A federal judge issued a blistering ruling Tuesday, finding Los Angeles officials failed in multiple ways to follow a settlement agreement to create more shelter for unhoused people.

Judge David O. Carter also ordered stronger oversight by a court-appointed monitor to “ask the hard questions on behalf of Angelenos,” as well as quarterly hearings to oversee compliance with the city’s commitments to create nearly 13,000 new shelter and housing beds.

“When the system fails, people die,” Carter wrote in his 62-page ruling, which comes as a result of a major, long-running homelessness lawsuit filed by the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, a group of downtown business and property owners.

“Nearly seven unhoused community members die each day in the County of Los Angeles,” the judge continued. “These deaths are preventable and represent a moral failure by all of us.”

The judge stopped short of the most extreme option he was considering: seizing control of the city’s hundreds of millions of dollars in homelessness spending and handing control to a court-appointed receiver.

Carter noted that such a move would be a last resort after a court has given multiple opportunities for the city to comply.

In the statement issued late Tuesday, the City Attorney's Office said the judge had "correctly" decided not to appoint an "unelected and unaccountable" receiver.

"Over the last three years, the City of Los Angeles has successfully moved thousands of Angelenos off the streets, into housing and services," the statement read in part. "Thousands of new housing units have been built, and homelessness is down in LA for the first time in years."

Matthew Umhofer, an attorney for L.A. Alliance, told LAist that the ruling is a win for the people of L.A., especially those experiencing homelessness.

“The court continues to hold the city’s feet to the fire on its failure to comply with the agreement,” he said. “Instead of fighting us and fighting the court on this issue, the city should be coming to the table.”

How the judge says the city breached the agreement

The court found that L.A. breached the settlement agreement with L.A. Alliance in four ways:

• The city did not provide a plan for how it intends to create 12,915 shelter beds, as promised, by June 2027.
• It consistently missed milestones over years for creating those beds. 
• It incorrectly reported encampment reductions and disobeyed the court’s order on those actions.
• The city “flouted” responsibilities by failing to provide accurate, comprehensive data when requested and did not provide evidence to support the numbers it was reporting.

The ruling comes after days of court testimony and thousands of pages of documents submitted to Carter on the issue.

The judge ordered stepped-up reviews by a court monitor to check for compliance with the settlement agreement in the case. The monitor “shall have full access to the data that the City uses to create its reports to the Court” to show compliance with the agreements, according to the ruling.

Carter also ordered the city and L.A. Alliance to attend in-person court hearings each quarter to review compliance, starting in the fall. The hearings will continue for as long as needed to make sure the city honors its commitments under the settlements, Carter ruled.

He wrote that these steps are progress, not punishment.

“The Court wants the City to succeed,” he wrote. “Because when the system fails, people die. And when it works — even slowly — lives are saved.”

Judge finds lack of accountability

Carter had harsh words for what he described as a glaring lack of accountability for how the city spends money on homeless services and housing.

“Unhoused individuals hear about programs and promises" the judge wrote. "They hear that hundreds of millions are being spent, that homelessness is being addressed, that success is being claimed. Yet many still cannot find a bed, a bathroom, or a hot meal.

"Their lived reality does not match the headlines.”

He pointed to the difficulty faced by court-appointed reviewers, and LAist, in getting data from the L.A. Homeless Services Authority — known as LAHSA — about how much was being spent for more than 2,000 housing subsidies the city was taking credit for to show compliance.

“Without accurate data, the public is left to rely on the assurance of public officials who have already presided over repeated reporting failures,” the judge wrote.

“The City’s compliance rests on shaky ground, upheld not by verifiable facts, but by the last-minute declarations of its own officials,” he added. “If the Roadmap Agreement has taught us anything, it is that seeking accountability with the City of Los Angeles is like chasing the wind.”

After LAHSA officials criticized LAist’s reporting of concerns about the data, Carter ordered the city to turn over addresses for each housing site. The city then acknowledged that the data was inflating the true number: 130 subsidies were being wrongfully counted twice.

“The pattern is clear: documentation is withheld until exposure is imminent, public accountability is resisted until judicially mandated, and the truth of reported progress remains clouded by evasive recordkeeping,” Carter wrote in his ruling. “These failures have undermined public trust and judicial trust alike.”

The judge added that the court-enforced agreements in the lawsuit — the L.A. Alliance settlement and an earlier agreement known as the Roadmap — were intended to be a turning point in the homelessness crisis. But there have been major problems with the city’s compliance.

“That neglect carries real consequences, borne most heavily by those with the least, by the people whose lives depend on those promises being fulfilled,” he wrote.

Referring to audits of the city’s homelessness spending, he added: “Taken together, these audits paint a consistent and deeply troubling picture of chronic operational failures in Los Angeles’ approach to homelessness.”

What do city leaders say about the ruling?

LAist has reached out for comment from L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, City Attorney Heidi Feldstein Soto and the chair of the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, Councilmember Nithya Raman.

While emphasizing L.A.'s progress in getting unhoused people off the streets, Feldstein Soto's office also pointed to wording from the U.S. Supreme Court in the Grants Pass case, which overturned some legal protections for unhoused people.

"As the Supreme Court decision last year in the Grants Pass case noted, developing lasting solutions to homelessness is a complex challenge facing cities across the country, and cities need flexibility in determining the best policy approaches," the statement read.

A spokesperson from Raman's office emailed a statement that read: "For the first time, we are seeing substantial reductions in street homelessness and to take power away from the City when it is actually making progress toward the purported goals of this Settlement, would have been a contradiction and potentially a harmful step backwards."

Umhofer said even though the judge did not order a third-party receiver to take over as L.A. Alliance had requested, the monitor would require the city to share more information about how it reports its progress.

That, Umhofer said, is a “very big deal.”

“The city has spent an extraordinary amount of money to try to defend itself, and the court saw right through the city and concluded that it had failed,” he told LAist.

The first quarterly compliance-review hearing is scheduled for Nov. 12.