The city and county are battling over LA’s homelessness response. Here’s how you can weigh in

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is losing control of responsibilities tied to about $239 million in federal taxpayer funds as the Trump administration continues a push to strip power from the joint city-county agency. Now, Los Angeles and L.A. County are competing for control of some of those federal roles.

A key vote scheduled for Monday could help chart the future of the region’s response to its homelessness crisis.

And it’s happening in a unique format. Anyone, including you, can join and likely cast a vote.

Here’s what to know about what’s happening and how to get involved.

How we got here 

A regional planning group called the L.A. Continuum of Care voted earlier this month to designate L.A. County to take over at least two federal roles currently managed by the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, known as LAHSA — running the homeless count and managing the region’s federal funding application.

The city and county have been competing for two other federal responsibilities currently held by LAHSA — managing a database that tracks unhoused people receiving public services and administering a system used to match people who need help with housing and shelter.

The local process to select LAHSA’s replacements began after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development suspended the embattled agency from these federal roles in June, citing financial mismanagement.

Independent reviewers scored the county’s applications higher than the city’s. On Oct. 6, the L.A. Continuum of Care’s 21-member board voted to recommend L.A. County for all four roles.

The following week, the L.A. City Council instructed its attorneys to explore potential legal challenges to the L.A. Continuum of Care’s selection process while negotiating with L.A. County for shared control of these responsibilities.

This week, city officials said those negotiations paid off. On Friday, the City Council voted 10-0 to support a tentative agreement with the county on the two remaining federal roles.

How to participate

The L.A. Continuum of Care’s general membership meeting is scheduled Monday at 3 p.m. The group will vote on whether to approve designating L.A. County for the two federal roles still up for grabs: managing the unhoused database and the housing matching system.

You can attend in person or online via Zoom, and anyone who attends might be eligible to vote.

The L.A. Continuum of Care is a regional planning group required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that chooses which agencies handle the region’s federal homelessness responsibilities. It’s a nebulous body without a fixed roster. It technically includes all “persons and entities interested in collaborative, solution oriented planning to address homelessness in L.A. County (with the exception of Glendale, Long Beach, and Pasadena)," according to its charter. Anyone who fits that description is allowed to vote.

Because L.A. County is the only candidate under consideration in the vote, county officials encouraged county employees not to vote to avoid potential conflicts of interest, according to an email from the county’s homelessness department.

Attend in-person at 637 Wilshire Boulevard, 1st Floor Commission Room, Los Angeles, CA 90017

Register to attend online here.

Worth noting: These are yes-or-no votes. If L.A. County is not approved, no decisions will be made.

How might this change things?

Since 2020, the homeless population has increased by nearly 10% in both the city of L.A. and across L.A. County, according to the official homeless counts.

The region’s homelessness budgets swelled over that same period, with hundreds of millions more spent on shelter beds, housing and services for unhoused Angelenos. Much of that money was available because of local voters who in recent years approved several sales taxes and other measures to fund homeless services.

The decisions getting voted on by L.A. Continuum of Care determine who runs the systems that track and direct that money and who answers to the public when results fall short.

After Monday’s vote, the L.A. Continuum of Care’s selections will go to a federal judge for review on Tuesday. The court will then largely determine when and how the transition away from LAHSA happens in the coming months.

It’s unclear how the shift in control will impact homeless services on the ground. LAHSA leaders and employees have warned that transferring these responsibilities is complex and could take up to a year.

A bitter fight over the best path forward played out ahead of the vote.

L.A. city officials, including Mayor Karen Bass, said they want collaborative governance, and argued giving the county sole authority over federal responsibilities would hurt city residents.

“The City of Los Angeles provides the overwhelming majority of housing for the region,” Bass and several city council members said in a statement earlier this month. “The City must be able to help the people on our own streets by placing them into the housing that we build and fund in order to solve the homelessness crisis,” the statement continued.

This month, Bass and a group of L.A. City Council members sent a letter to the L.A. Continuum of Care, arguing that the city’s applications should have scored higher, and urging more support for the city’s bid.

Leaders of the L.A. County Department of Homeless Services and Housing said the county applied for all four functions because it’s best positioned to represent and collaborate with the region's 85 cities and hundreds of service providers.

Ben Kay, chair of the L.A. Continuum of Care board, wrote to the mayor, City Council and county supervisors on Oct. 14 that the dispute had shifted from “a united front against federal encroachment to splintered infighting.” Kay warned that it could squander the chance to keep local control of these systems and head off further federal involvement. He defended the scoring and selection, saying the board “stands firmly behind the integrity of that process.”

The L.A. City Council held a special meeting on Oct. 14 to discuss the city’s next steps. City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo laid out some options: negotiating with L.A. County for co-leadership of federal roles, separating from L.A. County and forming a city-only continuum of care or potentially filing a lawsuit challenging the whole court-ordered selection process.

After a closed-session discussion, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson announced the council was formally requesting that the L.A. City Attorney’s Office “develop options for litigation to protect the city and to protect our constituents, both housed and homeless.”

The council also asked the city administrative officer to keep negotiating with the county.

Those talks produced a tentative agreement, which the council voted to support on Friday.

It covers the two federal roles still up for a vote Monday. If the county is picked to run both, the agreement would give the city a bigger role in each.

For the database, city staff would keep their current access. The city would also get all data in the system on unhoused people within city limits, including those enrolled in county-funded programs, according to the agreement.

Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who chairs the council’s homelessness and health committee, said the city would get the raw data behind the system so it can build its own reports and dashboards. “That’s something we’ve never had,” she said.

For the matching system, the city funds the vast majority of permanent supportive housing in the city, but it doesn’t currently manage matching for any of those units, Szabo said. LAHSA does. Under the agreement, the county would contract with the city to do that matching in buildings funded by the city or its housing authority.

“We’re going from nothing to something, and something substantial,” Jurado said.

The deal isn’t final. Its terms still have to be turned into binding agreements approved by both the City Council and the county Board of Supervisors, according to a report from Szabo’s office.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development told the court in an Oct. 20 filing that L.A. County’s homelessness department is an acceptable applicant and that it “prefers” the county over the city.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter’s court order requires the L.A. Continuum of Care to make its selections by Tuesday. Then, these complex federal responsibilities, supported by scores of LAHSA staff, have to move away from LAHSA on a timeline that will be set by the federal court.

LAHSA workers represented by union SEIU Local 721 have urged both the city and county to protect their jobs during that transition. They argue competent and experienced employees shouldn’t be sidelined because of leadership’s failures.

“We have spent years building relationships, learning these systems, and helping people move from homelessness into housing,” said Heather Varden, a LAHSA employee who posted an open letter from the union. “That experience should not be thrown away because the name at the top of the contract changes.”

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA, is losing its federal responsibilities.

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How to understand the context 

City and county officials created the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA, in 1993 as a joint powers authority between the two overlapping jurisdictions. Both the city and county appointed members to LAHSA’s governing commission and relied on the agency to manage public homelessness dollars for the region.

The federal roles were delegated to LAHSA by the L.A. Continuum of Care, an obscure but newly powerful planning group that HUD requires regions across the country to maintain if they want federal money.

Since late 2024, LAHSA has faced a string of critical audits and other scandals, putting its management of L.A.’s growing homelessness crisis under scrutiny.

L.A. County’s Board of Supervisors voted last year to divert more than $300 million in county homelessness funding from LAHSA and manage the funds itself. The county's new Department of Homeless Services and Housing took control of those funds in July.

On June 11, HUD suspended LAHSA from federal programs, citing alleged failures in financial management, internal controls, grant oversight and conflict-of-interest policies.

The move, according to the Trump administration, meant LAHSA wasn’t able to do the jobs the continuum of care had delegated to it, including applying for $239 million in federal funds on the region’s behalf.

The federal housing department said that with LAHSA suspended, it intended to have L.A. service providers apply directly to HUD for the funds — a move that would have ignored regional priorities.

LAHSA sued. In August, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter issued a preliminary injunction on LAHSA’s suspension through Oct. 27.

This allowed LAHSA to submit the region’s collaborative application for federal funds by an Oct. 14 deadline. (The agency has since provided notice that it has submitted the application on time.)

Carter also ordered the L.A. Continuum of Care to start taking applications to consider replacing LAHSA as soon as possible. The group hired consultants and ran an application process over about a month, beginning on Sept. 11. LAHSA leadership decided the agency would not compete in it.

L.A. County applied for all four federal roles and was the only applicant considered for two of them. The city applied for and competed against the county for the other two.

A panel of reviewers (whose identities were kept private) scored written applications and interview responses for each of the federal roles up for grabs. L.A. County’s pitch to operate a key database, known as HMIS, used to track service participants through the system earned a score of about 87 out of 100, compared to the city’s score of about 82. On Oct. 6, a committee focused on the database voted 8-0 in favor of the county’s application. Later that day, the board voted 10-4 to pick L.A. County for that role.

The county scored about 91 on its application to manage the system that matches unhoused people with available shelter and other resources — known as the Coordinated Entry System or CES — compared to the city’s score of about 73. The board voted 12-1 to select the county to run CES.

A 21-member board speaks for the L.A. Continuum of Care and guides decision-making. That board voted Oct. 6 to recommend L.A. County for all four federal roles currently held by LAHSA. Bass and several city council members had been urging people to attend the upcoming meeting and vote against the L.A. Continuum of Care board’s recommendations and in favor of the city.

Reba Stevens, a community advocate who serves on the 21-member L.A. Continuum of Care board, reviews materials in October 2026.

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How does the Continuum of Care operate?

Communities like L.A. must form and operate a “continuum of care” if they want federal homelessness money. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, introduced the model in 1994 to promote communitywide collaboration toward ending homelessness. Congress wrote it into law in the 2009 HEARTH Act.

The L.A. Continuum of Care is the largest in the U.S. — covering all of L.A. County, except Long Beach, Pasadena and Glendale, which each run their own.

It isn't a government agency with its own staff. It’s a group of service providers, city and county agencies, housing authorities, advocates and people who have experienced homelessness. Known as the L.A. CoC, it operates under a governing charter.

Federal rules require the L.A. Continuum of Care to apply for HUD funding each year, decide which local projects receive it and oversee how the money is spent and how programs perform. The group must delegate who operates a shared database, runs a system for matching people to housing, applies for federal funding and counts the region’s homeless population.

Because it has no staff of its own, the Continuum of Care delegated those jobs to “lead agencies.” Until now, the group had chosen the city and county’s shared homelessness agency, LAHSA, to perform all four of those federal functions:

• Federal funding (Collaborative Applicant): submits the region’s annual funding application to HUD.
• Homeless Count (Point-in-Time count administrator): conducts the annual unhoused population census that shapes funding and policy.
• Homeless Database (HMIS Lead): runs the database where homeless service providers track who they serve and what housing and services those people receive. In Los Angeles, about 400 agencies feed into a system holding about 175,000 active participant profiles.
• Housing matching (CES Lead): manages the system that assesses people and matches them to shelter and housing. That system runs on the HMIS database. 

Sarah Mahin, director of the L.A. County Department of Homeless Services and Housing, made the county's case to the L.A. Continuum of Care board at meeting in October 2026.

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Canceled meeting stirs controversy

On Oct. 9, the Continuum of Care’s general membership held a meeting to formally designate the county to fill the administrative roles. Because that general membership is broad, the vote was likely to be decided based on turnout.

The day prior, the L.A. mayor’s office sent text messages to “thousands of community members,” according to that office, urging them to attend the meeting and vote against the Continuum of Care Board’s recommendations and in favor of the city.

County agencies also sent out notices about the vote, including a warning to county employees not to participate because of conflict-of-interest concerns.

More than 1,000 people attempted to attend the meeting online, exceeding the Zoom call’s capacity, according to organizers. The meeting was immediately adjourned by organizers, who told attendees they had to stop the meeting to avoid violating California’s open meeting law.

Katie Hill, CEO at Union Station Homeless Services in Pasadena, called the L.A. mayor's office’s efforts to stack the meeting with voters “outrageous” in an interview with LAist.

“There’s a process that everyone has agreed on that is fair and represents our collective best interests,” Hill told LAist. “We were supposed to ratify it in the same way that Congress ratifies electoral votes. And then all of the sudden they said they didn't like the outcome, and now they want people to not ratify it.”

Some city officials defended the mayor’s push to involve the public. Councilmember Tim McOsker said the board’s recommendations are “not a rubber stamp.”

“The [Continuum of Care] has a responsibility to scrutinize the recommendations, evaluate the scores, and exercise its own judgment rather than blindly accepting them,” McOsker said in a statement. “Public meetings should be attended by the public,” McOsker’s statement continued.

Hill’s organization has several contracts with L.A. County and just one with the city of L.A., she said. Hill previously served on LAHSA’s governing body as an L.A. County appointee.

While Hill thinks the county is better suited to run the system, some homeless services providers are staying neutral.

“We did not mobilize participants for Friday’s meeting,” Jerry Jones, executive director of the Greater L.A. Coalition on Homelessness, a network of more than 60 service providers, told LAist. “The best path forward is for both groups of elected officials to work together.”

“Regardless [of] who the [Continuum of Care] lead is, there are 20,000 people being served — we need to keep that funding,” Ivet Samvelyan, vice president of Hope The Mission, told LAist.

After the capacity issues, the Continuum of Care upgraded its Zoom account and now has capacity for 10,000 people for Monday’s meeting, according to a report the group submitted to the court on Oct. 13.

The group must make its final selections by Oct. 27, the same day the preliminary injunction is set to expire.