LA County Is Now On The Hook For Adding 3,000 Mental Health Beds for Unhoused People After Judge Approves Major Settlement

Mental health and addiction treatment often are in short supply for unhoused people in L.A. But a major new lawsuit settlement is expected to change that in the coming years.

With a federal judge’s final sign-off on Thursday, L.A. County is now on the hook for adding 3,000 mental health treatment beds by the end of 2026 — 10 times as much as the county offered a year ago to try to end one of L.A.’s biggest homelessness lawsuits filed by a group of downtown business owners known as the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights.

The county bumped up their offer after Judge David O. Carter twice rejected earlier settlement proposals as not being enough.

The new beds won’t end homelessness, but people on all sides say it’s a major step to make crucial treatment more accessible.

The first 600 beds must be up and running by the end of this year, with hundreds more added in each of the following three years until 3,000 are reached by the end of 2026.

“Is 3,000 beds enough? Of course it’s not. But I believe that this is a solid proposal,” said Janice Hahn, chair of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors who pressed her colleagues to approve the deal.

She’s the top elected official overseeing the sprawling county government that serves the region’s main safety net for mental health and drug treatment, among other duties.

“We will make this happen,” she added during a Thursday hearing on the deal. “We are all-in as the county to try to address the seriousness of homelessness.”

The judge had warned county officials that their emails and texts about homelessness would get turned over to the plaintiffs’ lawyers if they didn’t settle the case in a way that satisfied him.

There remain questions about what exact treatment services would be offered, and how many of the beds would serve unhoused people in the city of L.A. versus other parts of the county. And all sides of the case acknowledged it doesn’t create the affordable housing that’s needed to end people’s homelessness.

But the deal is credited as major progress in making needed treatment available.

“I think it’s a great step forward,” L.A. Mayor Karen Bass told LAist in an interview after the settlement hearing.

“Three hundred beds was woefully inadequate,” Bass said of the county’s original settlement deal. “People are dying on the streets.”

Bass had pushed to add another zero to that number after Carter pointed to a 2019 county report that found 3,000 new mental health beds were needed.

Last year, the case resulted in a city settlement that promised 13,000 new shelter and housing beds in the coming years, though many of those beds were already planned.

Matthew Umhofer, a lead attorney for the alliance, said the lawsuit has helped bring the county and city together to collaborate on solutions — as well as a court-enforceable promise to add a lot more services.

“This lawsuit has brought accountability to the issue of homelessness that there just hasn't been for a very long time,” he told LAist. “We're pleased with the outcome, we're pleased with the agreement. We appreciate what the county has done to make this possible and what the judge has done to make this happen.”

Attorney Shayla Myers noted during the hearing that she and other lawyers representing unhoused people were shut out of the settlement negotiations. She praised the deal for its extra services, but said it lacks permanent housing for people to go to after treatment.

“The reality is these types of interim beds will not solve homelessness,” she told LAist after the hearing. “If there's no place for folks who are coming out of those beds to go, they'll wind up back on the street.”

Hahn agreed.

“Absolutely — those who advocated for housing today were 100% right,” she told LAist.

“Clearly, long term, we need to provide permanent supportive housing,” she also said, adding that more housing is starting to be built.

“We need to give people their own place to live, with services. And then maybe long term, they will be ready to have their own places, without services,” she said.

Carter pushed for strong court oversight to make sure the settlement is followed — and ended up getting what he wanted.

In an earlier settlement offer in April — which Carter rejected — county officials wanted to submit quarterly reports to Carter about their progress, without the judge appointing a monitor to proactively examine whether the deal was being followed through on.

But Carter said that wouldn’t cut it, and pressed the county to allow a court-appointed “special master” who would report to the judge.

County officials agreed to have a retired federal magistrate judge, Jay C. Gandhi, serve in that role. But Carter pressed them Thursday to also agree to his special master on the city settlement, former Santa Ana Councilwoman Michele Martinez.

Carter said he wouldn’t sign the settlement unless she was included. County officials ultimately agreed to it.

At Thursday’s hearing, Carter also brought up that L.A. County officials plan to ask taxpayers for more money to address homelessness — a “re-up” of the Measure H tax increase that voters approved in 2017.

The county has a problem of not providing a detailed accounting for where much of its homelessness spending has gone, the judge said. That amount could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, he added.

“Going forward the public has to have faith that you as the Board [of Supervisors] and you [as] the city have the underlying documentation” on homelessness spending, Carter said, adding that right now that doesn’t happen.

“You need — and the taxpayers need — a full and transparent accounting of these monies.”