5 key moments leading up to LA homelessness leader’s resignation

The Los Angeles region is at a critical juncture in how it approaches perhaps its thorniest crisis: homelessness.

County elected leaders voted last week to defund the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA, which has been the subject of multiple audits uncovering serious financial and oversight failures.

That agency’s chief executive, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, announced Friday that she would step down after a tumultuous two-year tenure.

Her decision comes at a time when the L.A. City Council is also weighing plans to pull funding from LAHSA. Meanwhile, county leaders are deciding how to spend more than $1 billion per year in expected revenue from a sales tax approved by voters for homeless services and affordable housing production.

Keep up with LAist.

If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less.

Subscribe

How did the region end up losing its top homelessness executive and deciding to forge a different path on efforts to house more than 75,000 people living on the streets and in shelters?

Here are five key events leading up to Adams Kellum’s resignation.

Resignations at LAHSA precede Adams Kellum’s arrival 

When Adams Kellum took the reins at LAHSA in 2023, the agency was not known for stable leadership. Before her term, LAHSA had been overseen by a string of short-lived executives and acting directors.

The last LAHSA chief who lasted more than a couple years was Peter Lynn, who led the agency between 2014 and 2019.

Heidi Marsten took over as executive director in 2020 and stepped down in 2022. In her resignation note, she said she received pushback over her efforts to freeze LAHSA executive compensation in order to give raises to the agency’s lowest-paid workers.

“Leaders at the helm of the homelessness crisis are quick to state they want to end homelessness,” Marston wrote at the time. “But when given the opportunity to create housing security, I have watched those same people refuse to make the sacrifices necessary to effectuate that change.”

Next, LAHSA was led by a pair of acting co-executive directors, Kristina Dixon and Molly Rysman. Following their tenure, Stephen David Simon acted as LAHSA’s interim executive director before Adams Kellum’s arrival.

Late payments to service providers

Multiple audits of LAHSA have identified one recurring problem: frequently delayed payments to the providers who work directly with unhoused people.

Even before the release of the latest round of audits, the issue came to a head last year in a county Board of Supervisors meeting where service providers said LAHSA’s late payments had in some cases forced them to take out private loans in order to make payroll.

John Maceri, CEO of the nonprofit the People Concern, said during the meeting that the late payments had brought his organization and others to “the breaking point.”

Adams Kellum said the long-standing issue predated her time as CEO.

“This issue right here is my primary focus,” she told county supervisors at the time. “I'm losing sleep, as you can imagine. And I should, because this must get addressed.”

County audit finds un-recouped loans and lack of oversight 

In November, the L.A. County auditor-controller’s office released an audit that confirmed LAHSA was indeed routinely paying service providers late. And it found much more than that.

The audit concluded that LAHSA had failed to track whether providers followed the terms of their contracts. It uncovered that the agency had in some cases distributed funds set aside for specific purposes to providers for completely different purposes. The agency also failed to establish repayment agreements with service providers it gave $51 million in advances.

Shortly after the audit came out, Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said she would introduce a motion to redirect county funding away from LAHSA and into a new county department responsible for homelessness response.

“The audit findings make clear the structure we have for service delivery is not working. We need greater accountability and bold action," Horvath said at the time.

Adams Kellum signs $2.1M contract to her husband’s employer

Public officials are generally banned from getting involved in contracts in which they have a financial interest, according to state conflict-of-interest laws. That includes contracts that financially benefit their spouse.

Adams Kellum told LAist late last year that she had disclosed the fact that her husband was employed by a local homeless services provider. She said she had been “completely recused” from contracts involving that provider.

But LAist found through a public records request that Adams Kellum signed a $2.1 million contract to Upward Bound House, the Santa Monica provider where her husband, Edward Kellum, works in a senior role.

A LAHSA spokesperson told us agency employees mistakenly sent the contract to Adams Kellum for her signature. But her failure to designate an alternate signer was criticized by Supervisor Kathryn Barger in a recent Board of Supervisors meeting.

“This is about just plain old sloppy work by [executives at] LAHSA, and quite frankly the executive director who signed it,” Barger said at the time. “If my spouse was working for ABC Corporation and I saw something come across my desk, I would know I shouldn't sign that.”

Adams Kellum tries to save LAHSA’s county funding 

As scrutiny of LAHSA intensified, agency officials made the unusual decision to release early, incomplete data from this year’s homeless count.

In March, Adams Kellum said that preliminary data suggested that when the full results of the 2025 homeless count are released this summer, they would show a 5% to 10% drop in unsheltered homelessness across the county. She said that would build on a 10% drop in the city of L.A.’s unsheltered population the previous year, according to her agency’s count.

But those numbers were not enough to stop elected leaders from moving forward with plans to pull county funds from LAHSA.

When Horvath’s motion came up for a final vote last week, Adams Kellum showed up at the Board of Supervisors meeting to argue against the move. Instead of being welcomed by the board to share her perspective at length, Adams Kellum spoke from the public comment podium like any other county resident lining up to voice their opinion on board votes.

“I made promises — one would be a reduction in unsheltered homelessness, which we’ve seen now two years in a row,” Adams Kellum said. “To enhance transparency, I promised that we would improve our operations, and we have. We’ve implemented 20 new data dashboards that provide unprecedented insight into how our system functions.”

Adams Kellum said she had also made progress on fixing LAHSA’s late payments to providers.

“We’ve made a lot of the changes that you proposed,” Adams Kellum told the board, shortly before her public comment time ran out and her microphone was cut off.

The board ended up voting, 4-0 (with one abstention), to pull nearly $350 million in county funding from LAHSA.

Three days later, Adams Kellum announced her resignation.