Glorious Ineptitude in Practice: The LA Homelessness Edition

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A few posts back, I coined the phrase “glorious ineptitude” to describe a dramatic shift in the way we measure institutional success. Back in pre-woke America, institutions used to be judged by their results. If a school, for instance, produced a lot of kids who were competent at math and English, it was a “good” school. If a school produced a lot of kids who were incompetent at math and English, it was a “bad” school.

But at some point in the 80s or 90s, the rise of the woke was complete and they achieved cultural hegemony. The woke now dominate America’s most thought-shaping and culture-shaping companies, non-profits, and bureaucracies—especially in the fields of education, news, and entertainment. The rise of the woke, however, didn’t usher in a rebirth of American excellence. Bad schools in pre-woke America—sticking with the education theme—remained bad schools in post-woke America. Greater centralization and spending combined with less “Euro-centric” standards and curricula didn’t close the achievement gap between black and white students. And rather than question the core tenets of their civic religion—that insufficient government control and white racism are the cause of all of America’s most pressing problems—the woke decided to move the goalposts. Judging institutions on results is so old school…so patriarchal and racist. Nope, according to our woke overlords, the only fair way to judge an institution today is to assess its commitment to “diversity” and “compassion.” If it has few to no white males and embraces woke shibboleths, it’s a smashing success.

Judging LAHSA on Results

Okay, enough of the flowery words (shibboleths? really?) and riveting prose. It’s now time to see how glorious ineptitude works in practice. And to do that, I present one of the main LA institutions tasked with addressing the homeless problem in that city: The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA).

By pre-woke standards, LAHSA is a colossal failure. As the below YouTube clips make abundantly clear, LA is teeming with homelessness:

But let’s not allow video to do all the talking. A decent respect to the opinion of you the reader requires that I declare the ineptitudes that in pre-woke times would have rightly resulted in LAHSA being designated a colossal failure. Here we go.

Inept at mitigating the problem

According to CBS News (see the second YouTube video above), from 2018 to 2020, the number of homeless in LA County rose nearly 26 percent, and the number of homeless in LA proper rose nearly 32 percent.

Call me nuts, but it’s hard for me to associate LAHSA with the word “excellence” when the problem it’s tasked to fix grows dramatically worse in a few short years. Granted, the spike in homelessness may be Covid and lockdown related. But if that were the case, wouldn’t the 2020 homeless count be isolated like the 2022 homeless count? Why were the years 2018 and 2019 included in the date range? Did progressive CBS News want to make LAHSA look bad? And how exactly did the pandemic cause a spike in homelessness when 1) Sacramento instituted a state-wide eviction moratorium, and 2) the federal government spent billions of dollars on stimulus checks and payroll subsidies (i.e., the Paycheck Protection Program) to make sure those suffering lockdown unemployment still had income?

No, I’m not cutting LAHSA any slack. It sucks at fixing homelessness. And a cursory review of the citizen journalism found on YouTube shows that LAHSA’s ineptitude isn’t a recent phenomenon (see here, here, and here).

Inept at finding a scaleable “solution”

One of the main reasons LAHSA is inept at fixing homelessness is that its solution—housing for the homeless that is constructed to middle-class standards and tastes—is entirely unscaleable.

In 2016, Los Angeles voters approved a $1.2 bond referendum to build housing for the homeless. The goal was to build 10,000 apartments in ten years at a cost of $350,000 per studio and one-bedroom unit and $414,000 per two-bedroom unit.

To date, however, less than 1,200 housing units have been built. And the average cost of those units tallied a staggering $596,846.

It’s safe to say that LA won’t be building 10,000 apartments in ten years with the $1.2 billion that the taxpayers graciously gifted it. But let’s suppose LA was able to build 10,000 apartments in ten years. There are 42,000 homeless people in LA, for heaven’s sake! That leaves 32,000 people on the street to continue languishing in misery and filth. Perhaps LAHSA should rethink its solution. A “solution” that can’t scale to solve a problem isn’t a solution.

Inept at assigning culpability

The homeless have absolutely no culpability for their dire circumstances. They’re not homeless because they drank or drugged themselves into unemployability. They’re not homeless because they’re so behaviorally unstable they were abandoned by their families. Nope, the homeless are homeless because greedy businessmen won’t pay “a living wage” and greedy landlords won’t offer “affordable rents.” And let’s not forget those grubby taxpayers. The homeless situation certainly isn’t helped when the typical taxpayer in LA is so selfish and uncaring that he or she refuses to surrender more of his or her paycheck to LAHSA.

Inept at protecting the rights of the non-homeless

The “privileged,” even though they might be no grander than the working class, have no rights when it comes to the homeless. If you’re “privileged” (i.e., you dwell in a house or an apartment), your job is to shut up and count your blessings. Sure, living in a community overrun with tents, graffiti, litter, noise, crime, needles, and human feces sucks. But at least you have a secure climate-controlled place to put the bed that welcomes your weary head every night.

Inept at distributing the chaos and squalor of homelessness fairly

The homeless have a right to commandeer sidewalks and parks and turn those public spaces into shanty towns and open-air drug markets, but only sidewalks and parks in poor or working-class neighborhoods. The homeless have no right to commandeer sidewalks and parks in rich neighborhoods.

Inept at thinking outside the box

There’s only one solution to homelessness according to LAHSA: apartments constructed to middle-class standards and tastes for every homeless person in the county. And it doesn’t matter that this solution is impractical (enough such apartments can’t be built and no apartment, however fashionable, can cure addiction and mental illness). Anyone who thinks differently will never be employed in a leadership position at LAHSA. So rather than re-criminalizing vagrancy, drug possession, and shoplifting and sentencing homeless violators to sobriety camps (i.e., trying something new), we get the same old song and dance. We get $600,000 apartment units—and homeless-fueled chaos and squalor in poor and working-class neighborhoods.

Quick aside: What difference does it make if the tent a homeless person sleeps in is on a sidewalk in the heart of LA or in a lot on the outskirts of town? If I were the Grand Poobah of LA, I’d move the homeless and their tents to lots on the outskirts of town, segregate the homeless by sex and ailment, provide a suitable number of porta-potties and mobile showers to each “camp,” and then allow the healing agencies—whether public or private—to feed the homeless and do whatever they can to rehabilitate the homeless. Would my “solution” work? Probably not. But it wouldn’t make the quality of life for the homeless any worse, and it would greatly improve the quality of life for the non-homeless. Besides, I don’t want to give politically-juiced construction firms and unions $600,000 for each apartment they manage to build. I’d rather give a fraction of that sum to the healing agencies and see what miracles they can perform.

Inept at respecting the taxpayer’s wallet

Colossal failure doesn’t come cheap. LAHSA’s budget is over $800 million a year. And when you see some of the eyebrow-raising salaries of LAHSA’s leadership below, you kind of understand why LAHSA is quite comfortable with ineptitude. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a government agency to fix something when the handsome salaries of its leadership depend upon the government agency not fixing it.”

Inept at embracing accountability

In my mind, a true civil servant welcomes accountability. But I found nothing on LAHSA’s website resembling a measurable goal that, if achieved, would greatly mitigate the homeless problem—whether from the perspective of the homeless or the non-homeless. Instead of something meaty like…

“By 2025, 10,000 homeless people will be living in sobriety camps and each of them will be picking up city litter for at least 30 hours a week”

or

“By 2025, all homeless encampments will be removed from every city street and every city park,”

we get the watery slop of a woke mission statement:

“Our mission [is] to drive the collaborative strategic vision to create solutions for the crisis of homelessness, grounded in compassion, equity, and inclusion.”

Yeah, right. Nothing says “we welcome accountability” more than a government agency hellbent on driving “the collaborative strategic vision to create solutions.”

Judging LAHSA on Diversity and Compassion

Now let’s judge LAHSA on woke terms. Are the leaders of LAHSA predominately non-white males? And are the leaders of LAHSA predominately on Team Blue? I comprised the following chart of LAHSA’s leadership to find out:

Bureaucrat	Position	Salary	Non-White Male	Team Blue
Stephen Simon	Interim Executive Director	$290,075	Yes	Yes. Mr. Simon's CV includes stints at the LA Department on Disability, the Raben Group, and the AIDS Project--all unabashedly progressive organizations.
Kristina Dixon	Chief Financial Officer	$269,723	Yes	Yes. Mrs. Dixon is also a political director for the California Democratic Party.
Molly Rysman	Chief Programs Officer	$190,025	Yes	Yes. In 2019, Mrs. Rysman gave her take on homelessness to a UCLA forum and that take was chock full of woke shibboleths, including the need to end "mass incarceration."
Keshia Douglas	Deputy Chief Talent Officer	$164,052	Yes	Probably. Mrs. Douglas has a degree in criminal justice from Cal State LA and that major from that school is dripping with wokeism.
Jeffrey Samson	Deputy Chief Finance Officer	$170,385	Not sure. Mr. Samson appears white, but he did his undergraduate work in the Philippines and may be Filipino.	Probably. Couldn't find any obvious woke flags on Mr. Samson's LinkedIn page. He did share a Tweet of someone saluting LA's commitment to "diversity," though, in one of his LinkedIn posts.
Emily Vaughn Henry	Deputy Chief Information Officer	$163,655	Yes	Not sure. Mrs. Henry doesn't have any obvious woke flags on her LinkedIn page.
Nathaniel VerGow	Deputy Chief Systems	$184,136	No	Yes. Mr. VerGow's posts on his LinkedIn page pay proper tribute to woke causes such as "right to counsel" for people facing eviction, ending "period poverty" for women, and, of course, "anti-racism."
Emily Andrade	Director of Interim Housing	$151,828	Yes	Yes. Prior to joining LAHSA, Mrs. Andrade was a social worker, and that profession doesn't attract a lot of MAGA people.
Meredith Berkson	Director of Systems & Planning	$156,363	Yes	Yes. Mrs. Berkson has a bachelor's degree in sociology from UC Berkeley. Few MAGA people are graduated from that program and school.
Ahmad Chapman	Director of Communications	$131,120	Yes	Not sure. Couldn't find any woke flags. Mr. Chapman doesn't have a LinkedIn page.
Dr. Holly Henderson	Director of Risk Management	$126,970	Yes	Not sure. Couldn't find any woke flags. Dr. Henderson doesn't have a LinkedIn page.
Brittnee Hill	Director of Access & Engagement	$115,245	Yes	Yes. Anyone getting a bachelor's degree in sociology from UC Riverside and a master's degree in public health from Cal State Long Beach is unlikely to be a MAGA person.
Lucy Lin	Director of Contracts & Procurement	$110,053 Note: I couldn't find the director salary for Contracts & Procurement in the Transparent California database, so I used the highest paid associate director's salary for Contracts & Procurement.	Yes	Yes. Mrs. Lin has a psychology degree from Berkeley and a law degree from the San Diego School of Law. She also uses her LinkedIn posts to pay proper tribute to woke causes.
Ben Phan	Director of Finance	$132,389	Yes	Not sure. Couldn't find any woke flags. Mr. Phan doesn't have a LinkedIn page.
Jeffrey Proctor	Director of Funding & Allocations	$145,150	No	Probably. Mr. Proctor doesn't have any obvious woke flags on his LinkedIn page, but he does have a social sciences degree from San Diego State University.
Ivet Samvelyan	Director of Permanent Housing	$67,320	Yes	Not sure. Couldn't find any woke flags. Mrs. Samvelyan doesn't have a LinkedIn page.
Aamir Shaikh	Director of Information Technology	$181,666	Yes	Not sure. Mr. Shaikh doesn't have any obvious woke flags on his LinkedIn page.
Clifton Trotter	Director of Equity	$116,062	Yes	Yes. This was an easy one. No MAGA person is ever going to get a Director of Equity position.
Amy Williams	Director of Grants Management & Compliance	$129,793	Yes	Not sure. Couldn't find any woke flags.
Ambreen Zaheen-Watson	Director of Human Resources	$34,640	Yes	Yes. Mrs. Zaheen-Watson is a former "Equity and Employee Relations Manager" for the Los Angeles Superior Court. MAGA people don't get hired to positions like that.

Yep, on the diversity front, LAHSA has an outstanding score. At most, only 15 percent of its leadership is in the dreaded white male category. And as far as compassion goes, I don’t see anyone who’s obviously on Team Red and has been infected by the vile MAGA mind virus. So on the compassion front, LAHSA has an outstanding score as well. Combine the two scores and you can only come to one conclusion: LAHSA is a model of excellence. And if you believe otherwise, and aren’t charmed by LAHSA’s commitment to “diversity” and “compassion,” you’re obviously an irredeemable racist and sexist. You just don’t think people of color and women should be in positions of power.

Final Thoughts

Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? Is glorious ineptitude a thing—something our woke overlords use to mollify the typical voter and get him or her to uncritically accept companies, non-profits, and bureaucracies whose colossal impotence is only matched by their colossal appetite for virtue signaling and tax dollars? Or am I just a delusional blogger from the wilds of North Carolina tilting at imaginary villains? Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Peace.