Talk about your ivory tower.
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority –– LA’s central homelessness agency –– has headquarters in the AON Center on Wilshire Boulevard, The California Post revealed this week.
Among the tower’s features: helicopter rides to LAX, Maybach car service, and a luxe gym with an infrared sauna and cold plunge.
Wow. So while LAHSA’s homeless “clients” languish in squalid tents, the agency’s brass luxuriate in a skyscraper that caters to the ultra-rich.
Perhaps they figured no one would care. How entitled; how shameless; how arrogant.
What’s more, we don’t yet know how many taxpayer dollars have been squandered on this unseemly indulgence: LAHSA so far won’t say, and The Post has filed a Public Records Act request to get answers.
Clearly, this is absurd to the point of farce.
Karen Bass, Nithya Raman & Co. need to stop shoveling money to agencies and nonprofits that prioritize their own leaders’ perks over reducing homelessness –– and start holding these groups to account for abusing taxpayers.
It’s not like the latest abuse is a one-off.
There’s Carol Adelkoff, the CEO of 1736 Family Crisis Center in LA, who collected more than $1.6 million in pay over the past two years … from the comfort of Hawaii.
There’s Albert Senella, CEO of Tarzana Treatment Centers, who collected $2.36 million in salary last year and calls home a palatial $3.7 million, six-bedroom, eight-bathroom spread in Simi Valley.
These (and other) homeless agency “leaders” seem to see no irony in their own ultra-luxury lifestyles.
They are content to gorge on taxpayer dollars, year after year and decade after decade –– while homelessness gets worse.
In fact, LA agencies and nonprofits have incentives to entrench homelessness, to keep the taxpayer largesse flowing: More homeless people means more demand for tax dollars. Ad nauseam.
The result is a homeless industrial complex that helps everyone but those degenerating on the streets.
Bass and the 15-member City Council must be well aware of these dynamics by now. Yet they perpetuate them. Why?
Bass and the council have long known that LAHSA is a flawed organization; LA County all but shunned the agency in 2025, and the federal government is probing it for alleged financial mismanagement.
Yet the city continues to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars to LAHSA, which gets 73% of its funding from city taxpayers –– even after after Bass & Co. vowed yet failed to study alternatives. City Hall can’t even take a baby step away from an agency it knows is failing. Why?
Meanwhile, nutty Councilman Hugo Soto-Martínez and nine of his council colleagues just voted to cede more than a dozen parks and public spaces to homeless chaos in the Hollywood and Silver Lake areas. Here ya go!
It’s as clear as the tents on the streets: LA is moving in the wrong direction on homelessness.
“Housing first” has been a costly disaster: Placing addicts in hotels for some stretch of time, with no sobriety or treatment requirements, does nothing but deplete public coffers and enrich nonprofit/agency enablers.
LA has an astounding 45,194 homeless residents, per the latest official count –– 3.4% higher than last year, despite billions of tax dollars poured on the problem.
But at least LAHSA’s bureaucrats can enjoy their ivory tower.
One has to wonder: Do the group’s 10th-floor offices have a view of Skid Row and its 50 blocks of squalor?
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