Talk about your ivory tower.
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority — LA’s central homelessness company — has headquarters in the AON Center on Wilshire Boulevard, The California Post revealed this week.
Among the tower’s options: helicopter rides to LAX, Maybach automotive service, and a luxe health club with an infrared sauna and chilly plunge.
LAHSA, the embattled company under scrutiny for cash mismanagement, operates from a swanky downtown skyscraper boasting a Maybach, personal helipad, valet parking and a tenant health heart with a chilly plunge and infrared sauna. Aon Center
Wow. So while LAHSA’s homeless “clients” languish in squalid tents, the company’s brass luxuriate in a skyscraper that caters to the ultra-rich.
Perhaps they figured no one would care. How entitled; how shameless; how smug.
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 solutions.
Clearly, this is absurd to the level of farce.
Closed storefronts and homeless individuals are seen alongside a part of Van Nuys Boulevard. David Buchan for Ca Post
Karen Bass, Nithya Raman & Co. want to cease shoveling cash to companies and nonprofits that prioritize their own leaders’ perks over decreasing homelessness — and begin holding these teams to account for abusing taxpayers.
It’s not like the newest 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 previous two years … from the consolation of Hawaii.
There’s Albert Senella, CEO of Tarzana Treatment Centers, who collected $2.36 million in wage last 12 months and calls residence a palatial $3.7 million, six-bedroom, eight-bathroom unfold in Simi Valley.
These (and other) homeless company “leaders” appear to see no irony in their own ultra-luxury existence.
They are content material to gorge on taxpayer {dollars}, 12 months after 12 months and decade after decade –– while homelessness gets worse.
In truth, LA companies and nonprofits have incentives to entrench homelessness, to preserve the taxpayer largesse flowing: More homeless individuals means more demand for tax {dollars}. Ad nauseam.
The end result is a homeless industrial complicated that helps everyone but these degenerating on the streets.
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority –– LA’s central homelessness company –– has headquarters in the AON Center on Wilshire Boulevard, The California Post revealed this week. Google Maps
Bass and the 15-member City Council must be effectively conscious of these dynamics by now. Yet they perpetuate them. Why?
Bass and the council have lengthy recognized that LAHSA is a flawed group; LA County all but shunned the company in 2025, and the federal authorities is probing it for alleged monetary mismanagement.
Yet the metropolis continues to fork over a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of {dollars} to LAHSA, which gets 73% of its funding from metropolis taxpayers –– even after after Bass & Co. vowed yet failed to examine options. City Hall can’t even take a child step away from an company it knows is failing. Why?
Revelations about the luxe workplace area comes as LAHSA comes under mounting criticism over its dealing with of public cash. Aon Center
Meanwhile, nutty Councilman Hugo Soto-Martínez and 9 of his council colleagues just voted to cede more than a dozen parks and public areas 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 transferring in the fallacious route on homelessness.
“Housing first” has been a expensive catastrophe: Placing addicts in motels for some stretch of time, with no sobriety or remedy necessities, does nothing but deplete public coffers and enrich nonprofit/company enablers.
LA has an astounding 45,194 homeless residents, per the newest official depend — 3.4% greater than last 12 months, despite billions of tax {dollars} poured on the downside.
But at least LAHSA’s bureaucrats can get pleasure from their ivory tower.
One has to marvel: Do the group’s Tenth-floor places of work have a view of Skid Row and its 50 blocks of squalor?