A week before they were officially informed that nearly 300 of them would be laid off by the summer, workers at the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, also known as LAHSA, penned an open letter to their local elected leaders.
The LAHSA workforce is “predominantly women, predominantly people of color, and made up largely of born and raised Angelenos,” the workers wrote in their letter. Some of them have experienced homelessness, they wrote.
They urged those powerful officials, who include Mayor Karen Bass, the Los Angeles City Council and the County Board of Supervisors, to preserve their jobs, ahead of a major overhaul of LA’s homeless services system that’s set to become a reality on July 1 through the launch of a new county homeless services department.
This planned overhaul, precipitated by the county’s decision last year to withdraw funds from LAHSA (a joint powers authority that also includes the city of Los Angeles), has prompted the impending layoffs of as many as 53 outreach workers, more than a dozen permanent housing coordinators, and many, many others, totally 284 workers, according to a list of affected positions LAHSA provided to The LA Reporter this week. LAHSA officials announced this Monday that layoff notices are expected to go out by April 30, and employees would be let go by June 30.
LAHSA’s workers knew these layoffs were headed their way. In their April 13 letter, they wrote that an anticipated number of more than 250 people losing their jobs would be “unprecedented.”
“Many of us are terrified with the fact that we are just one pay check away from ending up in the system that we now support,” they wrote. “We don’t want to end up on the streets too.”
The LA Reporter reached out to LAHSA workers to find out what they were doing with the latest news about the layoff plans, now that they are official.
Over the years, homeless services workers have largely stayed in the background, amid the increasing public scandals, news of mismanagement that are being covered widely in the media, and the social media fights that elected officials at the county and city have been engaging, through messages on X.com, about disagreements over how homeless services should be carried out.
Unlike with teachers, firefighters, police officers and other government workers who often tend to have spokespeople and other messengers, LA’s homeless services workers don’t have a major platform to share the realities of what they do to the public, on their own terms. LAHSA workers haven’t typically been allowed to speak directly to the media, and they often shy away from doing so, anyway, concerned about how they might get portrayed in the coverage, as well as the prospect of losing their jobs, especially amid the criticisms about the results of the homeless services system.
But the workers have been speaking up more over the last year or so, after the county announced they were pulling their funding from LAHSA. More than 300 people, a mix of workers and their supporters, signed the LAHSA workers’ recent April 13 open letter. Many of them, though, signed it anonymously.
Some talked to The LA Reporter about getting caught in the cross fire of elected officials’ perennial disagreements over the delivery of homeless services.
Jacqueline Beltran, a senior coordinator who oversees a program to master lease interim housing, said that from her perspective, she has “seen this for as long as I've been here, this ping-pong between the city and county of who was at fault, and now that there's a clear separation of county and city funds, it feels like we're having to be the ones that are impacted.” Beltran was also part of an earlier open letter from December, that LAist wrote about.
In the latest April 13 letter, LAHSA workers pointed out that the recent two years of declines in the homelessness numbers — which politicians have been touting — only came after “years of extremely hard work” on the part of LAHSA workers and workers for other service providers. They highlighted that the work they do involves the intricate process of building relationships with people, sometimes over years, and relies on the years of experience many of them have accumulated. That can’t easily be replicated, they said.
Gil Youenes, a steward with their SEIU Local 721 union representing workers at LAHSA, told The LA Reporter in a interview this week that “the media rarely makes a distinction between the workforce, which is the driving factor of that decrease in homelessness … and the people at the top that have made poor decisions, or elected officials that have defunded us or criticized us as an organization, when every day, we suit up and we go to work and we do hard work, and we don't get paid enough, and we are trying to do the work that we care about.”
“Our work is just as important [as those of other government workers] but because we have had less attention and have historically had less power, we often get forgotten about in the mess of, you know, the state of our region,” added Youenes, who noted that prior to working for LAHSA, he was an electrician.
In addition to fighting public perception, and their overall obscurity, they also face a disadvantage within the labor process. Even though LAHSA workers are part of SEIU Local 721, a powerful union that represents tens of thousands of Los Angeles County workers, and many of their jobs are paid for using county funds, their contract is with the LAHSA joint powers authority. Their own unit is much smaller by comparison to their counterparts at the county that can come together in large numbers to negotiate with the county’s management team.
Youenes said they are in the midst of “meet and consult” conversations with county officials. But those kinds of discussions don’t carry the same weight as a “meet and confer” process, which is a formal part of union bargaining. And that has had an effect, he and others believe, on how seriously they get taken in obtaining real protections during the transition.
The workers have been cognizant of the need for having a position that gives them more teeth, which is why they had advocated last year for the Board of Supervisors to exercise a Los Angeles County charter provision that would have allowed them to be transferred directly over to the county, and that would have allowed them to retain the years they have already worked, in the form of tenure benefits.
But county officials declined to do that. They have instead offered a “concierge service,” which assigns them guides to help with the process of applying for jobs at the county.
County officials have also been holding and planning job fairs for segments of the LAHSA workforce, based on job type. Officials have given updates a couple of times to the Board of Supervisors recently, in March and in April. In those presentations, they said they held a job fair in Feburary for outreach workers, and will continue to hold such recruiting events.
The County CEO this week also provided a statement saying that their office has been “working collaboratively with LAHSA and SEIU 721 since November 2025.” They said that the county offered jobs to 69 outreach workers, and all but one accepted or started those positions, which are in the Departments of Mental Health, the new Homeless Services and Housing department, Health Services and Probation. The county CEO’s office also said 11 outreach workers did not apply for jobs, or withdrew from the recruitment process.
The county is looking for “employment opportunities” for another 159 LAHSA workers who work in administration, such as the accountants, those in information technology and who administer programs, the statement said.
One of the issues LAHSA workers raised to The LA Reporter this week was that many of the jobs at the county are different from what they do now, and some have concerns about the working environment there. Tiffany Duvernay-Smith, who is a coordinator for LAHSA’s Lived Experience Advisory Board (a panel of people who have experienced homelessness who give advice on LAHSA programs), noted in an interview with The LA Reporter that that not everyone is currently attracted to the jobs the county is offering
“What about the person who doesn't want the county job?” Duvernay-Smith said. “I love my LAHSA job.”
Duvernay-Smith, who is previously homeless, said the dynamics of what is going on is setting them onto their back foot, because they are in a position of taking what they can get. They have less leverage and fewer choices, since they can’t survive otherwise without a job. The layoffs have been a traumatizing situation for many people at LAHSA, especially those who have had past experiences with homelessness, Duvernay-Smith said. She also said that they want to hold elected officials to their promises.
In their letter, LAHSA workers urged the county, which is now well on its way to setting up a new homeless services department, to transfer 315 LAHSA workers by June 30 as the county had promised.
And they are urging Los Angeles city officials to continue funding LAHSA. The city of Los Angeles is the other major half of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, but is only in the very early stages of exploring what comes next, which may include setting up their own “bureau” to deliver services.
The County CEO's office sent a response to a question about the 315 jobs, saying that this number which had been referenced in a January Board of Supervisors’ meeting and in the LAHSA workers’ letter “represents a point-in-time count of full-time, represented LAHSA employees occupying County-funded positions. Due to the way LAHSA braids its various funding streams together, those 315 employees collectively occupy only 254 positions. “
In the meantime, the workers The LA Reporter spoke to said one key thing they want is better and more frequent communication, to show that things are beginning to go in the right direction.
Liz Palomino, who has worked at LAHSA for the last year and a half as an interim housing coordinator, offered up an analogy of how homeless services workers “demobilize” an interim housing site, in situations when a shelter is slated for closure. By the closing date, they hope to “have housed every single person into a new interim housing site,” she said.
“I use that in connection to this, because in those meetings, we have a clear plan at the beginning, but then as we get closer and closer to the date of demobilization, there is more and more meetings happening,” Palomino said. “There is weekly meetings, sometimes daily meetings, as we're ensuring that people are getting placed and are having a safe place to land.”
But, according to Palomino, “all we've gotten this whole time, a lot of the times, is silence and questions and a lot of back and forth, of broken promises.”
Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath has been the face of the overhaul of homeless services. Last year, she spearheaded the dramatic withdrawal of funds from LAHSA, and the creation of the new county homeless services department. Her motion had promised to also protect the workers at LAHSA. This week, Horvath released a statement on the layoffs, saying that the county has “taken a deliberate, phased approach to transitioning funding, contracts, and staff from LAHSA to the county.”
She also reiterated the need for the overhaul, saying that “audit after audit has made clear why this action is necessary.” She said that “LAHSA has too often operated as a black box. Commissioners, the media, and funding partners have repeatedly struggled to obtain clear, reliable information about staffing and budgets. That lack of transparency is exactly why structural reform is necessary.”
Her statement was packaged with a statement from SEIU Local 721’s president, David Green, that said that LAHSA workers represented by their union “have played a critical role in combatting Los Angeles County’s homelessness crisis, and we will continue our fight to ensure every single member is supported throughout this transition.”
In addition to their asks of the elected officials, the LAHSA workers’ April 13 letter also addressed their fellow Angelenos, saying that “we recognize the need for structural change, and we have long advocated for a system that is more effective, accountable, and responsive.”
But they added that “key decisions have been made at the highest levels of leadership without substantive input from the people actually doing the work. Nonetheless, the rank-and-file workers are asked to absorb the consequences of those decisions.”
For some of LAHSA’s workers, how their jobs are treated, and what is being done to provide services to people who are unhoused, are tied together.
And for them, “it’s not a game, it’s not theoretical,” Palomino said. One of the people who has a job that’s slated for one of the layoffs, she said, is a LAHSA case manager who has helped her mom —who had been homeless for more than 10 years — “finally be in a stable position.”
Her mother was able to do this because she “had a case worker who walked her through getting her into a program, where she was able to get stabilized, where she was able to go through detox, she was able to get a bed somewhere — and that person walked her through every single part.”
The matter of funding LAHSA is now expected to be taken up in the budget process that’s just started with the release of Mayor Bass’s budget proposal, which retains a funding for LAHSA. The Los Angeles City Council is now set to begin hearings on Friday on the mayor’s budget proposal, which they have the opportunity to modify by a June 1 deadline.
The city’s role at LAHSA is also being taken up, with a proposal submitted earlier this month by two City Council members, Ysabel Jurado and Tim McOsker, and Mayor Karen Bass, that charts a 90-day path that includes looking into restructuring the LAHSA commission so that it gives the city greater power to direct what happens there.
A spokesperson for the mayor’s office, Ilana Morales, provided an emailed response on the layoffs that referenced that proposal. Morales wrote that “with the county withdrawing from LAHSA, these layoffs were inevitable.”
“The city is also withdrawing from LAHSA, but Mayor Bass and Councilmembers McOsker and Jurado have proposed a plan to do so in a way that transitions out of the agency while continuing to bring homelessness down,” Morales wrote. “It is unacceptable for bureaucratic disruption to turn anyone back onto the street.”
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