When the City Council and Mayor voted last spring to renew Los Angeles’s contract with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles for another five years, it should have been simple. The Stay Housed L.A. program had become one of the city’s most successful anti-displacement efforts, defending tenants in eviction court, providing rental assistance, and keeping thousands of families in their homes. The five-year renewal was approved by the Council, signed by the Mayor, and funded by Measure ULA, the voter-approved “mansion tax” that dedicates 30 percent of its revenue to homelessness prevention.
Then City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto refused to sign. She froze the $34 million contract, citing concerns about its sole-source nature. Her office demanded a new bidding process and opened what it called a “legal review” of how previous funds were spent. That single act of obstruction triggered months of chaos. The Council had to pass emergency extensions to prevent service collapse, first a seven-month bridge through January 2026 and then another short-term infusion of $8.4 million from ULA to keep the program running temporarily.
The result is paralysis. Stay Housed L.A. is operating without long-term stability. Legal aid attorneys have been laid off, postgraduate legal fellows have uncertain jobs, and rental assistance has been suspended more than once. The city’s new Right to Counsel ordinance, meant to guarantee low-income tenants representation in eviction court, is being hollowed out before it even takes full effect.
The impact is not abstract. In written comments submitted to the City Council, renters and tenant advocates pleaded for the city to stop the disruption. “Rental assistance and legal services are not just beneficial, they are essential symbiotic services for tenants — whether it’s preventive to ensure tenants are not served an eviction notice, or defensive to defend against an eviction and keep tenants from becoming unhoused,” wrote Anahi, a renter from Council District 10. Another commenter, Emmanuel Matamoros, was more blunt: “If the point is to have more folks in the streets or in shelters then it makes sense not to release these funds to the public via Stay Housed LA.”
The City Attorney says she is simply upholding the law and ending no-bid contracts. On Thursday, during an appearance before the L.A. City Charter Reform Commission, Feldstein Soto doubled down on that claim, saying, “Whenever there is a proposal to sole source an agreement to a given developer or nonprofit entity or anybody else . . . my office has held the line and made sure that it’s put back out to bid, so that any dedication of public resources and taxpayer dollars is transparent and visible”
Yet her record tells a different story. Feldstein Soto has repeatedly authorized sole-source contracts in other contexts. Her own office approved no-bid professional-services deals for various city departments, including training and consulting agreements that never faced public debate. For example, a September 24, 2025 mayoral transmittal notes that the Gang Reduction and Youth Development Office “has obtained sole source contract approval from the City Attorney’s Office” for a $150,000 training contract. That same language appears multiple times in the document. Meanwhile, the city renewed FilmLA’s contract for five more years this June, an agreement long criticized as a no-bid monopoly over film permitting. Those actions proceeded publicly without any comparable objection from the City Attorney, even as she was blocking the LAFLA deal on sole-source grounds.
She has also quietly hired private law firms to represent the city in high-profile cases. The most glaring example is her decision to retain the corporate firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher to defend Los Angeles in the homelessness lawsuit before Judge David Carter. The contract was initially capped at $900,000, but Gibson Dunn billed $1.8 million for just two weeks of work, with partners charging nearly $1,300 per hour. Within three months, the cost ballooned to $3.2 million, and by September the City Council, at Feldstein Soto’s urging, approved a fivefold increase, expanding the contract to nearly $5 million for the current fiscal year.
The episode drew outrage from council members, several of whom voted against the increase, citing waste and lack of oversight. Even after the controversy, Feldstein Soto praised Gibson Dunn’s work and committed $1 million from her own office budget to help pay the firm. The rest came from the city’s unappropriated balance, which includes funds otherwise reserved for essential services. The move depleted much of the city’s outside counsel budget for the year and forced the reallocation of $4 million in taxpayer money to cover corporate legal fees.
All of these actions undermine the claim that Feldstein Soto is applying her rules consistently. She has allowed sole-source contracts when they suit her or her allies, and paid millions to private firms to defend her office in controversial cases. But when it comes to tenant defense, she has drawn an arbitrary line in the sand.
Unlike those private and departmental contracts, Stay Housed L.A. is a public-interest program approved through every democratic channel, voted on by the Council, signed by the Mayor, and funded by Measure ULA revenues dedicated to homelessness prevention. The Council even made explicit findings that eviction-defense services qualify as professional work for which competitive bidding is not practicable, a routine and lawful exemption under the City Charter. Yet Feldstein Soto overrode both branches of government and used her office’s signature authority to stall the program.
The damage is measurable. LAFLA and its partner organizations have provided legal help to more than 21,000 households since 2021, securing favorable outcomes for most tenants and distributing more than $11 million in rental assistance. Administrative costs account for only seven percent of the program budget, far below industry norms. By blocking the contract, the City Attorney has jeopardized one of the few programs proven to keep people housed and prevent homelessness.