Los Angeles County is preparing to make sweeping cuts to homeless services next year, with budget documents showing reductions that would reshape nearly every part of the system that helps people avoid homelessness or exit it. County officials project a $303 million dollar shortfall in Measure A revenue for the upcoming fiscal year, and the draft spending plan responds by eliminating whole programs, shrinking outreach capacity, and scaling down supportive housing services that thousands of people rely on to remain stable.

The deficit is driven by a simple math problem. The county estimates it would need $865 dollars to maintain all current services next year but expects just over $560 million. With that gap, program cuts are not marginal. Prevention programs disappear entirely. Every program that keeps people housed before they lose everything is zeroed out, including problem solving, case management, financial assistance, and hundreds of prevention slots that stabilize families in crisis. When this work stops, more people fall into homelessness, adding strain on the very system the county says it is trying to preserve.

Street outreach also takes a major hit. The number of multidisciplinary teams is reduced by nearly a third, and the county’s own materials warn that response times will slow, workers will have to cover much larger areas, and fewer encampments will be engaged consistently. Requests routed through LA HOP will take longer to process, and the county expects thousands fewer outreach engagements overall. Outreach workers often spend months building trust with people who have no other contact with the system. Cutting these teams weakens the most basic part of the county’s connection with unhoused residents.

Interim housing, which includes shelters, recuperative care, stabilization housing, and motel rooms, becomes more expensive even as capacity shrinks. The draft plan funds fewer beds and dramatically fewer motel rooms through Pathway Home, the county’s encampment resolution program. Eight additional Pathway Home sites are slated for closure, removing more than five hundred seventy five beds. Operations that once relied on motel placements will be reduced to only ten per year countywide. Fewer rooms and fewer motel-based operations mean longer waits and fewer exits for people living on the street.

Permanent supportive housing is also weakened. More than seven thousand supportive services slots are cut, a twenty four percent loss. These include the intensive case management services that help residents stay housed by providing health linkages, benefit navigation, crisis intervention, and mediation with landlords. When these supports disappear, people who were once stabilized can fall back into homelessness. The cuts risk destabilizing thousands of placements that took years and significant resources to create.

Safe Parking, which serves people living in their cars, is eliminated across all four sites the county currently funds. Housing navigation, which helps people apply for housing, collect documents, pay rental application fees, and locate available units, is eliminated as well. Legal services, which resolve eviction threats, clear criminal records, and help people secure benefits, are also fully defunded. These programs are small compared to interim housing, but they often produce some of the most direct housing outcomes in the system. Their removal leaves thousands of people without supports that resolve the issues pushing them into homelessness.

The slide deck shows that some areas remain protected, including interim and permanent housing for families and youth. But the deepest cuts fall on adults, the population that makes up the largest share of people living outdoors and the group most likely to be Black. This undercuts the county’s stated commitment to equity, since eliminating adult prevention, cutting outreach, and shrinking supportive services disproportionately affects those already facing the greatest barriers in the system.

Cities outside Los Angeles will feel the impact too. The county’s ten million dollar allocation to Glendale, Long Beach, and Pasadena is eliminated in full. Those local homelessness systems, which operate separately from LAHSA, depend on these funds to keep shelters open, subsidize rent, and staff outreach programs. Their removal will ripple through the region.

One striking feature of the draft plan is that even as direct services contract, administrative and data infrastructure spending increases. Millions are added for countywide data integration, analytics, new evaluation programs, staffing for the InfoHub system, and expanded reporting and oversight functions. These investments come at the same time the county eliminates prevention, navigation, legal services, Safe Parking, and outreach teams. The plan directs more money to tracking and measuring the system than to stabilizing many of the people living within it.

The result is a spending plan that preserves the most expensive part of the system, interim housing, by shrinking everything that helps people avoid homelessness or exit it permanently. Beds will cost more next year, even as their number drops. Services that hold housing placements together will thin out. Prevention will disappear. Outreach will diminish. And for many workers and residents, the public comment period between now and early December may be the only opportunity to press the county to reconsider before these changes lock into place.