A new report from the City Controller raises serious questions about whether Los Angeles can translate its homelessness budget into real-world results
Los Angeles officials have spent years insisting that the city is throwing unprecedented resources at the homelessness crisis. But a new analysis from City Controller Kenneth Mejia challenges that narrative in stark terms. Of the more than $1 billion the city budgeted for homelessness programs in fiscal year 2025, at least $473 million was never spent. That figure, nearly half the total allocation, is not a minor accounting discrepancy. According to the controller’s report and its accompanying public dashboard, it represents a recurring, structural gap between what the city promises and what it actually delivers.
This is not the first time Mejia’s office has surfaced this problem. In fiscal year 2024, the city left more than $500 million unspent. Taken together, the two years paint a troubling picture. Los Angeles has now failed to deploy close to $1 billion in homelessness funding over consecutive fiscal years, even as the crisis on its streets remains one of the most visible and urgent in the country.
The controller’s office identified several contributing factors in previous findings, including staffing shortages, programs fragmented across multiple city departments, and outdated financial systems that make real-time tracking of funds difficult. Those systemic weaknesses have not been fully resolved.
A significant share of the unspent funds came from state Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention grants and revenue generated by Measure ULA, the city’s real estate transfer tax approved by voters in 2022. Both funding streams allow expenditures to be spread over multiple years, which City Hall has pointed to as justification for the spending gaps.
Mayor Karen Bass has emphasized that deploying funds strategically across fiscal years reflects long-term planning rather than institutional failure. Her administration has also expressed support for greater transparency in how homelessness dollars are tracked and reported. That defense, however, is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. The tens of thousands of Angelenos currently without stable housing are not experiencing a long-term planning cycle. They are experiencing a crisis in real time. When eviction prevention funds are delayed, people lose housing. When shelter dollars go undeployed, encampments expand. When mental health and services funding sits idle, individuals fall through gaps that the system was specifically designed to close.
Beyond the spending gaps themselves, the controller’s report identifies a significant accountability problem. Because homelessness funding flows through a complex web of sources, departments, and multi-year timelines, it is difficult for the public, or even for city officials, to understand how much money is actually being spent in any given year.
Mejia’s office was forced to create entirely new accounting codes simply to track homelessness dollars across departments. That this work had not previously been done speaks to how fragmented oversight has been. Independent audits of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority have raised parallel concerns about financial reporting delays and inadequate oversight infrastructure.
The result is a transparency gap with real political consequences. It allows elected officials to cite large budget totals as proof of decisive action, while residents across the city experience something that doesn’t match the headline numbers. As Controller Mejia stated directly, the size of the announced budget “leads the public to believe that the city is spending much more on homelessness than it actually is.” That disconnect fuels the increasingly common frustration that billions are being spent with little to show for it, when in fact a substantial portion of those billions have not been spent at all.
Even within the city’s own leadership, the underspending is drawing criticism. Councilmember Nithya Raman has publicly noted that funding allocated for a homelessness oversight bureau sat unused for nearly a year, with no staff hired to run it. The fact that even the city’s own accountability infrastructure has gone unfunded raises difficult questions about institutional capacity and political will.
Mejia’s office has outlined a set of targeted reforms, including better alignment between budget timelines and actual spending cycles, more rigorous mid-year monitoring of fund deployment, and clearer public reporting so residents can track whether dollars are moving from allocations to outcomes. The recommendations point to something larger than a bookkeeping fix. For years, the central debate about homelessness in Los Angeles has focused on whether the city is spending enough, but this report suggests the city is not even capable of spending what it already has.