The Los Angeles Community Action Network is warning that tenants who used a rental subsidy to get off the street are running into a wall when that assistance expires, and is pressing the city to keep dedicated funding for housing away from short term fixes that leave people facing the same cliff again. The subsidy in question, known as a time limited subsidy or TLS, covers the gap between what a formerly unhoused tenant can pay and market rent for up to two years. After that, the subsidy ends and the tenant owes full rent. LACAN says tenants it works with are being evicted once that happens, unable to cover market rate on their own.

The numbers help explain why. Nearly all TLS assisted units in Los Angeles rent between $1,000 and $2,500 a month, according to LACAN, while 75 percent of people receiving the subsidy earn less than $1,250 a month and 52 percent earn less than $250. A tenant on that end of the income range has no realistic path to paying market rent once the two years run out. Countywide, roughly 3,671 people are enrolled in TLS this year, alongside 6,185 interim housing beds, meaning the cliff LACAN describes is not a fringe case but something built into how the city and county currently house a large share of people exiting homelessness.

LACAN is asking supporters to contact Mayor Karen Bass, Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, and their own council member to oppose using Measure ULA, the city’s dedicated affordable housing and homelessness prevention fund, on interim programs like TLS instead of the permanent housing the measure was written to fund. The group is also asking LAHSA and the city’s housing department to stop evictions of tenants whose subsidies have already expired.

That ask lands the same year the city council itself debated, and ultimately narrowed, a proposal that would have moved in exactly the direction LACAN opposes. In May, Councilmember John Lee and Council President Harris-Dawson introduced a motion that would have allowed councilmembers to tap ULA funds more broadly for temporary housing and street homelessness response. The council’s ad hoc committee on Measure ULA rejected that language, and the full council adopted a framework that ties any new homelessness spending to permanent outcomes. The approved plan directs the housing department to design a three year pilot providing up to $30,000 per household per year to help up to 1,000 people move from homelessness into permanent housing, and focuses that money on acquiring vacant sites to house people while permanent units are being built on the same site.

A separate ULA-funded program approved this month shows what the money can do when it goes directly toward permanent housing. On September 16, United to House LA announced the city council had approved a fund administrator for a $102 million Small NOAH program, aimed at buildings of three to 20 units that were never subject to a deed restriction but remain relatively affordable simply because they are older or less desirable to investors. This is the kind of housing most exposed when an investor buys a building, renovates it, and raises rents to market rate. The program gives a mission driven buyer, the nonprofit Genesis LA, money to acquire those buildings first, keep them permanently affordable, and in some cases transfer ownership to community land trusts or the tenants themselves.

For the tenants LACAN works with, none of that reaches them before their current subsidy runs out. The group’s ask remains the same regardless of how the ULA fight at city hall resolves. They are demanding that the city stop the evictions happening now, and use LA’s largest dedicated housing fund to get people into housing they can actually keep.