SUBJECT: Stop the Criminalization of Care: Vote NO on Gita O’Neill for LAHSA CEO
TO: LAHSACommission@lahsa.org
To the LAHSA Commission,
I urge you to vote NO on the appointment of Assistant City Attorney Gita O’Neill as interim CEO of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
This appointment signals a dangerous shift in LAHSA’s future, from housing and care to displacement and criminalization. O’Neill is a prosecutor, not a service provider. Her record makes clear that her approach to homelessness has relied on enforcement, not compassion.
O’Neill began her career in the Neighborhood Prosecutor Program, created by the City Attorney’s office to target “quality-of-life” violations. In Venice and beyond, she used laws like LAMC 85.02 (later ruled unconstitutional) and pushed for Stay-Away Orders that effectively banished unhoused residents from critical services like clinics and food programs. These measures weren’t about public safety—they were about exclusion.
She later helped lead the legal effort to revise and defend LAMC 41.18 and 56.11, expanding enforcement zones and shielding the City from legal challenges. Public records show that O’Neill actively coordinated with LAPD, sanitation, and business interests to clear encampments—sometimes even encouraging hostile architecture like sidewalk planters to deter unhoused residents. These aren’t policies rooted in care—they are strategies of displacement.
Now, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision, her appointment to LAHSA appears not just tone-deaf, but strategic: a move to align LAHSA with an expanding national crackdown on homelessness. President Trump just signed an executive order calling for mass sweeps, encampment bans, and the deputization of law enforcement to forcibly remove unhoused people from public space. Appointing a prosecutor like O’Neill to head LAHSA in this moment is not neutrality, it’s capitulation. It’s caving to a federal agenda that treats poverty as criminality and unhoused people as public nuisances to be removed.
O’Neill has no demonstrated background in running housing programs, providing trauma-informed care, or working with the unhoused in a service capacity. Her career has focused on prosecuting, regulating, and managing public visibility, not solving the crisis of homelessness.
Appointing her to lead LAHSA would be a fundamental betrayal of the agency’s mission. It would further erode public trust and entrench a carceral approach that has already failed our city.
Please do the right thing. Vote NO on Gita O’Neill’s appointment.
Sincerely,
