In 2023, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass went on national television and set a goal for her first term. She said she wanted to end street homelessness in the city by 2026. It is now 2026.
On Thursday, the federal government did what City Hall could not. More than 100 law enforcement vehicles rolled into Skid Row for Operation Save Skid Row, which executed 28 arrest warrants and 44 search warrants. By afternoon, 23 suspects were in custody.
District Attorney Nathan Hochman called it the largest operation targeting Skid Row drug dealers in Los Angeles history. Prosecutors say the alleged dealers sold fentanyl and methamphetamine from tents, with some disguised as homeless people or social workers.
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli pointed the finger at Sacramento. He said California has watered down its criminal laws and emptied and closed prisons, leaving little deterrence. He gave Bass credit for approving LAPD participation but aimed his harshest words at the governor and the legislature.
Bass has not been able to explain away the gap between promise and result. In a May interview, she was asked about her 2026 pledge and conceded the goal had not been met. She blamed bureaucracy.
That excuse sits badly with voters. Running the bureaucracy is the job of a mayor, and Bass asked for it.
The official numbers are not kind to her either. LAHSA’s 2026 count, released July 24, put the city’s homeless population at 45,194, up 3.4% from 43,695. That reversed two straight years of declines. Countywide, the total rose 1.2% to 73,040.
LAHSA said neither citywide increase was statistically significant, and that fairness is worth noting. But the central Metro region, which includes Skid Row, tells a harder story. Unsheltered homelessness there jumped 21% in a year, an increase LAHSA does consider significant. Street homelessness overall was up 7.9%.
A separate study by the RAND Corporation found that 87% of the tents still standing in Hollywood, Venice and Skid Row are now in Skid Row. Four years earlier, that figure was 60%. Skid Row was the only one of the three neighborhoods to grow continuously, at nearly 4% a year.
RAND also found the official count captured just 61% of Skid Row’s unsheltered population. In other words, the real picture may be worse than the one the city is defending.
The treadmill is plain in LAHSA’s own data. For every person the system housed this past year, about 2.3 newly unhoused people sought services.
Meanwhile, the money has grown enormously. In 2016, the city budgeted about $139 million a year for homelessness. By 2026, that figure approached $1 billion.
Bass has her defenses. She blamed the Trump administration for the increase, said homelessness is down by double digits since 2023, and cited 6,000 people moved off the streets through her Inside Safe program and more than 1,000 veterans housed. The City Council has even called for a review of the 2026 count over possible errors.
But the larger scandal sits in the agency that spends the money. In June, HUD suspended LAHSA’s participation in federal funding, citing a pattern of fraud, poor financial controls and conflicts of interest. The agency has received nearly $1 billion in HUD money since 2021.
According to HUD, LAHSA’s former CEO resigned after more than $2 million in federal funds was committed to her husband’s employer. Separately, a contractor hired by LAHSA has been accused of stealing $10 million of $23 million in homeless funds.
Los Angeles County has pulled roughly $350 million a year in funding from the agency. Bass was appointed to LAHSA’s commission for a term that ended June 30, 2026. She has not been accused of any wrongdoing, but the agency she helped oversee is now under federal investigation.
Bass said she shares HUD’s concerns about LAHSA but that cutting funding does nothing to house people, warning that lives would be lost. After the homeless count came out, she promised a system that is results-driven and transparent.
Governor Gavin Newsom shares the blame at the state level. A state audit found California spent billions of dollars on homelessness without tracking whether the programs worked. It found the state’s homeless population grew 32% over five years and 53% over ten.
Republican state senators who requested the audit put spending at more than $24 billion over five years, while the number of unhoused Californians climbed above 181,000. California accounts for roughly 30% of all homeless people in the country.
When the audit landed, Newsom’s homelessness council argued that local governments are primarily responsible for tracking the data. That is a convenient answer from a governor who spent years demanding credit for the spending. The auditors also found that San Jose and San Diego failed to track their own money.
All of this matters because of who was living in the tents. Prosecutors say the drug networks preyed on the very people the city promised to help, selling them poison while Skid Row grew.
Five suspects are still on the run, and Essayli has promised more operations. Bass, for her part, said Thursday’s raid was about removing criminals who prey on the vulnerable. The question hanging over Los Angeles is why it took federal agents to start.
