LAHSA employees urges elected officials to save jobs after layoffs announced

A day after the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority announced nearly 300 layoffs, agency employees on Tuesday called on city and county officials to save their jobs.

In a 13-page open letter, LAHSA employees urged the Los Angeles City Council, Mayor Karen Bass and Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to fund positions and prevent layoffs, which were first made public April 13.

“We are writing to express our extreme concern for the way that this shift will impact our homeless service workforce as well as the people that we serve,” the letter reads.

“These damages to LA’s homeless service system will echo throughout our streets and communities,” the letter continued. “Ultimately, this will mean more encampments, more preventable deaths in the streets and more individuals and families with no other option but to live in unsafe and unacceptable conditions.”

LAHSA employees are asking the city not to reduce homeless service funding. Additionally, the workers are asking the county to maintain a commitment to hire 315 LAHSA-represented employees into county roles before June 30.

“…What we have seen so far is chaos and confusion,” according to the letter. “We have seen LA County agree to millions of dollars in payouts for their executives in the last six months. Meanwhile, hundreds of our workers are facing layoffs without any severance packages.”

Los Angeles County officials said they remain committed to “creating pathway for represented, county-funded LAHSA employees to join the county workforce if they choose to do so,” while protecting salaries wherever possible and ensuring no gaps in health insurance.”

The county offered employment to 69 outreach workers, of which 68 have taken roles across the departments of mental health, homeless services and housing, health services and probation, according to the county’s Chief Executive Office. Eleven outreach workers either did not apply or withdrew from the recruitment process.

The county is identifying employment opportunities for 159 additional LAHSA employees, and started a program to help employees navigate the hiring and onboarding process.

“Since employees have not yet received notices — and because layoff notices are broad and may include city-funded positions — we continue to work with LAHSA to determine how many impacted employees are in County-funded roles or have been offered County employment at this time,” according to a statement from the county’s Chief Executive Office.

On Monday, LAHSA said it will issue layoff notices to 284 employees on April 30 — with their final day of work scheduled for June 30, the last day of the fiscal year.

“I want to profoundly thank our staff for their unwavering dedication and hard work serving people experiencing homelessness across Los Angeles County,” interim LAHSA CEO Gita O’Neill said in a statement.

LAHSA said the layoffs are part of a restructuring that will eliminate 414 positions, of which 130 are vacant positions. The layoffs will reduce the staff from 600 to 320 employees, with about 53 additional vacant positions, according to Ahmad Chapman, a spokesman for the agency.

O’Neill emphasized that LAHSA will be a “fundamentally” different organization beginning in July. The agency is expected to focus on the operation of the Homeless Management Information System and Coordinated Entry System, governance and system performance, and overseeing the annual homeless count and leading grant awards.

As part of this transition, LAHSA’s contracting and program oversight role will be refocused primarily on the city.

“This restructuring marks a necessary evolution for LAHSA,” O’Neill added. “By narrowing our focus to macro-level governance, data management and securing federal funding, we are stepping into our true role as a strategic architect of the region’s homelessness response system.”

On the same day LAHSA announced the layoffs, Bass unveiled her proposed $14.89 billion budget for the 2026 27 fiscal year, which allocated about $788 million for homelessness spending, a 17.3% decrease or $165.2 million less compared to the current fiscal year of $953.3 million.

Of the proposed spending, funding for LAHSA is expected to increase from $50.65 million to $52.82 million, or by approximately $2.2 million, according to city documents.

In 2025, the Board of Supervisors approved the creation of the county’s first homelessness department, and authorized the transfer of some employees and about $300 million in funding from LAHSA to the new agency. The decision came in response to audits that found LAHSA had failed to properly track spending and service outcomes.

The Department of Homeless Services and Housing formally launched in January, with county officials expecting the department to be fully operational by July.

Los Angeles city officials are discussing a similar move to shift some programs away from LAHSA over the next fiscal year.