Scott Shafer [00:03:06] Their comprehensive review of shelter incident reports, police records, and interviews with dozens of residents found a system often mired in chaos and scandals. The lead reporter on that CalMatters report, Lauren Hepler, joins us to talk about what they found. Lauren, welcome to Political Breakdown.
Lauren Hepler [00:03:23] Thanks so much for having me.
Scott Shafer [00:03:24] Well, I know this was a very comprehensive report. So first of all, why don’t you just tell us what you and your colleagues at CalMatters did in investigating this, the documents you reviewed, and so on.
Lauren Hepler [00:03:35] Yeah, this really grew out of about 10 years I’ve been covering homelessness in California and talking to people on the streets. You know, if you’re living in a tent or a shanty, kind of an obvious question is why are you out here? Like, this is a difficult way to live when we know that there are these shelters that at least maybe have a bunk bed, some hot meals, but over and over again I heard that people felt like they were treated like an animal in shelters. Women told me about sexual assaults. So we really wanted to see what’s the paper trail like here, how widespread are incidents like this. So we filed Public Records Act requests with every county in California. And what we got back was pretty shocking. It really showed kind of disarray across the state. So we got records from Salinas internal emails that showed all these complaints about staff stealing donations, helping friends and family jump the line for housing. In LA, court records showed that a nonprofit hired a man convicted of attempted murder to work security. He then went on to commit three sex crimes in one day against women at the shelter. And then there were just dozens of other reports about stabbings, about black mold, about rotten food, and I could go on, unfortunately, so we found that these are systemic and widespread.
Marisa Lagos [00:04:50] So it sounds like you really did look at the entire system, not just specific providers or specific, you know, individual shelters. Were there any through lines though here? I mean, I imagine there’s only a certain number of nonprofits operating in this space.
Lauren Hepler [00:05:07] Yeah, it’s interesting. There are a few sort of much bigger nonprofits that we found, like the one I mentioned in Los Angeles, Hopix is part of this bigger nonprofit called Special Service for Groups or SSG. And they brought in like $170 million in revenue in 2023. That’s a nine figure jump, you know, in just recent years. So they’re an example of a large nonprofit that operates lots of different homeless services programs, shelters being one of them. Another we looked at is Bay Area Community Services. They saw revenue climb 1 ,000 % in the decade up to 2023. They’re now bringing in like $98 million a year. So you see these big players getting a lot of grants. And then in some places, there are also much smaller nonprofits that operate one -off programs. And that’s sort of the variety that we saw.
Scott Shafer [00:05:58] You did note that scandals seem to have plagued the fast-growing shelter operators in particular. You mentioned ones in Oakland and LA. They ramped up too fast. Is that just because they couldn’t kind of keep up with their own growth, or were they fundamentally flawed in some other way?
Lauren Hepler [00:06:15] I think the one through line is the staffing here. So you have the nonprofits at an administrative level that are bringing in millions of dollars in grants to address what is a really complicated, difficult issue. But that money doesn’t always trickle down to the frontline workers who have to kind of deal with the chaos day in and day out. These jobs pay just over minimum wage a lot of times in shelters. So you’ll hear that there’s a lot of churn, and it’s difficult to recruit for these jobs. Sometimes there’s allegations, like I mentioned, of staff stealing if they themselves are maybe struggling or their families. So it’s a complicated issue that unfortunately doesn’t have, you know, easy solutions.
Marisa Lagos [00:06:56] And one of the reasons, Lauren, you all dug into this is that this has been a boon, right? I mean, we’ve seen you actually calculate it because the government didn’t apparently have a number for you, but that, you know, governments have invested over a billion dollars in recent years since 2018, and the number of shelter beds has more than doubled. And yet there’s still three times as many homeless people. So I guess stepping back for a second, like, what is it that the governor and public officials and these shelter operators say is meant to be the function of these shelters? Are they supposed to be a bridge to other housing or just a way to kind of get the problem off the streets and out of our visible line of sight?
Lauren Hepler [00:07:36] Yeah, that’s an interesting question because you’ll see it very clearly on the non-profit’s websites that say like, our goal is to obtain permanent housing as rapidly as possible. Very clearly stated. When you go to the governor’s office, sometimes there’s a little bit of waffling like, well, you know, the solutions have to work together. These are shorter term. But what we found is that when it comes down to it, these shelter operators often have, you know, specific targets in their contracts, like house at least 30% of people here all the way up to like house 70% of the people here. And there’s lots of different ways people do the math, but even in the most generous way we found that fewer than one in four people move on to permanent housing across the state and the rest kind of keep churning through our jails, our hospitals, tents, other shelters.
Scott Shafer [00:08:25] You found that chaos, I’m quoting here, chaos often breaks out in the shelters. What does that look like? I mean, you mentioned a couple of specific incidents, but what does like chaos look like?
Lauren Hepler [00:08:35] Yeah, one shelter operator described it as, we’re putting out two or three dumpster fires every day. So that can be like a brawl, a fight between either people living at a shelter, sometimes staff get involved. It sometimes escalates to real violence, like I mentioned stabbings, I interviewed women outside of a shelter in LA, one literally had a black eye and staples still in her head from a beating. so unfortunately it sometimes escalates to violence. And then there’s also kind of just the sanitation and public health issues, a lot of reports of black mold, of rotten food, illnesses that spread very rapidly in these kind of group settings.
Marisa Lagos [00:09:18] I mean, I know that you talked to a lot of people, I think more than 80 residents in the shelters. And we have some tape from one person you met. Can you talk a little bit about Katherine Moore and the story you heard from her?
Lauren Hepler [00:09:31] Yeah, so Katherine lives down in Orange County, you know, sort of like a famously sunny, expensive place to live, but her experience there, she ended up living in an RV with her husband when she lost her waitressing job during the Great Recession. and it ultimately they split up. So she was left with nothing and ultimately ended up homeless, living on the streets in and around Anaheim. And in that period, she was very honest and said, I started using meth to stay up at night when physical attacks and robberies were most common and it just led to this kind of spiral of addiction. She ended up in jail where she got clean. And then as she left jail, she moved to a city funded shelter in Anaheim. And here’s what she had to say about that experience and why it can. make people hesitant to accept offers of shelter.
Katherine Moore [00:10:22] I feel without the proper education and training, you are just traumatizing the people more. And that’s why you have so many homeless people who are shelter resistant. It’s because they’ve been in the shelter, they’ve been treated really poorly, and most of them don’t have a voice to stand up for themselves. They don’t feel like they deserve anything better just because of how poorly they’ve been treated.
Scott Shafer [00:10:46] And Lauren, where is Katherine Moore now and how is she doing?
Lauren Hepler [00:10:50] Katherine defied the odds. She eventually got permanent housing through a housing voucher. That only came after she ended up back on the streets and actually joined a class action lawsuit over issues she experienced in the shelter, including finding drugs on the floor while she was in recovery, sexual harassment from security guards, bloody toilets, again, kind of a sadly long laundry list of issues.
Scott Shafer [00:11:16] Lauren, one of the things you wrote is that nearly all of California’s 500 -plus cities and counties have ignored a state law that requires them to document and address dangerous shelter conditions. How is that? I mean, that’s just mind-boggling. Was there just no accountability? Who was supposed to be following up to make sure that they followed the law?
Lauren Hepler [00:11:39] Yeah, this issue really gets at the blame shifting and the finger pointing you see around homelessness in California, where the governor and state officials are often saying, hey, this is a local problem. We send money to cities and counties for them to deal with encampments, issues with their shelters. So back in 2021, there was a state law that was supposed to kind of try and put those pieces together. The cities and the counties were supposed to report on just the basics as the author, Sharon Quirk-Silva told me, you know, how… how are these facilities operating in terms of like the buildings, the mold, any habitability issues, and if there are any major complaints. but when we asked for those reports from this law that was passed in 2021, we found that it’s like four counties and five cities out of, again, hundreds of counties and cities in California had actually filed those reports. So the state since then has put out a bulletin to be like, hey, everyone needs to be filing these reports. And there’s actually a bill that was just introduced to kind of strengthen that oversight. So that’s one thing we’ll be looking at really closely to see if the state gets serious about either threatening funding or at least following through on that oversight.
Marisa Lagos [00:12:51] I mean, clearly the state and local governments should have a role here, but I also do wonder about these shelter operators, and do you think they’re like almost promising too much? I was really struck by one of the quotes in your piece by the CEO of Mercy House, Larry Haynes, who he said, you know, if we’re forced to act as psychiatric wards, sort of housing people who might have criminal histories, mental health problems, other health issues. families, single people. Like, what do you think is gonna happen here? So I don’t know, like, was he one of the only ones that took responsibility there? Because it does seem like part of this whole process is all these nonprofits bid on these to get this money, right? So they’re making pretty clear promises in writing about what they think they could do.
Lauren Hepler [00:13:37] Yes, Larry Haynes was probably the most candid about this, but I heard variations of this from a lot of shelter operators. The nonprofits did not create the housing crisis. It is not entirely their fault that there are not affordable apartments to move people into after they end up at a shelter. Things like housing vouchers often have years-long waits in California, so that’s one issue. And then, like Larry said, you have kind of these human -level problems where shelters kind of become a dumping ground for like all of our issues in society, like my editor said public schools often are kind of similar, but in this case it’s like you have failing health care systems. If people can’t get psychiatric care you get dumped in a place like this. People with intense, I met a woman with an incurable brain disease in Orange County, a kind of Parkinson’s-like condition that had been in and out of a lot of facilities. So that one of the big problems seems to be that we use shelters as like a one -size -fits -all type of solution when really people have drastically different needs.
Scott Shafer [00:14:41] That description, you know, we can’t be psychiatric wards and solve everybody’s problems, sounds a lot like the jails at the county level. And as you point out in your reporting, the number of people who died in the shelters is actually higher than in jails in California. You know, what does that tell you?
Lauren Hepler [00:15:00] Yeah, this was the first time we had seen this number, so the state tallied it up and said more than 2,000 people have died in shelters since 2018, and like you say, that’s nearly twice as many as died in California jails during the same period as just one point of comparison. We’re doing more work right now to get those coroner’s reports and understand exactly what is going on, but so far it appears similar to jails, that you’ve got kind of a mix of. spillover from the drug crisis, there are a lot of overdoses, but also a lot of chronic health issues, people dying of heart conditions, lung conditions, and then very sadly you have occasional suicides or homicides.
Marisa Lagos [00:15:42] Yeah, and I mean in some ways it makes sense, right? Because jails are more tightly controlled in terms of who can come in and out, what can come in and out. But one of the other findings is, and we’ve sort of hit on this before, but I want you to dig into it longer, which is shelters are kind of a dead end, right? Like you say that maybe a fifth of residents over the past six years actually ended up in housing. And then in some cases, they tend to kick out more people than they help get housed. So what does that tell us? And were you surprised by those findings?
Lauren Hepler [00:16:13] Yeah, honestly, it was kind of most jarring to see this in person, like I think of a shelter, the one we looked at in Salinas, where there were all these complaints about mismanagement and staff stealing donations. But when I got there to interview people, what I immediately noticed was there were a bunch of people living in the woods right outside this homeless shelter, literally like 70 yards away, and they had all been kicked out of the shelter. And they were just like, well, we’re here. We have nothing. So they just kind of make a go of it, living outside there. And we saw that in Anaheim, other parts of the state as well. And it’s born out in the data. Like if you look at this provider Mercy House in Orange County, they house about 11 % of their residents last year, but about eight times that many were exited, which means getting kicked out for a whole variety of reasons. And so again, I think what it shows when you pan out is kind of how we’re stuck in this self -defeating cycle on homelessness. We’re trying to pump money into solutions, but people just end up cycling through these different types of institutions.
Scott Shafer [00:17:21] You know, obviously, Governor Newsom and his administration have made a real push toward dealing with homelessness. They’ve spent a lot of money on this. And he touts, you know, sometimes the results he did during COVID. And I’m wondering, like, what does the governor’s office say about this? Have they been forthcoming or have they kind of punted?
Lauren Hepler [00:17:40] The governor’s office refused to give us an interview directly about our findings. We were directed to two state housing and homeless services agencies. And what they said was basically that shelters are part of a system. We know it’s not the be all end all, but they’re one solution that the state has invested in. and that’s certainly true, but I think it’s also worth asking what are the conditions in these places? Is anyone paying attention? And what’s being done about it?
Marisa Lagos [00:18:12] I mean, when you talk to these residents, like I know some people say, I could get a shelter bed, but I feel safer in my car or on the street. How much of that, you heard that, and is that more common from women or families, or is that kind of across the board in terms of the threats to somebody’s personal safety they might feel in some of these facilities?
Lauren Hepler [00:18:34] Yeah, so I definitely heard from an array of people. Yeah, like what comes to mind of a man in his 50s who was living outside on the streets in a dangerous part of East Oakland who told me, I know it’s risky out here, but I’m not going back in one of those places. They treated me like a dirty animal. And then the women that I mentioned who had experienced sexual assaults in shelters. So you do get a broad cross section of people who say, I’ve been there, I’ve done that. I’m not going back. But the thing that makes it so confusing and messy to deal with is that there’s also lots of people who are in line trying to get into these places. So it’s like, you’ve got a scarcity issue, there’s not enough beds to go around, but then once people get in, they have this negative experience and it makes them mistrustful of the whole system. And that is very hard to unwind.
Scott Shafer [00:19:23] I know you talked to experts outside of California who are very critical of what California is doing. Do they point to any other states that are doing it better?
Lauren Hepler [00:19:33] The big point of comparison is in New York City where they have what’s called a right to shelter. There are the kind of parity between shelter beds and the number of homeless people in New York, but they have their own issues obviously right now apart from issues they’re having with capacity because of so much influx of folks coming from different countries right now. They also have issues in New York with the psychiatric needs going untreated and kind of these one size fits all shelters not leading to housing. So there’s a different approach there, but I think a lot of folks say it’s not necessarily better than what we have here.
Marisa Lagos [00:20:11] What about things sort of outside of, you know, government funded housing or government run housing and support? I’m thinking about things like income support, rental assistance. What do we know about, you know, the success of those types of programs and if we’re trying them at all here in California?
Lauren Hepler [00:20:29] Yeah, that’s a big issue where there’s a lot of experimentation going on right now. So we’ve seen pilots recently in San Francisco, in LA, one in 2023 in San Francisco found that 70% of homeless people surveyed said they could have stayed housed with an additional $300 to $500 in monthly income. And a pilot in LA paid people $750 a month and found that within six months only almost 30% of those people got back into housing. So experts say this is important for a couple reasons. One, rent assistance or income could help us turn off the spigot of people falling into homelessness and adding pressure on these systems and obviously preventing them a lot of personal upheaval and trauma. But also you could potentially use this to rehouse some of people who are on the street. But it’s a question of how do you prioritize those programs versus these other things we’re investing in?
Scott Shafer [00:21:29] It seems like some local governments, I’m thinking like San Jose, are beginning to turn away from shelters. Is that something that’s widespread? I mean, is there a broader sense that this system of shelters just isn’t? Congregate shelters.
Marisa Lagos [00:21:43] Congregate shelters, right? You’re talking about, like, tiny homes.
Scott Shafer [00:21:46] Yeah, like tiny homes. Yeah, so that, you know, you really have more independence, more security, more, you know, individual, like personal space.
Lauren Hepler [00:21:54] We’re doing more reporting on this right now, but I gotta say, in the complaints and incident reports we got, there were also a lot of violent attacks happening in the COVID motels, in the tiny homes, a lot of overdoses when you have the locked doors. So it’s an issue where ultimately you need like these supports in place, whether it’s a big facility with bunk beds or a smaller space where people have more private areas, which certainly a lot of people say privacy is extremely important. I don’t want to understate that, but you can’t just kind of store folks away and hope that things get better. You need to have that real hands-on support. But like you say, we are seeing a huge variety across the state right now. San Diego recently debated a huge 1,000 bed shelter that ultimately… got defeated. In places like Long Beach, I just toured an old public hospital that they’re morphing into a campus with shelter, drug detox, medical services, all on one site. So there is a lot of experimentation and it will be interesting to see how that goes.
Marisa Lagos [00:23:02] What’s been, besides not any reaction from the governor’s office, what have you heard from policymakers, lawmakers, maybe local officials, like what’s the reaction been since this piece came out last week?
Lauren Hepler [00:23:16] Yeah, so we were pointed to one state bill, actually a couple state bills, but one AB 750 was just proposed and that would strengthen kind of the state oversight here, add some teeth to that 2021 law we mentioned where the cities and the counties are supposed to be telling the state how everything’s going at the shelters. So we’ll see if that passes. There’s another bill that kind of deals with the funding side of things, asking the local governments to more specifically report on how they’re using state money for different homeless services solutions. So both of those will definitely be interesting to watch.
Scott Shafer [00:23:52] I want to come back to something you said earlier, which is you gave this specific example of the security guard that was hired by a shelter in Los Angeles. He had been convicted of murder and went on to assault three women, I think, in one day. What happened to him? I mean, is he gone? I mean, are the shelters, like, even after the fact, are they taking steps to, like, resolve and fix and address some of the problems after they happen at least?
Lauren Hepler [00:24:16] Yeah, this one, so the security guard had previously been convicted of second -degree attempted murder and robbery and then he was hired at the shelter in south LA just before the pandemic. Like we say, there were three counts of sexual battery in one day against women staying at the shelter. The specifics of the attacks kind of vary but groping, unwanted touching, these types of things. But no one at the shelter called police that day. In fact, another staffer actually gave him a ride home. We later read in the court records that one of the women said she was kicked out of the shelter when she came forward. Police were eventually brought in and months later the DA charged the case and he was eventually convicted and went to prison.
Marisa Lagos [00:25:07] So is that, I think this is another thing you documented before you let go, which is that it’s not unusual for if shelter residents bring up problems or crimes that they actually themselves are punished. Is that another thing that needs more oversight?
Lauren Hepler [00:25:23] Yeah, we heard that from multiple people that they’re discouraged from calling police, from calling ambulances because, you know, neighbors obviously are very wary of issues of criminality around shelters or homeless services sites. So that becomes its whole, own issue. But yes, I think in general folks feel that even if they complain, a lot of times those complaints aren’t dealt with or they certainly aren’t kept updated on the process.
Scott Shafer [00:25:52] Well, some very, very important investigative reporting. Thank you so much, Lauren Hepler from CalMatters. Appreciate your sharing it with us. Political Breakdown is a production of KQED. Our engineer is Jim Bennett. Our producer is Dana Cronin. I’m Scott Schaeffer here with Marisa Lagos. Thanks for listening.
