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MONDAY, MARCH 31- APRIL 06, 2025
VOL. 14,
NO. 217
LA County board OKs $637 million for homelessness services
Fend for yourself: Under Trump, Consumer Protection Bureau’s probes of big tech and finance firms freeze up
By Joe Taglieri
By Jake Pearson, ProPublica
joet@beaconmedianews.com This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
T
he Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday allocated $637 million for homelessness services. The board’s 5-0 vote followed several amendments for budget adjustments and a nearly four-hour public hearing. Most of the funding is from the over $535.4 million from 2025-26 Measure A funds, a one-time Measure H carryover totaling more than $59.2 million and nearly $42.6 million from the state’s Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention Grant Program. Supervisors were tasked with choosing one of six formulas for distributing more than $96 million from the county’s Local Solutions Fund. The board considered adopting baseline and target metrics as recommended by the Executive Committee for Regional Homeless Alignment, a move opposed by a number of local officials and community members. Palmdale Mayor Richard Loa urged the board to reconsider the allocation, saying the budget disproportionately takes away money from cities and unincorporated areas that need it the most. A representative from LA City Councilwoman Nithya Raman’s office agreed with
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A homeless encampment in Arcadia. | Photo by Terry Miller/HeySoCal.com
Loa, adding that the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee and Mayor Karen Bass were also concerned about how funds would be distributed based on the new metrics. The board chose Formula No. 4 after an amendment offered by Supervisor Janice Hahn, who said she supported equity in funding allocation to cities. The adopted funding formula bases cities’ shares on data from the annual point-intime count required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to
assess homelessness and the American Community Survey, which “focuses on families with an annual income of less than $10,000, serving as a proxy for the deep poverty correlated with the doubled-up student homelessness not included in the PIT count,” according to a report by the county Chief Executive Office. Carter Hewgley, senior manager of the LA County Chief Executive Office’s Homeless Initiative, said prior to the vote that
Formula No. 6 stood out as a good way to incentivize positive results. The sixth and final option considered information from the Very Low-Income Regional Housing Needs Allocation in addition to PIT and ACS data. Responding to a question from Hahn on barriers to clearing encampments and getting people into permanent housing, Cheri Todoroff, executive director of the county’s Homeless Initiative, said, “The biggest
See Homelessness services Page 28
ince the Trump administration moved to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last month, the bureau has dropped nine lawsuits that it had brought on behalf of consumers. The actions effectively freed major financial firms like Capital One and the mortgage giant Rocket Homes from the threat of consequences for their alleged significant wrongdoing, shocking consumer advocates and raising questions about the future of America’s consumer watchdog. For their part, when the cases were dropped, the companies lauded the decisions, with a bank spokesperson welcoming the dismissal of the case, “which we strongly disputed,” and Rocket Homes calling the suit an “empty claim.” But the administration’s new hands-off approach to enforcement at the CFPB extends far beyond those public lawsuits. Behind the scenes, dozens of ongoing investigations into alleged corporate malfeasance are now frozen at the agency, potentially denying accountability and financial relief for untold numbers of consumers, a ProPublica investigation has found. Under a stop-work order issued by the agency’s new leaders, CFPB investigators have been unable to press forward on probes into companies whose products and services are used by tens of millions of Americans, including Carvana, the online used-car retailer; Mr. Cooper, one of the country’s largest mortgage servicers; and CareCredit, a leader in medical credit cards, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matters. The ongoing inquiries, the existence of which ProPublica is revealing for the first time, were at various stages of development, with subpoenas issued in most of them and companies submitting records in response. And while the nature of the alleged wrongdoing wasn’t clear in all cases, people familiar with the inquiries said several probes tracked closely with problems featured in the agency’s own recent public reports. Last fall, for example, the CFPB examined automobile finance companies and found numerous problems with industry practices, including failing “to timely provide See Consumer Protection Bureau Page 04
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