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The organization often became a lifeline when people entered the girls’ center in downtown Skid Line for help.
The center has registered people with temporary housing subsidies designed to help homeless individuals pay rent during limited hours to recover.
These days, that’s not an option.
In April, the Los Angeles Department of Homeless Services, citing budget cuts, instructed centers and other service providers in the county to stop accepting new participants in TLS, a critical program that is little known outside the world of homeless services.
“We’re always asked,” said Amy Turk, chief executive of Downtown’s Women’s Center. “And we’re like, ‘We don’t know.’ ”
According to providers and Rasa, the change could ripple across the LA County Homeless Services System. People may stay in shelters for longer as one route to housing is blocked. With fewer spots in shelters, people may stay longer on the streets.
“It’s going to go for a bottleneck,” said Sasha Morozov, the regional director of a homeless service provider known as PATH. She called the possibility “heartbreaking” given the time and investment the community has made to accommodate people. “We’ve been working so hard.”
Service providers and Lahsa say they consider time-limited grants important and point out that they can help reduce the number of people who remain unmoved for the second year in a row. One provider even called them “super highways from the homeless.”
Nathaniel Burgou, Associate Chief Program Officer at Rahasa, said:
The strengthening of subsidies comes after voters approved Measure A in November. This is an increase in sales taxes that supporters have said could generate as much as $1 billion a year to deal with the homeless crisis. But much of that new money is flowing to build new affordable housing rather than homeless services, and given the slower economy, the county is actually expected to reduce sales tax revenues for homeless services this fiscal year.
Some providers have already seen the impact of a time-limited reduction in subsidies.
Katie Hill, chief executive of Union Station Homeless Services, said the organization was pulled back a few months before the April announcement due to a lack of grant funds, and so far had to drive away more than 700 homeless families looking for a place to sleep with their provisional beds filled.
At LA Family Housing, Chief Program Director Kimberly Roberts said the nonprofit had previously moved about 50 households from shelters a month to permanent homes using TLS, releasing 50 temporary beds in the process.
“I can’t do that now,” she said. “The decision not to invest more resources or add more dollars means there are more people on the streets, which means there are more camps.”
The time-limited grant program works as follows: LAHSA receives money from federal, state and county governments and then contracts with private companies that register nonprofits and homeless people and pay landowners. The grants are expected to be made the most out of two years. Meanwhile, nonprofits help individuals work to buy homes without subsidies.
Lahsa said he would direct providers to suspend registration of new participants due to government budget cuts that have affected a variety of programs as well as time-limited grants.
These cuts don’t come from cuts in the Trump administration’s social programs or the county’s plans to eventually transfer tens of millions of dollars from Lahasa to new county agencies, but from state funding cuts made amid budget constraints and reduced expiration dates for one-off grants. The county has not cut its own funding into grants, but has trimmed other homeless services programs.
Regarding time-limited grants, Lahsa reports that $46 million less will be spent this fiscal year compared to his last year. From July 2026, more cuts are expected for the next fiscal year.
For now, those currently enrolled in time-limited grants have not been affected, and Rasa said they are adopting a “ramp down” strategy to address funding cuts.
Service providers will likely not be able to register new participants this year, as time-limited grants will naturally expire.
Lahsa is looking to cut the overall time limit from 7,700 last fiscal year to 2,500 by the end of this year, so the agency in the June report said it is “unusual, if not impossible,” for new people to be registered immediately.
In recent years, taxpayers have spent billions of dollars tackling homelessness in LA County, and some elected officials have been increasingly complaining about how the money was spent and whether they would go to the right place to meaningfully reduce the number of people on the streets and shelters.
In 2024, Lahasa reported a slight soak in the county’s total number of homeless people fell 4% this year, but more than 72,000 people live in shelters and on the streets.
Los Angeles City Councilman Nitiya Raman said time-limited grants are in part important as they are cost-effective and can reduce the overall public investment needed to reduce homelessness.
“Not everyone needs a permanent home funded by the government for the rest of their lives,” she said in an interview.
In recent years, councillors have pushed for increased efficiency in the TLS programme, characterising her as underutilized.
She hopes that there will be improvements afterwards and more money will be found, but she is “very worried” about TLS cuts, especially as other funding cuts are looming.
Another specialized homeless housing subsidy – this is at the federal level – is expected to expire in 2026. The Trump administration also wants to further cut the country’s major rental subsidy program known as Section 8.
“What we’re seeing in the next two years is a dramatic reduction in housing options available to people living on the streets and those living in shelters,” Raman said. “The impact of this should not be underestimated.”
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