Three months after submitting her resignation, Va Lecia Adams Kellum will officially step down Friday as chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, it was announced Monday.
Adams Kellum, appointed as head of the joint L.A. city-county agency in March 2023, announced her resignation in April, days after the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted to strip LAHSA of more than $300 million and create a new county department of homelessness.
On July 11, the LAHSA Commission directed staff to begin pre-hiring procedures for an interim CEO.
In her resignation letter to the LAHSA Commission, Adams Kellum wrote it was the “right time” for her to step down after county leaders implemented a recommendation from the 2020 Blue Ribbon Commission on Homelessness that called for shifting key responsibilities from the agency to a centralized department.
“I am incredibly proud of LAHSA’s talented and dedicated staff and deeply grateful for their tireless work. I thank them and the Commission for the opportunity to serve as CEO and for our partnership in reducing homelessness in our region,” Adams Kellum wrote in her resignation letter.
LAHSA Commission Chair Wendy Gruel said that when the commission hired Adams Kellum in 2023, it was for her to be an “agent” of change. In a statement, Gruel said Adams Kellum has delivered “significant improvements” in areas such as transparency, contracting, provider payments and accountability.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass credited Adams Kellum as the architect of Inside Safe, a program intended to resolve street encampments and bring people into temporary housing.
“Despite this broken system, while homelessness rises across the country, Los Angeles is bucking that trend — street homelessness declined for the first time in more than six years, and early reports show that this progress continues for a second year,” Bass said in a previous statement.
Under her leadership, the agency touted a reduction in unsheltered homelessness for a second year in a row.
The annual point-in-time homeless count showed there was a 4% decrease in homeless people across the county, while in the city of Los Angeles, there was a 3.4% drop.
The 2025 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count showed that unsheltered homelessness in the county declined by 9.5% in 2025 compared to the prior year, and it has dropped by 14% over the last two years. Additionally, there has been about an 8.5% increase of unhoused individuals entering interim housing, such as shelters and other forms of temporary housing.
In the city of L.A., unsheltered homelessness declined by 7.9% in 2025, and has dropped by 17.5% over the last two years. LAHSA reported there has been a 4.7% increase in unhoused individuals entering temporary housing in the city.
The homeless count was conducted over the course of three days, Feb. 18-20, after it was postponed in January due to the devastating wildfires that ravaged areas of L.A. County and city.
The new county agency is expected to be in place by Jan. 1, with Measure A funding — the 2024 half-cent tax for homelessness and housing efforts — pulled from LAHSA and transferred to the new county department by July 1, 2026.
Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Janice Hahn have led efforts to establish this new department.
In response to the 2025 homeless count, Horvath hailed the results, though she said more work remains.
“But 72,308 people are still living without permanent shelter. We can, and must, do more,” Horvath said in a statement. “At this pace, it would take three centuries to end homelessness in Los Angeles County. Every day, seven lives are being lost on our streets — an unacceptable reality that demands bold, coordinated action.”
She noted that the county’s new homelessness department will meet the urgency of the moment, adding that it is expected to “streamline services, break through bureaucracy, and deliver results across all 88 cities and unincorporated communities.”
Homelessness in the county in 2019 stood at 58,936 people, with the city of Los Angeles accounting for a majority of that figure with 35,550 individuals. In 2024, LAHSA recorded 75,312 homeless people in the county, with 45,252 of them in the city.
In 2025, those figures further dropped to 72,308 homeless people in the county, with about 43,669 of them in the city.
LAHSA was created in 1993 to address homelessness in Los Angeles County. It was the lead entity to coordinate and manage federal, state, county and city funds for shelter, housing and services to people experiencing homelessness throughout the Los Angeles Continuum of Care, which encompasses all cities in the region — with the exceptions of Long Beach, Pasadena and Glendale.
The agency has come under fire for its lack of transparency in addition to spending millions and not alleviating the homelessness crisis. Such criticisms have only intensified following scathing audits.
Recently, L.A. city officials questioned some last-minute revisions in the 2025 count after the agency disclosed that several hundred interim housing units were incorrectly tagged as being in the city’s jurisdiction by LAHSA’s new housing inventory system, LAist reported last week.
It lowered the city’s homelessness count by more than 400 people. LAHSA spokesman Ahmad Chapman told LAist that U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development rules required that so-called scattered site beds needed to be tagged as all being in the city where most of the beds in a given project are located.
Meanwhile, audits have found that the agency provided dollars to nonprofit services providers in past years without formal agreements to determine how and when the funds would be repaid. LAHSA has taken steps to recoup that money.
A court-ordered audit found that the agency made it impossible to accurately track spending or the performance outcomes of its vendors. The agency has made a commitment to improve data tracking and has released tools on its website to do so.
LAist also reported on alleged ethics violations by Adams Kellum when she signed off on a $2.1 million contract with her husband’s employer. She has denied any wrongdoing.
The agency contracted with Norton Rose Fullbright as outside counsel in March to conduct an independent review of allegations.
“Norton Rose Fullbright concluded its three-month review and determined that (Upward Bound House) was already a LAHSA subcontractor, and specifically for U.S. Housing and Urban Development Continuum of Care programs, before Dr. Adams Kellum became LAHSA’s CEO,” a report from Fullbright reads.
LAHSA officials have disputed the findings of these audits and urged officials to continue their partnership.