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Citing a slew of issues and a loss of confidence, the LA prosecutor is now recommending that the person she was hired by a judge a few months ago remove control of the troubled Skid Row Housing Trust.

In a memo Friday, prosecutor Hydee Feldstein Soto and the city’s housing director expressed their support for asking the judge to replace Mark Adams as bankruptcy trustee — and for the city to loan up to $10 million to fix housing problems permit.

To motivate the judge to replace him, the city would offer the soft loan on the condition that Adams be replaced. City council members are expected to take up the recommendation at a budget committee meeting on Monday. Committee chairman Bob Blumenfield told LAist Friday afternoon that he supports the move to replace Adams.

“All of these red flags evolve from red flags to flashing red lights that say, ‘Be careful,'” Blumenfield said.

“We really must do everything we can to prevent a human tragedy from getting worse and also look after the public money. Because that’s very much at stake,” he added.

WHAT IS A RECEIVER?

• A liquidator is someone hired by a court to take control of a property and fix problems. You essentially become the landlord, under the supervision of a judge and the city. According to the city attorney, the Skid Row Housing Trust case is by far the largest court-ordered receivership in LA history.

Back in late March, Feldstein Soto had petitioned a court to give Adams control of the trust’s 29 properties, which house about 1,500 formerly homeless people – after the non-profit housing trust fell apart financially and many of its homes were deemed healthy and safe .

But in a shift in confidence, Feldstein Soto, along with LA Housing Department head Ann Sewill, recommended replacing Adams with Receivership Specialists’ Kevin Singer for “some or all” of the properties.

“Disappointing” progress

“[Adams’] “The progress made in addressing serious violations of the regulations, such as B. repairing the fire/life safety systems, fixing plumbing issues in communal toilets, and restoring units cited by HACLA for minor sanitization violations were disappointing,” the memo to the city council said .

“In addition, the property management only placed an order a few weeks ago [Adams] sent out three-day eviction notices to hundreds of tenants, which were then withdrawn, but which should never have been sent out.”

Feldstein Soto previously told the Los Angeles Times that the 451 eviction notices were illegal under the city’s Tenant Protection Act and violated his promise not to evict anyone for rent arrears alone.

The memo also said Adams did not hire enough staff to repair and secure the properties, and he failed to provide the court-ordered reporting and accounting that the city and other agencies require.

“It turned out that the bankruptcy administration could be better served with another bankruptcy administrator,” it says.

Adams did not respond to LAist’s request for comment Friday morning, and a spokesman for the prosecutor said they had not commented.

When he recommended Singer as Adams’ replacement, officials wrote that Singer had worked on nearly 500 bankruptcy administrations nationwide — more than Adams’ approximately 300 — and that San Francisco officials praised his work in the city, which included “a very challenging one.” Bankruptcy Administration’ in the Tenderloin owned district.

When asked if Singer received more prosecution reviews than Adams, Blumenfield said he and others asked and “we were assured there were significantly more reviews.”

What happens next

The motion to extend city loans up to $10 million — assuming the court replaces Adams — will now go to the City Council Budget Committee for a decision. This meeting is scheduled for Monday at 2 p.m

“One way or another, the public is being held accountable,” Blumenfield told LAist, saying he believes if the Housing Trust implodes, many of the residents will end up back on the streets with no other choice.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We need to be smart about this and get involved as early as possible to prevent a major catastrophe, which will also end up costing us a lot of money – and that’s why we are.” committing your own tax money.”

As part of the loan, Blumenfield said, the city will impose stricter requirements on the new recipient to bring the city up to speed — and consequences if it doesn’t.

Blumenfield said the city cannot require this at this time because receivership is a court-controlled process and the city is not a lender.

Ultimately, it will be up to LA Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff to decide whether to replace Adams. His support for Adams may be waning — last week, during a tense downtown LA court hearing, Beckloff removed seven properties from receivership and questioned Adams’ efforts to improve the properties. Still, the judge expressed his support for Adams, saying he felt he was the right person for the job.

It’s unclear the status of prosecutors’ investigation into Adams’ performance, which it revealed last week. Her spokesman declined to comment on Friday.

The key to the future, Blumenfield said, is for the units to be renovated quickly so that they become financially stable. Currently, hundreds of the housing units are ineligible for federal housing credits because the city has said they violate quality of life standards, including when it comes to issues like fire safety.

Past Issues

The move comes after wrongful eviction orders and reports by the LA Times and LAist of several judges finding problems with his previous receiverships, including significant overcharges for his company’s services.

LAist also reported earlier this month that a company Adams founded to serve as a bankruptcy trustee has been banned by the state from doing business since 2015 for unpaid taxes. Adams told us he was looking into the matter and said his current business is in good shape.

SCHEDULE FOR COMPLETE TOWNHOUSE TRUST

• Skid Row Housing Trust is a non-profit organization founded in the late 1980s and is the largest provider of subsidized housing in Skid Row, LA’s premier community for homeless people. The organization develops, manages and operates 29 buildings in downtown LA that house people who were formerly homeless. In recent years, the nonprofit has completed construction of about 250 housing units with funding from Measure HHH, the $1.2 billion housing bond approved by voters in 2016.

  • Feb. 7: The nonprofit’s interim CEO warns of an impending financial meltdown and briefed employees on efforts to persuade other housing providers to take over the 29 buildings, according to the LA Times. The trust has been in financial crisis for years, posting annual deficits of up to $14 million.
  • March 30: Los Angeles District Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto files court documents, citing uncertain conditions, asking a judge to appoint Mark Adams as court-appointed receiver to administer the nonprofit’s properties.
  • April 5: According to the Times, three people are found dead in a Skid Row Housing Trust building of suspected drug overdoses.
  • April 7: Judge Mitchell Beckloff of the Los Angeles Superior Court approves the prosecutor’s motion and appoints Adams as the bankruptcy trustee. “We see the train falling off the cliff here,” a lawyer in Feldstein Soto’s office told the judge about the urgency of the situation.
  • June 2: Unlawful eviction notices were sent to 451 of the trust’s tenants by a property management company hired by Adams, according to the prosecutor. The following Monday, Adams retracted the communications, saying they had been sent in error.
  • June 6: City Attorney staff send Adams a letter saying they are “shocked and deeply disappointed” by the eviction notices. In an interview with the Times, Feldstein cited Soto’s other problems, such as a lack of 24-hour security, and said she was losing confidence in Adams.
  • June 15: Beckloff relieves Adams of control of seven of the properties after being at times frustrated with Adams’ reactions. Adams said the move could affect its ability to raise much-needed working capital.
  • June 23: The city attorney who originally recommended Adams for the job joins a senior city housing official in recommending replacing Adams and giving the city a loan of up to $10 million to redevelop the trust properties to grant. The decision to replace Adams rests with the judge, and the credit decision now rests with the city council.

City officials said the stakes are high at the housing foundation. For decades it has been one of the largest providers of affordable housing for the homeless in LA. But the buildings have fallen into disrepair in recent years as the non-profit owner went bankrupt and faced financial ruin, the memo and Times reporting said.

On April 5, just before Adams took over, three people were found dead in a Skid Row Housing Trust building of suspected drug overdoses.

When Feldstein Soto announced in late March that she would seek receivership, which gave Adams control of the properties, she said the 1,500 people who live in the buildings are extremely vulnerable.

“[These] are among our most marginalized and vulnerable populations,” Feldstein Soto told reporters. “If they lose their homes, there is little doubt that they will spread to our streets.”

LAist reporter David Wagner contributed to this story.

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The post Citing Failures, LA Metropolis Lawyer Desires To Oust Skid Row Housing Belief Receiver appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Last night, the Coalition on Homelessness and seven individual plaintiffs filed suits against the City and County of San Francisco and the Mayor of London Breed for their efforts to criminalize homelessness through a series of brutal police practices that violate the constitutional rights of homeless people in San Francisco injure. Plaintiffs are also seeking an injunction to stop these practices in an emergency. The plaintiffs are represented by the San Francisco Bay Area Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, and the global law firm Latham & Watkins LLP.

For years, San Francisco has claimed it is taking steps to address the city’s homelessness crisis. But in fact, the city is forcing homeless people out of sight – destroying their vital belongings and citing and arresting them for sleeping in public when they don’t have shelter. San Francisco has more laws criminalizing homelessness than any other place in California, and possibly America. This regressive policy of mass incarceration only perpetuates San Francisco’s homelessness crisis and scapegoats the homeless for the city’s egregious failure to support affordable housing for San Francisco residents.

San Francisco lacks – and always has lacked – adequate, affordable housing and housing for thousands of homeless San Franciscos. San Francisco’s threats, subpoenas, arrests, and removal of homeless residents from public spaces therefore violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The city also engages in a practice of illegally confiscating and destroying the personal property of unaccommodated residents in violation of the Fourth Amendment. These practices are helping San Francisco claim that it’s solving the homeless crisis — when in fact it just swept it under the rug.

San Francisco’s homelessness crisis is one of pricelessness. When long-established residents can no longer afford their apartments, they are forced onto the streets. San Francisco politicians have understood this for years, but they have not acted. Instead, the city has consistently relied on tough crime policies to respond to homelessness, rather than addressing the root cause of the problem: the clear lack of sustainable affordable housing.

It’s immoral, cruel, costly and ultimately counterproductive – not to mention unconstitutional. The city knows this because it consistently violates its own policies, which purport to require a humane, service-oriented approach to the homeless crisis. The reality is that homeless San Franciscans are waking up to find their survival goods being confiscated and destroyed as they face criminal penalties if they sleep outdoors, even though the city offers little to homeless San Francisco residents in terms of shelter, housing and services until it has nothing to offer. This lawsuit combines vast amounts of public data with eyewitness accounts to expose the city’s unlawful behavior that is making it nearly impossible for thousands of San Francisco residents to emerge from homelessness.

Those affected by homelessness in San Francisco are disproportionately people of color due to decades of discrimination in housing, education, healthcare, and the criminal justice system. Today, for example, blacks make up 6% of San Francisco’s total population, but make up 37% of the city’s homeless. Black renters in San Francisco still face some of the worst housing discrimination in the country. This targeted exclusion has only exacerbated the homelessness crisis for people of color.

San Franciscans deserve real homelessness solutions. This begins and ends with the city actually investing in affordable housing. This lawsuit seeks to hold the city accountable for its unconstitutional attack on unhoused San Franciscans. The city can punish unaccommodated people for a housing shortage it causes.

Customer testimonials:

Plaintiff Nathaniel Vaughn, a lifelong San Franciscan who was recently homeless, muses, “We don’t deserve to be treated like criminals and have our belongings thrown in the trash when we are most vulnerable.”

Plaintiff Toro Castaño points to the impact this is having on homeless people: “The city’s feuds [are] a dehumanizing disruption to that little bit of stability I was trying to build for myself during one of the hardest times of my life.”

Plaintiff Sarah Cronk says the same thing: “We’re just trying to create and build as much life for ourselves as we can – both with dignity and safety. The city makes that impossible for us.”

Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness: “San Francisco’s homelessness crisis is its affordable housing crisis. Instead of investing in sustainable, affordable housing, the city has spent millions of dollars ridding our neighborhoods of visible signs of homelessness. Punitive approaches exacerbate homelessness by making it more difficult for people to access already limited services, find work and secure stable housing.”

Attorney Statements:

“The city is using homeless residents as scapegoats for a crisis of economic and racial justice that it helped create. San Francisco should fight to end homelessness. But the only real solution to San Francisco’s homelessness crisis is housing. Instead of solving homelessness, the city has invested in detention measures that are making the crisis worse. Not only is this unconstitutional, it’s just plain bad politics. We should expect much better from our political leaders.” – Zal Shroff, Senior Staff Attorney, Bay Area Attorneys’ Committee on Civil Rights

“Racism is embedded in the criminalization of homelessness in San Francisco as people of color are disproportionately targeted by anti-homelessness ordinances. The current system is grievance-oriented, allowing housed residents to dictate traumatizing enforcement against unhoused people trying to live in whiter, gentrifying neighborhoods. This suggests the city is doing more to appease wealthy homeowners than supporting the health and well-being of the most vulnerable with real opportunities from homelessness. Through the lawsuit, we seek to expose the city’s illusory shelter opportunities and end the racist consequences of criminalization.” – John Do, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU of Northern California

The post Metropolis of San Francisco & Mayor London Breed Sued for Harassing Unhoused San Franciscans, Violating Civil Rights to Cowl Up the Metropolis’s Inexpensive Housing Failures appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Late yesterday, the Coalition on Homelessness and seven individual plaintiffs filed suit against the City and County of San Francisco and Mayor London Breed for their efforts to criminalize homelessness through an array of brutal policing practices that violate the constitutional rights of unhoused San Franciscans. The plaintiffs are also seeking a preliminary injunction to stop these practices on an emergency basis. Plaintiffs are represented by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area and the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, as well as the global law firm Latham & Watkins LLP.

For years, San Francisco has claimed that it is taking steps to address the City’s homelessness crisis. But in fact, the City is forcing unhoused people out of sight—destroying their survival belongings and citing and arresting them for sleeping in public when they have no shelter to go to. San Francisco has more laws penalizing homelessness than any other place in California, and possibly America. These regressive mass incarceration era policies only perpetuate San Francisco’s homelessness crisis and scapegoat unhoused people for the City’s egregious failure to support affordable housing for San Francisco residents.

San Francisco lacks—and has always lacked—adequate affordable housing and shelter for thousands of unhoused San Franciscans. San Francisco’s threats, citations, arrests, and removal of unhoused residents from public spaces therefore violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The City is also engaged in a practice of illegally seizing and destroying the personal belongings of unhoused residents in violation of the Fourth Amendment. These practices help San Francisco claim that it is solving the homelessness crisis—when it has actually just swept it under the rug.

San Francisco’s homelessness crisis is one of unaffordability. When longstanding residents can no longer afford to stay in their homes, they are forced out onto the street. San Francisco’s politicians have understood this for years, but they have failed to act. Instead, the City has consistently relied on tough-on-crime policies to respond to homelessness instead of addressing the root cause of the problem: the clear lack of permanent affordable housing.

This is immoral, cruel, costly, and ultimately counterproductive—not to mention unconstitutional. The City knows this because it constantly violates its own policies that purport to require a humane, services-first approach to the homelessness crisis. The reality is that unhoused San Franciscans wake up to find their survival belongings seized and destroyed as they face criminal penalties for sleeping outside even though the city has little to nothing to offer San Francisco’s unhoused residents in terms of shelter, housing, and services. This lawsuit combines massive amounts of public data with eyewitness accounts to expose the City’s unlawful conduct, which makes it almost impossible for the thousands of affected San Franciscans to exit homelessness.

Those experiencing homelessness in San Francisco are disproportionately people of color due to decades of discrimination in housing, education, healthcare and the criminal justice system. Today, for example, Black people comprise 6% of San Francisco’s general population but make up 37% of the City’s unhoused population. Black renters in San Francisco still face some of the worst housing discrimination anywhere in the country. That targeted exclusion has only exacerbated the homelessness crisis for people of color.

San Franciscans deserve real solutions to homelessness. That starts and ends with the City actually investing in affordable housing. This lawsuit seeks to hold the City to account for its unconstitutional attack on unhoused San Franciscans. The City cannot punish unhoused people for a housing crisis it created.

Client statements:

Plaintiff Nathaniel Vaughn, a life-long San Franciscan who recently became unhoused, reflects: “We do not deserve to be treated like criminals and to have our belongings thrown in the trash when we are at our most vulnerable.”

Plaintiff Toro Castaño notes the impact this has on unhoused people: “The City’s sweeps [are] a dehumanizing disruption to the small ounce of stability that I was trying to build for myself during one of the hardest times of my life.”

Plaintiff Sarah Cronk says the same: “We are just trying to scrape by and build as much of a life for ourselves as possible—with both dignity and safety. The City makes that impossible for us.”

Jennifer Friedenbach, Executive Director of the Coalition on Homelessness: “San Francisco’s homelessness crisis is its affordable housing crisis. Instead of investing in permanent affordable housing, the city has spent millions of dollars to rid our neighborhoods of visible signs of homelessness. Punitive approaches make homelessness worse, as it only makes it harder for people to access already limited services, find employment and secure stable housing.”

Attorney statements:

“The City is using unhoused residents as the scapegoats for a crisis of economic and racial justice that it helped to create. San Francisco should fight to end homelessness. But the only real solution to San Francisco’s homelessness crisis is housing. Instead of solving homelessness, the City has invested in carceral policies that make the crisis worse. That’s not only unconstitutional, it’s also just bad policy. We should expect better far better from our political leaders.” – Zal Shroff, Senior Staff Attorney, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the Bay Area

“Racism is embedded in the criminalization of homelessness in San Francisco as people of color are disproportionately targeted by anti-homeless ordinances. The current system is complaint-driven, allowing housed residents to dictate traumatizing enforcement against unhoused people who attempt to live in whiter, gentrifying neighborhoods. This suggests that the City is doing more to appear wealthy homeowners than it is to support the health and wellbeing of the most vulnerable with real opportunities out of homelessness. Through the lawsuit, we aim to lay bare the City’s illusory shelter options and end the racist results that criminalization produces.” – John Do, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU of Northern California

The post Metropolis of San Francisco & Mayor London Breed Sued for Harassing Unhoused San Franciscans, Violating Civil Rights to Cowl Up the Metropolis’s Inexpensive Housing Failures appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.