City Hall Criticized for Delay in Using AIDS Money

Year after year, Los Angeles has received millions of dollars for providing housing to poor people with AIDS, but rather than spend the money, the city has allowed much of it to accumulate, infuriating some activists.

“We’re waiting,” said Michael Weinstein, president of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the nation’s largest HIV/AIDS medical provider. “We’ve been waiting for a year.”

In response, city officials and others say a recently completed study clarified the housing needs for people with AIDS, and noted that some of the money was allocated last week by the City Council.

“The goal here is not to spend the money faster,” said Deputy Mayor Noelia Rodriguez. “It’s to spend it wisely.”

The unusual controversy--City Hall is far more used to scrambling to find money than to being accused of refusing to spend it--has pitted Weinstein’s organization in a long and bitter feud with the city bureaucracy. There have been demonstrations outside Mayor Richard Riordan’s official residence and counter-accusations that the AIDS group is exaggerating the problem.

There are some recent signs of progress: Last week, the City Council authorized spending $6.2 million on rental assistance and other housing programs for poor people with AIDS. But that still leaves more than $11 million that has yet to be assigned to any project or program.

Over the life of the housing program, known as HOPWA, for Housing Opportunities for People With AIDS, at least $17 million in federal money has gone unspent.

City officials defend the decision to move slowly on distributing the money, saying it was prudent to wait until the completion of the recent study on housing needs before doling out millions of dollars.

“We tried to keep as much of the money intact without committing it until we could find out some of the fundamental things of the study,” said Ferd Eggan, AIDS coordinator for the city of Los Angeles. “We wanted some real guidance in understanding the way people [with HIV or AIDS] are living their lives now.”

In the wake of recent medical breakthroughs in the treatment of AIDS, people with HIV or AIDS have been living longer and healthier.

Last spring, the city noticed that there was a “mismatch” between some of its funding allocations and actual housing needs, said Romerol Malveaux, manager of housing services for the city’s housing department. The city discovered that less than half of the $5 million it had allocated in 1997 to a short-term rental assistance program got used, which indicated that the housing requirements among people with HIV or AIDS had changed, Malveaux said. Rather than spending the amount immediately on something else, the city waited for the results of the housing study it had commissioned.

The study, conducted by Shelter Partnership Inc., is believed to be the first of its kind in the nation since the advent of protease inhibitors. It assessed the housing needs of low-income people with HIV or AIDS in the Los Angeles area. One of its major findings was the increasing need for long-term housing for independent living. The survey of 785 people also found that many of the respondents were very poor, seemed particularly vulnerable to being homeless, and had health problems not related to HIV.

The preliminary results of that study were available months ago, and activists complained that the city should have begun distributing housing money then.

“They’ve had this information for seven months,” said Ged Kenslea, community relations director for AIDS Healthcare Foundation. “That was a missed opportunity.”

Federal officials, who have chided the city in the past for its failure to spend the housing money as it was provided, declined to criticize the most recent delay.

The city acted prudently in waiting to spend the money, said Mary Teemley, deputy director of community planning and development for the Southern California office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provides Los Angeles with its federal housing grants for people with HIV and AIDS. “They did not charge right ahead until they got the results of the study.”

One frustration among those who criticize the city is the difficulty in pinning down who is responsible and how much money is at stake. At first, city officials estimated that it was under $10 million, then conceded it was $13 million, then amended that figure to $17 million.

Weinstein complained that the shifting numbers reflected the city’s poor oversight of the money. And he blamed Riordan for failing to do enough to force the bureaucracy into action.

“With all these protests . . . our mayor, who is missing in action on most issues, has not said word one,” Weinstein said. “Where’s the action plan? No one’s being held accountable for the fact that this money hasn’t been used.”

Rodriguez dismissed that criticism.

“Mayor Riordan has a solid track record of providing services to people with AIDS and others,” she said. “The mayor’s not focused on criticism. He’s focused on providing services.”