Los Angeles police responded more than 1,200 times in roughly two years to a single publicly funded homeless housing development minutes from Beverly Hills, one of nearly 50 such taxpayer-funded sites now generating hundreds of calls for violent crime, narcotics, and mental health emergencies across the city.
The building at 5050 Pico Boulevard was supposed to be a luxury apartment complex. During the pandemic, it was converted into permanent supportive housing for homeless residents before it ever opened to paying tenants. The state purchased it through Governor Gavin Newsom's Homekey program for roughly $35 million, approximately $1.2 million per apartment. What the neighbors got in return, a review of LAPD records by The California Post found, was a two-year stream of police dispatches for assaults, batteries, domestic violence, mental health crises, welfare checks, trespassing, suspicious persons, and ambulance calls.
And 5050 Pico is not an outlier. It is the flagship example of a pattern stretching across the city, funded by billions of dollars in public money that officials have refused to account for, and that neither Governor Newsom nor Mayor Karen Bass would discuss when asked.
The California Post reviewed police records covering LAPD responses to nearly 50 publicly funded homeless housing developments over a roughly two-year period. The call volumes at individual addresses are staggering.
At 566 San Pedro Street, officers logged about 840 responses. The calls included fights, cutting injuries, reports of people armed with guns and knives, shots fired, and narcotics activity. A few blocks away, 601 San Pedro Street generated roughly 750 police calls.
Officers responded about 390 times to 517 San Julian Street for trespassing, attempted suicide, and criminal threats. Two addresses on Crocker Street, 527 and 543, produced more than 420 combined calls for domestic violence, batteries, trespassing, and reports of armed groups.
These are not temporary shelters on Skid Row. Some sit in residential neighborhoods where homeowners invested their life savings, trusting that city planning would protect the character and safety of their streets. The pattern is not limited to Los Angeles; New York City has pushed to place unscreened homeless men into quiet Brooklyn neighborhoods over similar objections from residents who were never consulted.
Raphael Swann purchased his townhouse near 5050 Pico Boulevard in 2019. At the time, the adjacent construction site was marketed as a luxury apartment development. The neighborhood sits minutes from Beverly Hills and The Grove, one of the city's premier retail destinations. Swann expected the new building would lift property values and bring foot traffic from young professionals.
Instead, the project was converted to homeless housing during the pandemic, without consulting the neighbors.
Swann told The California Post he has never been invited to a single meeting to address the ongoing problems at the site.
"I was expecting all this new construction with the Metro opening was going to be a positive thing. Not this."
He added: "It's incredibly demoralizing. The city does absolutely nothing."
When The Post visited the building, a memorial with candles sat outside the entrance. Neighbors said a woman had died after falling from the roof while allegedly under the influence of drugs. The official circumstances of her death have not been confirmed.
The Iris, a mixed homeless and market-rate development on Barry Avenue in West Los Angeles near Sawtelle, holds 61 apartments. Thirty-four of those units are designated as supportive housing for formerly homeless residents. The project received nearly $7 million in Proposition HHH funding, a Los Angeles bond measure earmarked for homeless housing.
On February 27, 2025, prosecutors alleged that Ishmail Bangura, identified by police as a resident of The Iris, ran naked from the building, broke into a nearby apartment, attacked a 3-year-old child, and attempted to sexually assault a 63-year-old woman.
Bangura had been arrested twice in the days before the incident. He was free on another pending case at the time of the alleged attack. He later pleaded no contest to assault with intent to rape, first-degree burglary, and felony child abuse, admitting the crimes occurred while he was released on that prior case. His sentencing outcome has not been reported.
That a man arrested twice in a matter of days was still on the street, and still housed in a taxpayer-funded building next to families, captures the failure of a system that treats placement as success and ignores everything that happens afterward. It is a pattern familiar to residents in cities across the country, where sprawling homeless encampments have been allowed to metastasize block by block while officials look away.
Newsom's Homekey program has committed roughly $1.3 billion since 2020 to help local governments purchase hotels, motels, and apartment buildings for conversion into homeless housing. Los Angeles city and county agencies have committed an additional $1.3 billion to renovate, complete, and operate Homekey-linked projects. Combined with Proposition HHH funding, the total regional public investment tied to these developments reaches approximately $2.6 billion.
The California Post requested comment from both Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass. Neither responded.
The silence is consistent with a broader pattern among officials overseeing homeless policy in major American cities. Mayor Bass has previously acknowledged falling short on her own homelessness pledges, deflecting responsibility onto bureaucratic obstacles rather than addressing the consequences her policies impose on neighborhoods.
Scott Meyers, a Republican running for Congress in California's 30th District, which covers large parts of Los Angeles County, did not hold back when asked about the spending.
"What exactly are we getting from our taxes? We defer to future generations the cost of any road maintenance, and we squeeze funding away from basic city services, yet we grant hundreds of $600,000 apartment units to vagrants which become crime scenes that can't be addressed by our police and fire departments because they've suffered cutbacks of funding that was shell-gamed away to build those same apartment units. And it's not just 'no oversight', it all goes completely unmentioned by the Democrats in City Hall, all the way up to our United States Congressional representatives."
Meyers's frustration reflects a straightforward math problem. The money flows out. The police calls pile up. The neighborhoods deteriorate. And the officials who authorized the spending will not even discuss the results.
The Los Angeles experience mirrors a statewide and national failure that has persisted for years. In 2021, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva called for a state of emergency over the homeless crisis, telling the LA County Board of Supervisors that the city had spent over $2 billion on homeless services in just half a year with nothing to show for it. "You cannot build your way out of homelessness," Villanueva said at the time. The LA Homeless Services Authority acknowledged a grim ratio: for every 100 people housed, 120 new individuals ended up on the street.
Villanueva had earlier announced a plan to clear more than 200 homeless tents from Venice Beach by July 4 of that year, stepping outside his normal jurisdiction because local city officials, including City Council member Mike Bonin, who was then facing a recall effort, had failed to act. Villanueva described the boardwalk scene bluntly: "This is not Venice. This is a horror show that's been foisted on this community."
Four years later, the horror show has not ended. It has moved indoors, into buildings the taxpayers purchased, in neighborhoods the taxpayers live in, generating police calls the taxpayers fund.
The LAPD records reviewed by The California Post do not include a comparison baseline showing whether these call volumes are higher or lower than those at similar-sized market-rate buildings in the same neighborhoods. That comparison would be useful. But 1,200 dispatches to a single address in two years, for assaults, batteries, and ambulance calls, does not require a control group to recognize as a problem. Nor does a man arrested twice in a week walking free to allegedly attack a toddler and an elderly woman.
Several basic questions remain unanswered. The exact two-year date range covered by the LAPD records has not been specified. The operators running 5050 Pico Boulevard and The Iris have not been publicly named. The full list of nearly 50 developments reviewed has not been released. And the outcomes of Bangura's two prior arrests, the ones that apparently failed to keep him off the street before February 27, remain unknown.
Those gaps matter. But the facts already on the table tell a clear enough story. From Los Angeles to New York, the governing class has decided that the people who pay for these programs do not deserve a say in where they go, how they operate, or what happens when they fail.
Spend $2.6 billion of someone else's money, refuse to answer questions about the results, and call it compassion. The neighbors living with the consequences have a different word for it.
