The Most Expensive Mistake We're Making: Why LA Doesn't Prevent Youth Homelessness

Manchester wove this safety net. Los Angeles can too. | Visual by deluxmultimedia

Letters to the Housed by Paul Asplund of SecondGrace.LA

Over the past few weeks I've been walking through the IGH Vanguard Cities report, looking at what other cities are doing about homelessness and asking why LA isn't doing the same. We've covered Lisbon's social enterprise restaurant model, Buenos Aires's no-exclusion system redesign, and this week I want to talk about Greater Manchester, England, because they're doing something we've never seriously tried: human-centered design, asset framing, and deeply cross-coordinated programming on a large scale. What Manchester have done is point-by-point what I've been talking about in this blog. And their success in preventing young people from becoming homeless in the first place is remarkable.

Youth homelessness is where chronic homelessness starts. Catch people early and you reduce the population that feeds every expensive crisis system we operate. Manchester figured this out and LA can learn from their success.

What Manchester Built

In 2021, Greater Manchester launched a Homelessness Prevention Strategy, co-created with people who had lived experience of homelessness. It was the city-region's first. Instead of focusing exclusively on people already on the streets, they invested heavily in stopping people from getting there.

The centerpiece for young adults was the Young Persons' Homelessness Prevention Pathfinder, targeting 18-to-25-year-olds at risk of homelessness. It was designed by the Greater Manchester Better Outcomes Partnership and delivered through a network of local providers across all ten boroughs, with the global nonprofit Depaul as a founding partner.

The program works through coaching, not case management. Every young person gets a dedicated coach who helps them co-create a personalized plan based on their strengths and goals. The plan might address housing instability, debt, family breakdown, mental health, education, or employment, but the young person drives it. There is no prescribed pathway, no program they have to fit into.

Young people co-produced the program design. And the program adapted when it learned from them. Pathfinder was originally built around wellbeing and skills development, but the evaluation found that most participants came in needing housing help first. So the program shifted to meet that reality. That kind of responsiveness is rare in government-funded services.

According to the IGH's 2026 Vanguard report, 1,711 young people completed Initial Support Plans as of December 2024, with the majority achieving at least one housing outcome and at least one self-determined personal outcome. The December 2024 evaluation conducted by GMCA found that the consistent coaching relationship was the single most important factor in positive outcomes. Young people reported that having someone who showed up reliably, who didn't rotate off their case, who they felt genuinely cared, was what made the difference.

Why It Works

Three design choices set Manchester apart from what we do in LA.

Outcomes-based commissioning. Providers don't get paid just for enrolling people or running programs. They get paid when young people achieve specific results: sustained housing, improved wellbeing, engagement in education or employment. This creates a fundamentally different incentive structure than LA's contract-based system, where providers are accountable for service delivery metrics (how many people came through the door, how many assessments were completed) rather than whether anyone's life actually changed.

Real-time shared data. Manchester built a data framework across providers that tracks what's happening with participants in something close to real time (Better Angels is trying to build this in LA). They partnered with the Centre for Homelessness Impact as an Early Adopter of a national data framework measuring eight indicators designed to tell whether rough sleeping is being prevented and, when it happens, whether it's rare, brief, and non-recurring. Compare that to LA, where RAND Corporation found a 32% undercount in our 2025 Point-in-Time data.

A coordinated ecosystem, not isolated programs. The Pathfinder doesn't operate alone. It sits inside a system that includes A Bed Every Night (ABEN), which expanded to 601 bed spaces in 2025/26 with tailored services for women, LGBTQ+ people, people with pets, and veterans. It includes a Housing First program that has placed 426 people in secure tenancies with a 78% sustainment rate after 18 months. And it includes a Women's Rough Sleeping Census that deliberately challenges the narrow government definition of rough sleeping (physically "bedded down") because women's survival strategies make them less visible.

The result of all of this, taken together: a 42% drop in rough sleeping since the 2017 peak. In December 2024, rough sleeping across Greater Manchester fell 23% compared to December 2023.

"Having someone who showed up reliably, who didn't rotate off their case, who they felt genuinely cared — that was what made the difference." — Young people in the Pathfinder program, GMCA Evaluation, December 2024

Why This Matters for LA

Each year, roughly 1,000 young people age out of Los Angeles County's foster care system. A California Policy Lab study found that nearly one in four of them report being homeless at some point between ages 21 and 23. A 2024 RAND survey of nearly 400 transition-age youth experiencing housing instability in LA found that 57% reported serious mental health challenges, more than a quarter had less than a high school diploma, and their median monthly income was $450. A follow-up longitudinal study tracking 24 of these youth found they moved an average of 15 times in a single year.

Fifteen times in one year. That's not a housing system.

Manchester's Pathfinder evaluation found that 58% of young people in their program had left home because of family or relationship breakdown. 38% had been in the care system with what evaluators described as "poor" transition support. 20% were seeking asylum, many as unaccompanied minors. The causes of youth homelessness in Manchester aren't so different from what we see in LA. The response is where we diverge.

LA does have programs for transition-age youth. In November 2025, the LA County Department of Mental Health launched a new Office of Transition Age Youth. LAHSA runs a Transitional Housing Program. DCFS has its Independent Living Program. Mental Health America of Los Angeles operates TAY-specific services with housing, employment support, and therapy. The Board of Supervisors even restored TAY and prevention funding after initially cutting it from the FY 2025-26 budget.

But none of this adds up to what Manchester has: a coordinated, region-wide prevention system where providers across all areas share data, get paid for outcomes, and give every young person a consistent coach who stays with them. What we have is a collection of programs, some excellent, that don't talk to each other, don't share data effectively, and serve young people through a system that wasn't designed around their needs.

"When you design a service organization, you go out to the people you intend to serve and ask them what they need. Then you build the organization. Then you go back and ask them again. You keep iterating. Manchester did this."

This is the human-centered design problem I talk about constantly. Manchester's young people said they needed housing help, and the program changed. In LA, programs are designed from the top, and by the time they reach the front line, they've lost connection to the people they're supposed to serve.

The Math of Prevention

Los Angeles could be saving lives and millions of dollars at the same time. Greater Manchester is a region of about 2.8 million people, comparable to the city of LA's 3.9 million. They spend roughly £75 million (about $95 million) per year just on temporary accommodation. They only recoup 42% of that through housing benefits, which means the net cost of managing homelessness reactively is enormous.

Prevention costs a fraction of crisis response. The Pathfinder was launched as a £663,000 ($890,000 US) pilot. Even after expanding region-wide, the investment is tiny compared to what temporary accommodation, emergency rooms, and criminal justice involvement cost when young people cycle through the system for years.

In LA, the approved FY 2025-26 spending plan for homeless services was $908 million. How much of that was dedicated specifically to preventing youth homelessness before it starts? Not a standalone program comparable to Pathfinder. The TAY and prevention funding that was restored after the Board of Supervisors initially cut it was a fraction of the total budget, and it was restored only after advocacy, not because prevention was built into the spending plan as a priority.

We spend the money either way. We spend it on crisis, or we spend it on prevention. One of those approaches has a 42% reduction in rough sleeping to show for it. The other has a system where young people move 15 times in a year.

"We spend the money either way. We spend it on crisis, or we spend it on prevention."

What We Could Build

If LA County built a Manchester-style youth prevention system, it would look something like this: a single coordinated program across all eight Service Planning Areas, with providers who are paid when young people achieve housing stability, wellbeing improvements, and educational or employment engagement. Every young person would get a consistent coach who stays with them through the process, coordinating with all of the relevant support systems. The program would be designed with input from the young people it serves, and it would adapt based on what they say is working and what isn't. And it would be backed by shared data that lets everyone — providers, county agencies, community organizations — see the same picture in real time.

Manchester built it. It's working. It costs less than what we're spending now. And the young people it serves are the same young people who, without intervention, become the chronic homeless population that LA spends billions trying to help twenty years too late.

Next week I'll step back from the Vanguard Cities series to talk about what all of these models add up to, and what a comprehensive LA response could look like if we had the political will to build one.

Join us at SecondGrace.LA. The solutions exist when we work together.

In love and service, Paul