Report Finds Contract Violations at L.A.’s Dome Village

The Dome Village for the homeless near downtown Los Angeles has violated its government funding contract by failing to prove that the tenants actually were homeless before moving in and by allowing many residents to stay there more than two years, according to a recently released report.

The first probe by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority of the 8-year-old experimental encampment of white fiberglass domes also said the program did not document what vocational training residents received and where they ended up after they left.

Dome Village officials said most of the problems were minor and part of their program’s maturation process. They insisted that all the issues cited have been resolved.

“No one is perfect,” said village founder and well-known homeless activist Ted Hayes, who lost a bid this week for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council. “To an outsider it may look dramatic, but it’s really not.”

The Homeless Services Authority, a joint agency of the county and city of Los Angeles that oversees federally funded programs in the area, is reviewing the corrections offered by Hayes and other Dome Village administrators. The authority expects to complete that review next week.

Hayes said the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently granted more than $700,000 to the program to keep it operating another three years. But the Homeless Services Authority could cancel that funding, which represents the vast majority of the dome compound’s budget.

The report, issued in December, was obtained this week by The Times. It demanded that “corrective actions . . . be taken immediately” and said failure to do so could result in termination of federal funding.

Visible to motorists driving south on the Harbor Freeway near 8th Street and Staples Center, Dome Village, designed to be a transitional housing facility, comprises 20 igloo-shaped units. It houses up to 24 residents, including children. The compound includes showers, toilets, a laundry room, a kitchen and a “cyber-dome,” where residents can learn computer skills on donated computers.

Residents pay a third of their income for rent; some are allowed to stay for free.

Unlike highly structured programs for the homeless, Dome Village emphasizes individual choice and self-rule and is meant to be a model for similar campuses in other cities. The domes are cheaper than other housing units and can be disassembled and moved with relative ease.

The most serious problem raised in the report was a lack of paperwork documenting that the residents had been homeless before moving into the domes.

In response, Katherine Haber, the village’s executive director, said Dome Village began in February to use a new form to track previous living conditions of new residents.

“Our biggest failing was that our bureaucracy of paperwork was not acceptable” to the city and county agency, she said.

The report also challenged an estimate by Dome Village administrators that 62% of the residents find jobs and 73% learn computer skills during their stay.

“There are no records to document this information,” the report said. “A review of client files and discussions with staff revealed that there was no curriculum, no sign-in sheet for both clients and instructors, no defined schedule for use of the cyber-dome, no graduation information and no documentation related to job placement of clients who have graduated from the program.”

Ronda Flanzbaum, who manages the cyber-dome, said the village does not have funding for a full training program. But she said residents have learned several complicated computer applications, including graphics and financing programs.

The report also chided Dome Village for allowing more than half of the clients to stay longer than two years, in violation of the program’s contract.

Hayes said most of those residents have since left. Now, he said, Dome Village has five residents who have stayed longer than two years. Three of those are now employees, who are allowed to stay indefinitely, he said, and the other two have serious health problems but are preparing to find permanent housing.

One of those employees is Chester Ward, who oversees village maintenance. Hayes said he found Ward wandering downtown streets three years ago, unshaven, unwashed and incoherent.

On a recent day, Ward proudly displayed a business card he produced on a computer in the Cyber Dome for his part-time car washing business. He also provided a tour of his dome, which he modified with insulation to keep out the cold. The dome, which he shares with another resident, has a television, a heater, a stereo and a fan.

“It gets cold sometimes, but it’s nice,” he said.

The Homeless Services Authority report also said Dome Village lacks records to show where residents go after leaving the program. Hayes and Haber said a new form has been created to track them.

Since the homeless authority was created in 1993, it has done only occasional inspections of the 120 homeless programs funded with federal and local public money. Most of those inspections came in response to complaints.

But last summer, the authority began annual inspections of all the publicly funded programs for the homeless in Los Angeles County. Mitchell Netburn, executive director of the authority, said the problems uncovered at Dome Village all relate to lack of documentation. But he said, “If they are not addressed, that would raise serious concerns.”

He added, however, that Dome Village administrators have worked hard since the report was issued to address the problems.