Part 3: The Deeper Conversations - Philosophy and Systems Change from Letters to the Housed by Paul Asplund of Second Grace LA


Designing a New Department of Homeless Services: When Root Causes Collide With Political Reality

Author's Note: This post reflects my personal observations, notes, and reflections from a collaborative design session I attended. It represents my interpretation of the presentations and discussions, not an official record. Any errors or omissions are my own. The views expressed are mine and do not represent ChangeWell, LA County, or any affiliated organization.

Parts 1 and 2 covered my impressions of the process. Approximately 100 people gathered together to help design the new Department of Homeless Services and Housing in Los Angeles County. Today, I want to talk about some of the deeper conversations that happened in between the guided sessions.

Some of the most revealing moments happened in the margins—during lunch breaks, in the parking lot, in those brief windows between structured activities when the facilitators' agendas loosened and we spoke freely.

Capitalism as Dogma

On the morning of Day 2, a conversation erupted that cut beneath the surface of all the prototypes. I led a discussion with some members of my group about root causes—the kind of conversation that feels almost absurdly theoretical for a workshop ostensibly about departmental structure and service delivery, but speaks to a fault line I see running through the entire process.

I argued that capitalism functions like a religion, with capital as its figurehead. When people treat an economic system with religious fervor, you can't just carve out alternative spaces. The system demands totality—it won't be satisfied unless it's running everyone's life.

One member of the group traced this back to the Protestant work ethic, how it transformed capitalism into something quasi-religious. The idea that proving your godliness comes through your labor. That's why we dehumanize people who don't fit into the formal work structure. Even atheists who reject organized religion have been conditioned to associate human value with economic production.

"When I was homeless, the benchmark of success set for me was becoming a tax-paying citizen. That was my value. Not my humanity. Not my recovery. My ability to return to economic productivity."

The conversation spiraled outward—into how all of this connects to who gets to exist in society, who gets recognized as fully human. Prevention is 90% of the solution to homelessness. We have 60,000 people losing their housing every year in LA County. Stop that, and we can focus on housing the people already without homes. But prevention hasn't generated the same revenues for the nonprofit industrial complex. In fact, keeping people on the margins housed is much more cost-effective.

The Innovation vs. Reform Tension

I see myself as part of the generation that created this problem. I'm trying to foster solutions while staying out of the way. The answers are in the generations working on this now. I'm so aware that I'm on my way out.

But looking at the prototypes being developed, I felt a familiar frustration: Why don't we just jump ship? This system's failed for 40 years. Homelessness has increased every year since I was born, regardless of who the President was, regardless of how much money we had. It's not because of politics—it's because of capitalism.

I heard similar tensions from others in the room. People felt that all the ideas, while good, were micro-focused—existing within a ship that's sinking. We're recreating what's here and hoping it'll work better.

Some teams had started with more radical visions—restructuring the entire county response around life stages rather than service types, for instance. But even those proposals, which felt revolutionary in the room, worked within existing structures. They weren't the mutual aid networks and community-centered care I ultimately envision. They were department redesign—ambitious department redesign, but still bureaucracy.

The solution, as I see it, is preventing people from falling into homelessness in the first place. Make that the first priority—that everybody stays housed. But to do that, you have to challenge property rights, wealth accumulation, the whole structure.

When I floated why we couldn't just propose burning down capitalism, a facilitator reined me in: we were designing for a department that has to work within the political reality of LA County.

Fair enough. The truth was, everyone was designing for the department that would exist, not the society they wished existed. The prototypes were pragmatic, implementable, politically viable. Many were also, in my framework, fundamentally limited by their failure to challenge the underlying structures creating homelessness in the first place.

Nobody had an answer for that paradox. So we kept designing.

The Asset Framing Breakthrough

Yet I also acknowledged that working within the system could create meaningful change if you changed the underlying philosophy. I shared Trabian Shorter's concept of "asset framing"—looking at helping somebody experiencing homelessness by seeing their assets first, their problems second.

I shared what I've learned after meeting thousands of folks on the streets:

"I meet you and hope this is the worst day of your life. But I can't write you off, because I came back from nothing. I was a dead man walking—literally left for dead, a sex worker at the height of the AIDS crisis. Nobody expected me to live. And I didn't just come back, my life took off."

So I have to look at everybody and say:

  1. What happened to me is possible for you. I was surrounded by a community that supported me through every one of the ups and downs. Let's find that community for you.

  2. What's possible, without any judgment? What are your dreams? What did you want to be when you were growing up? No one grew up wanting to be homeless.

  3. What can we do to create a solution that will work for you?

A provider at our table observed that you're only allowed to be an artist if you're rich. You're only allowed to have passion or enjoy your work if you have privilege. Otherwise, you should just be grateful for whatever job you have access to and be quiet. But what if we flip that? What are you good at, what do you enjoy doing with your life, and how do we utilize that to get you where you want to go?

This philosophy appeared in multiple prototypes, though not always explicitly. Some teams centered community expertise in their designs. Others recognized that workforce retention mattered because clients were "fed up with new case managers"—treating continuity of relationship as valuable. Still others focused on giving people agency over their own information.

Lived Experience as Revolutionary

The generational divide wasn't just philosophical. It was about who had authority to speak.

I heard about one model that illustrated what genuine power-sharing could look like: 16 young people with lived experience and 16 representatives from county departments meeting monthly with equal voting rights. The grant was written by young people with lived experience alongside county staff.

Everyone had equal power in the room. Everyone got to vote. Everyone served as liaisons with different departments. After years of talking about bridging gaps, they'd found a system that actually filled the gaps and created fewer barriers.

It wasn't only youth-led or only provider-based—it was genuinely collaborative. That's the only way forward. People with lived experience can co-create policy, analyze data, and design systems without requiring translation through service providers or bureaucrats.

I connected this to a broader critique: the data exists to keep the funding. The goal is never "ending homelessness" because it's the goal of keeping the program alive. It happens to all nonprofits. The data doesn't serve people—it serves the system that employs us.

Community vs. System

Throughout both days, two competing metaphors structured the conversation: the community and the system.

Community includes organic community care, mutual aid, relationships of reciprocity, and recognition of inherent human value. Some friends of mine founded a nonprofit in Australia called Orange Sky Laundry. Their number one metric is hours of conversation. Not loads of laundry, not miles driven. Hours of conversation. Because community builds through sharing stories.

The system represents bureaucracy, accountability structures, funding streams, contractual relationships, and measured outcomes. It's HMIS and CHAMP, Statement of Work requirements, audit compliance, and performance metrics.

The prototypes tried to bridge both worlds. Some designs were explicitly community-building—creating spaces for genuine human connection over shared meals. But they required project managers, coordinators, tech teams, and county funding.

Other proposals wanted cultural immersion and community-led design and values. But they would become county departments with staff, budget lines, and reporting requirements—system structures.

"When you house somebody in a place where they're not part of the community, there's no reason to stay. You've got nobody who cares about you. People experiencing homelessness live in the neighborhoods they want to live in for the same reason I live in mine. Engaging them in those neighborhoods, instead of moving them across the county, will make a huge difference."

The Critical Assumption

Every prototype included a section on "critical assumptions"—the preconditions that would need to be true for the design to work.

Almost universally, they included:

  • Funding is available to support implementation

  • Political will and buy-in exist at leadership levels

  • Staff capacity can be built or hired

  • Systems integration is technically possible

  • Community participation can be sustained

But hovering over all of them was an assumption that went unwritten: that incremental system reform could address a crisis rooted in structural injustice.

During that final afternoon, as prototypes were being polished, I overheard a side conversation that captured the dilemma. One participant thought we needed to get the SPAs in order first, establish a baseline, before tackling larger community aspects.

Another responded that this was exactly the problem. We keep trying to perfect internal processes while people are dying on the streets. At some point, don't we need to ask whether the entire structure needs to burn down and be rebuilt?

The first person looked pained. They understood the impulse, but had to work within the political reality of the Board of Supervisors, the budget, state and federal regulations. They couldn't propose burning it down. They could only propose making it work better.

Maybe this is why we've been failing to end homelessness for 40 years.

And nobody has ever proposed a solution for that paradox. Yet.

Coming in November: The six prototypes that emerged, and why expanding the possible is itself a revolutionary act.