By Cynthia Strathmann, Executive Director
March 24, 2026
SAJE was recently awarded a $6.6 million contract by the City of Los Angeles Housing Department to do outreach and education with community members about the Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance (TAHO). At SAJE, this news was greeted with satisfaction, as we felt we had written a good response to the city’s request for proposals (RFP), as well as a kind of grim determination.
Why not more elation or exuberance, one might ask? Six million dollars is a lot of money!
When the city approves a contract, it is not like the receiving entity is handed a giant bin of cash that we can dive into like Scrooge McDuck. Nor is being awarded a contract like winning the lottery. City contracts come with a huge number of rules and requirements about how money is spent and what it can and cannot be spent on.
In fact, the city’s requirements are substantial from the beginning of the contracting process. RFP responses can be hundreds of pages (our TAHO RFP response was 98), as the city requires proof that organizations have the expertise and ability to fulfill contract obligations. Anonymous and impartial reviewers then score the RFP responses according to an established rubric, awarding set numbers of points for particular sections. After that, the contracts go to the city council for approval, but the process is designed to insulate city contracting as much as possible from political intervention.
Once a city contract is awarded, contractors must show they are spending the contract money on specific activities and in specific ways in order to be paid. There are two ways the city typically pays contractors like SAJE: the first option is to pay for work done (“deliverables”), the second is to reimburse them for costs they incur (“cost reimbursement”). Imagine hiring someone to paint your house: if you pay them after they have finished painting it, that would be like a deliverable-based contract. If you reimbursed them for their time and materials as they painted, that would be like a cost-reimbursement grant. In reality, most contracts have elements of both; the contract SAJE was just awarded for TAHO outreach is a cost-reimbursement grant, but we also have a long list of deliverables we must report on.
Documentation requirements for government contracts are famously strict. On the cost front, each month SAJE will be required to submit records of staff time spent on and materials purchased for the contract as well as proof that the money left our bank account. We also must collect and submit similar documentation from all our subcontractors. Having to commit to complex reporting requirements explains in part why our satisfaction at having been selected as a contractor was tempered by resignation about the amount of work managing the contract will be. All of the time spent on invoicing and reporting could be spent on helping community members, but the public’s desire for less red tape and efficient service is always in tension with their desire for accountability, and reporting is one of the processes where those conflicting desires meet.
Then why, one might ask, does SAJE seek out government contracts at all?
We do this type of contracting in part because contract work can give us insights we might not otherwise have. For example, SAJE is a contractor with the city’s Rent Escrow Account Program (REAP), which allows tenants in buildings that have failed multiple inspections to put money into a special account for repairs. As contractors, we are able to see the conditions of rental units all over the city. The REAP contract also made us aware that many units in the program were being rented as short-term vacation rentals on platforms like Airbnb (which, considering that the units had flunked more than one housing inspection, should be an alarming bit of news for potential guests).
But the primary reason SAJE pursues city contracts, and the reason we responded to the RFP for the TAHO contract, is that we are a public charity, and providing services to the indigent, as the city quaintly puts it, is our primary purpose and how we pursue and support our mission. In the case of TAHO, we believe protecting tenants from landlord harassment is important, and that is why we do it.
Ultimately, though, SAJE would prefer that this work be done by the city itself. There is a myth in American society, nurtured by interested parties for many years, that private contractors are always more efficient at delivering services than government. Anyone old enough to remember regularly interacting with their local cable company can presumably offer at least an anecdotal rebuttal, and scholarly investigations also show that while some services can be contracted out efficiently, you don’t always get what you pay for.
Additionally, and in some ways more importantly, it is the responsibility of the government to provide services to society, and in a democracy there are mechanisms to hold governments accountable for the services they do or do not provide. Contracting systems displace responsibility from the government to non-elected actors, and there is no way for the public to hold those private leaders accountable through elections. As a public charity, SAJE has public oversight of its finances, cannot by law make a profit, and is bound by our purpose and mission—but we are still not part of the government. And the managers or CEOs of companies don’t have any public obligations; their primary obligation is to their shareholders, not the public, and their primary purpose is to make money.
So while SAJE is always pleased to be awarded a contract because of the services it allows us to provide and the confidence it shows in our experience and ability, there are both practical and philosophical reasons that we greet such awards with determination rather than glee and abandon because we’ve hit the jackpot. Unlike grants, contracts are inflexible and binding, and the constraints they create reverberate throughout organizations. The provision of complex services should be the business of the government, not the private sector. But given the world we currently live in, and the needs of tenants throughout the city, this is, as they say in the movies, as good as it gets.
