Homelessness continues to soar, jumping 9% in L.A. County, 10% in the city

Homelessness continued to rise dramatically, increasing by 9% in Los Angeles County and 10% in the city of Los Angeles last year, in a stark illustration of the challenges faced by officials trying to reduce the number of people living on the streets.

Efforts to house people, which include hundreds of millions of dollars spent on shelter, permanent housing and outreach, have failed to stem the growth of street encampments, as reflected in the annual point-in-time count released Thursday by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

The count, conducted by thousands of volunteers during a three-day period in January, projected that 75,518 people were living in interim housing or a tent, car, van, RV, tent or makeshift shelter in Los Angeles County, compared with 69,144 the previous year.

Since the 2015 count, homelessness has increased by 70% in the county and 80% in the city.

“The results are definitely disappointing with all the hard work and all the investment, but they’re not surprising,” LAHSA’s new chief executive, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, said in a pre-release briefing on Tuesday. “We thought with last year’s numbers that we were flattening the curve. However, what we see in this trajectory is that people remain in a situation of vulnerability where they’re falling into homelessness faster than we can house them.”

“There’s much more needed to right the ship,” she added.

Unhoused Billy Jones speaks with volunteer Ari Hamilton while he was canvassing the Echo Park neighborhood during the 2023 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count on Jan. 26 in Los Angeles. Jones has been living on the streets since 2019.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

In struggling to explain the continued growth of homelessness, Adams Kellum acknowledged that the reasons are not fully known, but she pointed to economics as the underlying cause. She cited a recent study by UC San Francisco, finding that among people who had leases before becoming homeless, a decrease in income was the most common reason for losing their housing.

Almost all the growth came from the Westside and Harbor areas of Los Angeles, with each seeing increases of just over 2,000 people, or about 45%.

South L.A., which has the second-highest homeless count in the region behind central Los Angeles, countered the trend with a modest 10% decrease of about 1,600 people. The remainder of the county was statistically unchanged.

The increase was entirely made up of people living on the street, as opposed to those in shelters. Countywide, the unsheltered population jumped 14% to more than 55,000, while the count of people in shelters declined slightly to just over 20,000.

The annual count showed an 18% increase in chronic homelessness, with an even sharper rise among those living outdoors. Just over 27,000 people were living on the street who had been homeless more than a year and had a disabling health, mental health or substance use condition, according to the count — nearly 5,000 more than the year before. Another 5,000 chronically homeless people were counted in shelters, for an increase of 7%.

As in prior years, Black people were over-represented, making up 31% of homeless residents, or more than four times greater than their overall share of the county population. The Latino portion leveled off at nearly 43% after increasing substantially in last year’s count. The count of Asians more than doubled, though at 1,212 it was less than 2% of the whole.

A demographic survey conducted after the count found that 25% of homeless people self-reported experiencing several mental illness and 30% reported substance use disorder.

Unhoused Mario Lopez sleeps on a bus stop bench in Echo Park and was counted during the 2023 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

“These results are disappointing. It is frustrating to have more people fall into homelessness even as we are investing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and resources into efforts to bring people inside,” L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn said in a written statement. “I hold out hope that the new partnership between the County and City of Los Angeles will make a difference and help us more effectively address this crisis. 2023 needs to be a watershed year for us where we turn these trends around.”

The new city and county partnership began with the declaration of local emergencies that paved the way for county agencies to work more closely with the city of L.A.’s homeless outreach teams.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass expressed a similar sentiment.

“The challenge before us is vast, but we will continue to work with urgency to bring Angelenos inside,” she said in a written statement. “We must sustain our momentum by locking arms with leaders at every level of government as we confront this crisis as the emergency that it is. Lives depend on it.”

This year’s increase continued an almost unbroken trend that has seen Los Angeles County’s homeless population rise every year except one since 2015, the year before the city and county began pumping funds into homeless housing and services.

Los Angeles city voters adopted Proposition HHH, a $1.2-billion bond measure to build new homeless housing, in 2016. County voters followed the next year with Measure H, a quarter-percent sales tax that generates more than $350 million annually for a variety of initiatives, including shelter beds, housing vouchers and services for permanent housing.

City and county leaders credited those initiatives for a modest 4% decrease in the 2018 count, but that was followed by two years of double-digit increases. After the coronavirus pandemic forced cancellation of the 2021 count, two more years of increases followed.

During the tenure of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, the city’s spending on homelessness grew from a few million to about $1 billion, a large chunk of it HHH funds. In her first budget, Bass allotted $1.3 billion to homeless programs.

Earlier this month, Bass reported that more than 14,000 people experiencing homelessness had been moved off the streets during the first six months of her administration. About 30%, or 4,332, acquired permanent housing, and an additional 10,049 people were placed in interim housing through city and county programs from December through May, she said.

Bass said the housing placements resulted from executive directives she enacted upon entering office, including a state of emergency on homelessness and the launching of the Inside Safe program, which is designed to clear street encampments by moving unhoused people indoors.

Adams Kellum, who was appointed LAHSA’s chief executive in January, attempted to set an optimistic tone.

The agency has “a mission and a purpose that drives us into the forefront of this crisis,” she said.

She also pointed to data that “tells us a real story behind the work that is being done to address homelessness in our community.”

She said the city and county are now working with “coordination, collaboration and strategic focus.” The new strategy has led officials to make some gains in addressing homelessness over the past few months.

For the third consecutive year, she said, the housing system has made more than 20,000 placements. While little permanent housing was produced during the early years of Proposition HHH, thousands of new units are now being completed, she said.

She also praised Bass’ Inside Safe program as an overwhelming success, noting that emergency directives put into place by the city and county have reduced the time it takes for outreach workers to bring someone into interim housing.

“For the adult population, we have reduced the time by 45% [from 110 days to 61 days] over the last couple of years,” she said.

For youths ages 18 to 24, the time was halved from 127 days to 59.

Those improvements, which occurred in the first half of this year, happened too late to be reflected in the count.

For the first time LAHSA provided a limited view into the imprecision inherent in its methodology. In the pre-release briefing on Tuesday, a researcher with LAHSA’s statistical contractor explained how the canvassers’ observations were converted into numbers.

Following the street count, researchers survey thousands of homeless people to gather demographic information and calculate averages for the number of people who occupy each type of dwelling, said Benjamin Henwood, a professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.

Those averages are then used to estimate the total number of people living on the street. By contrast, the shelter count is a head count gathered directly from the shelters.

While letting its topline numbers for the city and county stand without qualification, LAHSA’s report provided a confidence interval for the total count in its administrative area covering all of L.A. County except Glendale, Long Beach and Pasadena, which conduct their own counts.

With 95% certainty, it said, the number of unsheltered people in that area would be within 1,558 above or below the estimate of 71,320, which doesn’t include the three cities that conduct their own counts.

Henwood also noted that not all year-over-year comparisons would be considered statistically significant. In particular, the finding that the number of transition aged youth living on the street had doubled was not a reliable statistic because of changes in methodology.

However, he said, the increase in this year’s total number were sound, in spite of issues that in last year’s count raised doubts about its accuracy.

After connectivity breakdowns in a new mobile phone app marred last year’s count and raised doubts about its accuracy, redundancies were introduced this year to ensure that every area was counted, said Paul Rubenstein, LAHSA’s deputy chief of external relations.