More than 75,000 people unhoused in Los Angeles county, but officials see progress

Los Angeles’s unhoused population remained steady from 2023 to 2024, marking the first time in years the county did not record an increase in homelessness, officials said.

The Los Angeles homeless services authority (Lahsa) announced on Friday that it counted 75,312 unhoused people across the county this year, a 0.27% decrease from the unhoused population recorded in 2023 .

Officials say the data suggested meaningful progress in local efforts to address the crisis after substantial increases in homelessness each year since 2018.

The count includes unhoused people living outside and in shelter programs. The number is a rough estimate from a count conducted over three days in January 2024 and the Lahsa figures have previously been found to be undercounts .

Lahsa also reported a 5.1% decrease in people living outside in tents, cars, RVs and makeshift shelters, those considered “unsheltered”. The county recorded 52,365 unsheltered people, representing 69.5% of the total unhoused population. Lahsa reported a 12.7% increase in “sheltered” unhoused people, those living in indoor programs, suggesting more people are being moved out of encampments.

Los Angeles still has a far higher rate of unsheltered homelessness than other major US cities. New York City, for example, has one of the largest unhoused populations in the nation, but most live indoors in the city’s shelter system .

LA county is the most populous county in the US, a sprawling jurisdiction that includes dozens of cities. The city of Los Angeles reported a 2.2% decrease in the unhoused population from 46,260 people in 2023 to 45,252 people this year.

“After years and years of the count going up, finally we see a change,” LA city mayor Karen Bass said at a briefing. “The trend has reversed. Today we know we can and will bring people inside and move LA in a different direction.”

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Black Angelenos continue to be disproportionately affected by the crisis, making up 31% of the unhoused population compared with 9% of the general LA population. Lahsa also reported nearly 1,300 unhoused youth living on the streets this year.

The reasons so many people ended up living on the streets of Los Angeles are multifold: home prices and rents have surged in recent years amid a dire housing shortage; there’s been a spike in evictions as pandemic-era protections have ended ; and there aren’t enough shelter beds for the population, so many people wind up back on the streets after stints in temporary shelter programs.

Of newly unhoused people living on the streets, the count found that 54% said “economic hardship” was the cause of their homelessness, 38% cited a “weakened social network”, 17% cited a “disabling health condition” and 14% cited “system discharge”, such as leaving prison.

The data release comes after LA county declared homelessness a state of emergency in January 2023, with an order meant to accelerate efforts to get people off the street. The board of supervisors passed a $609.7m budget for its homeless initiative for fiscal year 2023-2024, with funds going to initiatives to reduce encampments, increase shelter and housing placements and ramp up mental health and addiction services.

In 2023, more than 27,300 unhoused people got permanent housing, said Dr Va Lecia Adams Kellum, CEO of Lahsa, who said that was a record-high number of placements. At this rate, she said, the county could “end homelessness” within several years if officials were also able to prevent people from losing housing. But the number of people falling into homelessness has continued to outpace the number of people moving off the streets: in 2023, for every 100 people who exited homelessness, at least 120 newly became unhoused.

“The Los Angeles region must reverse decades of under-building affordable housing, help more people achieve economic stability and address the shrinking social safety net,” Adams Kellum said.

The data was released on the same day that the US supreme court ruled that unhoused people sleeping outside can be fined and jailed , a decision LA officials condemned at their briefing.

“We do not agree with criminalizing homelessness,” said Adams Kellum. “This year’s homeless count strongly supports our best practices … We believe in housing and services, not arrest.”

Bass added: “This is a rehash of the 1990s when we couldn’t figure out how to deal with social problems like addiction and gang violence and we just decided we were going to lock everybody up.”

The city of LA does have its own anti-camping ordinance , meant to allow sweeps of people sleeping outside in targeted zones, and a recent report found that since its passage in 2021, only two unhoused people engaged under the law received permanent housing. And after sites were cleared under that law, the vast majority were later repopulated with encampments, the report found.

City and county officials said the new data indicated an overall decline in encampments across the region, though with more than 50,000 people continuing to live outside, the crisis has remained highly visible throughout the region.

Homelessness has continued to be a humanitarian emergency in LA, where now more than six unhoused people are dying every day on the streets and in shelters, an epidemic driven by overdoses, heart disease and traffic deaths.