Homelessness in LA falls for second year in a row

LOS ANGELES (CN) — The number of homeless people living in Los Angeles County fell 4% since last year, according to the results of the city’s annual homeless count, released on Monday.

It is the second year in a row that homelessness has fallen, after more than a decade of precipitous increases, and the first time LA has seen consecutive drops since it began conducting counts in 2005.

“For the first time in our city’s recent history, homelessness has gone down two years in a row,” said Mayor Karen Bass at a press conference. “These results are more than data points. They represent thousands of human beings that are now inside, lives that have been saved and neighborhoods that are beginning to heal.”

According to the count conducted by the LA Homeless Services Authority, 72,308 people are living without a home in LA County, including 43,699 in the city — a 3.4% decline compared to last year.

The population of unsheltered homeless people — which is to say the visibly homeless living on the streets — fell even more. There are 47,413 people living on the streets in the county, a 9.5% decrease, and 26,972 in the city, a 7.9% decrease.

The number of people living inside shelters and temporary housing, meanwhile, increased 8.5% in LA County, compared to last year.

In February, thousands of volunteers walked every single block in the county over a single weekend and counted the number of tents and makeshift shelters on the streets. They also counted vehicles that appeared to have people living in them. Officials then surveys in specific areas to develop a statistical model that approximates how many people correlate with the number of encampments. The count is meant to be both an estimate and a snapshot, with the exact number of people experiencing homelessness fluctuating from day to day.

For decades, homelessness has been far and away the number one political issue on the minds of Angelenos. Voters have passed three ballot measures to address the issue since 2016, hiking the sales tax by half a cent to raise billions of dollars in order to build supportive housing and pay for mental health care services. Mayor Karen Bass made it the central issue of her campaign and declared a state of emergency on homelessness on her first day in office. One of her key initiatives, Inside Safe, focuses on getting people off the streets quickly and into interim housing like shelters, motels and tiny homes.

“This lasting change was only possible because we chose to act with urgency, and we chose to reject the status quo, which has been leaving people on the street until housing was built,” Mayor Bass said on Monday. “It’s everybody’s goal that people achieve permanent housing. However, the notion that you should stay in a tent until permanent housing is built is unacceptable.”

Last year, homelessness in LA fell by a modest 2%, though the number of unsheltered people fell by a more statistically significant 10%. The same day the numbers were released, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its landmark ruling in Martin v. Boise, in which it found that cities could ban camping on the streets. That’s spurred a homeless crackdown in several jurisdictions, though the reaction in LA has been more measured.

It’s far from guaranteed that LA’s homeless population will continue to wane. In May, the authority’s outgoing chief, Va Lecia Adams Kellum, warned that budget cuts passed by the LA City Council in May could chip away at social services, pushing more people into homelessness.

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