The Brief

It’s been a year since the most destructive fires in L.A. County history killed at least 31 people, reduced neighborhoods to ash and instantly changed the lives of tens of thousands of Angelenos.

Most survivors remain displaced. Temporary housing insurance funds are dwindling. Many whose homes still stand continue to fight to get the structures properly cleaned. And the majority of residents, underinsured or not insured at all, face a wide gap in the funds needed to rebuild. Survivors are digging into savings and taking out new loans.

At the same time, the grief, trauma and emotional devastation wrought by the Eaton and Palisades fires remain at times overwhelmingly present.

Every survivor’s situation is unique yet connected by loss, obstacles to recovery and a deep sense of connection to the places they called home.

To understand how residents are continuing to pick up the pieces, LAist spoke with six survivors — some families, some individuals — a year after the L.A. fires.

The barber

Barber Geoff Cathcart smiles as Jason Fulton inspects his haircut at Lawrence and Colbert in Altadena.

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It was a typical day at Altadena’s oldest salon, Lawrence and Colbert, a Black-owned business that has served the community for some 46 years.

Well, it was a typical day after the Eaton Fire.

Geoff Cathcart expertly styled the hair of longtime client Jason Fulton, the buzz of the shaver the backdrop to their conversation — also typical for the barbershop, yet all its own, about men and their mental health.

But the rest of the barber chairs were empty.

A year after the Eaton Fire, they’re empty much of the time.

Lawrence and Colbert salon in Altadena is pretty quiet these days. But barber Geoff Cathcart says he is seeing slow progress in the area's rebirth.

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The barbers and stylists here have seen their business plummet. The majority of their clients — mostly elders in Altadena’s tightknit Black community — lost their homes in the fire.

Cathcart, who grew up in Altadena, lost his rental and now commutes from Glendora.

“ I used to walk to my shop ... didn't have to worry about gas or commute or traffic or any of those things,” Cathcart said. “And now it's just different, just adjusting. But I still want to show up and be here for the community. This is where I made my roots.”

He plans to return to Altadena permanently, eventually. But finding an affordable rental in the area has proved impossible — prices have shot up since the fire. So he’s waiting for prices to go down or for his own family members to rebuild — three homes his extended family owned burned down.

Cathcart says most of his clientele have had to relocate to Glendale, Pasadena, Lancaster or even out of state. Half of the salon’s stylists have been forced to move on because of the lack of business. Cathcart, who has been barbering for more than 25 years, says he’s applied for other jobs to supplement his income.

“When you come up to Altadena, there's not a lot here at the moment, and so it's very depressing,” Cathcart said. “I've had clients who don't want to come back until things are built back. It's heartbreaking to see. I've kind of become desensitized to some extent because I witness this every day coming to work.”

A year later, though, he sees the community starting to come back.

“It's slow, definitely slow,” Cathcart said. “But I do see progress. I do have hope.”

Meanwhile, he’ll keep cutting hair and having the conversations he’s always had with his clients — often intimate and personal, though the tune of them now is dominated by the fire’s aftermath.

“Every conversation is, 'Where are you at in the rebuild? and, 'Do you need help?' 'What stage are you at?' And I find, at least for my clients and the people I've run across, there are some people making great progress, but there's some people that are just completely lost still,” Cathcart said. “ Every conversation is really a psychological and emotional evaluation of how everyone is doing.”

That’s something the fire couldn’t change, he said — the role of the Black barbershop, long a sanctuary for the community, a hub of information sharing and support. The shop may have physically survived the fire, but the loss of business since is an ongoing threat.

“If we lose this, then it's just one less place for us to go as a community, as a people and as a culture,” Cathcart said. " We've been trying to rebuild the community one step at a time by just showing up and coming to work.”

A mobile home paradise lost

Donna and Howard Burkons at their rental in Woodland Hills.

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Donna and Howard Burkons have lived out of four suitcases since January 2025. The longest they’ve stayed in one place is a few months — a friend’s condo in Redondo Beach, a six-week road trip to Colorado and Arizona, a couple of furnished rentals in Woodland Hills they found on a website for traveling nurses.

Only recently did Donna Burkons buy linens for the carousel of beds they’ve been sleeping in, plus a skillet and some utensils of their own.

The only thing from their home that survived the Palisades Fire was a 100-year-old iron skillet that Donna Burkons’ great-grandmother used to cook on a chuckwagon back in Indiana. They’re reluctant to buy much of anything — their constant moves since the fire have become something like momentum to keep up until they rebuild.

The Burkonses lived on a rented lot in the Tahitian Terraces mobile home park overlooking the Pacific — one of the few middle-class havens in the Palisades. Their deck was bigger than their home. Donna would watch the sunset every evening with a glass of wine. Howard would watch her watching it. They’d keep an eye out for the “green flash” to light up the horizon just before the sun dipped below it.

“We’d see cars parked along the ocean just to see the sunset, and we had it every day,” Donna Burkons said.

“And we didn’t ever take it for granted,” Howard Burkons said, finishing the thought — a common occurrence for the couple who have been together since they were 18, just two hippie kids from Scottsdale, Ariz., who fell in love, moved to L.A. to work in film and TV and built this dream life by the ocean.

One of the Burkonses' grandchildren drew their former home in the Palisades.

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That is until all but one of the 158 mobile homes in Tahitian Terraces burned in the Palisades Fire. One of their neighbors died. The mobile home park next door, home to another 150 or so residents, also burned.

Now in their 70s, the Burkonses are caught in a waiting game. They owned their mobile home but not the land it sat on. So they have to wait for their landlord to complete the necessary infrastructure and permitting before they can start to rebuild. On top of that, like most survivors, they’re deeply underinsured.

It’s not the fire, or the controversy about how it started, or Small Business Administration loan applications or the 55 pages of inventory they had to put together for insurance that are their biggest enemies. Right now, Howard Burkons says, their enemy is time. They estimate it could be years before they rebuild. Yet their temporary housing insurance will run out this summer.

“At our age, it felt like the pandemic stole a couple of years of our life, and now the fire is stealing another four or more years of our life,” Howard Burkons said.

Before the fire, a typical day was spent with their four grandchildren, babysitting or helping with carpooling. Donna Burkons loved to play pickleball with friends. Howard Burkons would swim in the mobile home park pool every morning. They’d go out dancing the two-step together — a hobby they fell in love with in their 50s and one they’ve kept up since the fire to hold on to something normal and joyful. Their grandkids help with that too.

The Burkonses thought about moving back to Arizona, where they own some rental units. But they couldn’t be so far from the kids and grandkids. And they can’t afford to buy a “stick-built” house elsewhere. So for now, they’re taking it day by day, waiting to get back to their mobile home paradise, their little lots overlooking the grand Pacific.

The family who never left

Ana Martinez at home.

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There’s an old water well outside of Ana Martinez’s house in west Altadena. At first glance, the spiraling metal design, charred and rusted, seems intentional, evoking a country charm.

But the metal was blackened by the Eaton Fire.

“ It's just a reminder of what we went through,” Martinez said. “We did lose a lot of pieces that melted, but it's there. Just like us, you know? We survived.”

The Martinez family home still stands — Ana, her husband, Carlos, and their sons fought the flames throughout that terrifying night a year ago. As the wooden fence and tree in front of their house caught fire, they hacked them apart with a chainsaw. Their neighbor’s house burned to the ground.

In the time since and in the absence of sufficient insurance, Ana said the family has spent down their savings and maxed out credit cards to repair the house — putting up a concrete fence, replacing the melted windows and singed roof, cleaning smoke and ash and installing new insulation, rebuilding the carport that was reduced to ash.

“We got less than $70,000 from the insurance, and we've spent almost $200,000 with everything that needed to be done,” Ana said. “So we're starting at zero again, but at least we have a home.”

The family’s determination to protect their property — a place Ana and Carlos Martinez raised their three children, where one of their sons lives with his own children now, in the front house — brought them all together, closer than ever.

But over the months following, as funds dwindled, as Carlos Martinez, an electrician, and their sons worked around the clock to make ends meet, as Ana Martinez, who is in charge of the bills, watched the costs pile up, tension grew.

“We've never had money, but we've never had problems paying our bills,” Ana Martinez said. “At the beginning, it brought us together. Now, it's been a lot of problems because it doesn't matter how much work gets done, there's not enough money. There’s been a lot of arguing.”

They’re giving themselves at least five years “before we could say, hopefully, that we’ll be back to normal.” The money will come back, Ana Martinez is sure.

She’s not as sure about their health — the Martinezes never left their home, breathing in the smoke of the fire, then the dust of the debris cleanup and construction surrounding them since.

She and her husband developed asthma — they now use nebulizers and carry inhalers. Both of them have started losing their hair from all the stress. Ana Martinez had a cancerous growth removed.

“There's days that I wake up and I feel like I've been punched in the stomach,” Ana Martinez said. “My throat always hurts ... this burning sensation in my throat.”

Then there are the less tangible reminders: like when a neighbor recently had a barbecue and Ana ran outside, smelling smoke, frantically scanning for flames. Or the spike of terror she feels when the Santa Ana winds start up, or when the sun sets, its orange glow reminding her of the fire’s apocalyptic days. The apparently random moments of grief that well up, painful in her chest.

“ I've never been a person that would cry for no reason,” Ana Martinez said. “It's changed me.”

Parts of the well melted, but like the Martinezes, it survived.

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The lemon tree is putting out fruit.

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A year on, those emotions are lessening, or at least, she’s finding ways to let them move through her more easily. Ana says she feels more present, she notices the little things more. The lemon trees in her yard that somehow returned, that have borne fruit despite the flames. The beauty of the massive surviving oak that continues to shade their home. She says she’s less inclined to grow angry when someone cuts her off in traffic or is rude at the grocery store.

“We don't know what people are carrying around, you know? If we lash out for no reason, it's because we have so much internally that sometimes we just don't know how to control our emotions,” Ana Martinez said.

Despite the stress of it all, and the survivor’s guilt she continues to feel, watching neighbors sell their lots or struggle through the process of rebuilding, she finds solace in gratefulness.

“ That's what I've learned so far because there's been days that I'm just grateful that I'm able to get out of bed,” she said. “It's made me very mindful to appreciate what we have. ... We have life, and that's all that matters.”

The Holocaust survivor

Rachel Schwartz's home after the Palisades Fire.

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Rachel Schwartz lived in a house way up on a hill, where she could see the ocean. She loved clear days when Catalina Island emerged from the haze on the horizon, its rugged silhouette vivid on a glittering sea.

Schwartz called the Pacific Palisades home for nearly three decades, and all she wants to do is get back. In the meantime, the 94-year-old is living in an apartment off a busy road in Westwood.

“It left me, I'm afraid, with a severe depression,” Schwartz said. “The doctor said this is part of losing everything.”

She said she’s no longer the person she used to be — upbeat, always ready to try new things.

“Right now, nothing interests me except my wish to rebuild my home,” Schwartz said.

This is not the first time Schwartz has lost everything.

Born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1931, she and her older sister were the sole members of her immediate family to survive the Holocaust. After the war, the two girls landed in Detroit, where they had some relatives. Schwartz was just 15.

Eventually, Schwartz, her husband and their two young children moved to L.A. She and her husband divorced, and Schwartz built a career as an accountant, then real estate agent — she still works to this day. She eventually remarried. In 1997, she and her future second husband were able to purchase a townhouse in the Palisades, a dream. It was the house she planned to stay in the rest of her life.

Then came the fire.

“ I told my mother, ‘Mom, you've been through three concentration camps and a three-week march,’” said Bruce, Schwartz’s son. “You can survive this fire if you survived that.”

“This fire is like a  second Holocaust. Everything gone, everything burned,” Rachel Schwartz said. “If not for Bruce, I wouldn’t have made it.”

But now, Rachel and Bruce Schwartz, who lived with her, are racing against a seemingly stuck clock. They haven’t been able to start the rebuilding process because of complications with the rules of their homeowners association — 17 units burned; eight didn’t. The HOA requires 75% of the members to approve a rebuild in the case of calamity, and the majority of residents voted against it.

“There are many unanswered questions as to what is going to happen to us,” Bruce Schwartz said. “ We're stuck in limbo, and I think it's going to be three to five years before we have a clear picture.”

Not only are there complications with the HOA, but they’re also severely underinsured — just a few months before the fire, State Farm dropped them, and residents had to instead get on the California FAIR plan.

Meanwhile, their temporary housing insurance is running out. And anger about the cause of the fire — a reignition of a fire that started a week before and wasn’t completely put out — and the ongoing lack of accountability remains a constant.

“I feel that it was a great negligence why the fire was not put out,” Rachel Schwartz said.

But a year on, they are both growing tired of the anger and the grief like a constant cloud hanging over them.

“We just have to move on from it because there's been so much sorrow and so much feeling bad, that it's time to start feeling good,” Bruce Schwartz said. “It's time to move forward and rebuild our community.”

Rachel Schwartz nodded as her son spoke. She still can get her nails and hair done, she joked, so things can’t be all that bad.

“ I came from Europe as a small girl, and even in this tragedy, we still have enough to eat. We have comfortable beds to sleep,” she said. “I look out and the sun is shining. And I still feel very grateful to be in America.”

A prefab symbol of hope

Charlotte and Steve Gibson hosted a construction-viewing party for their neighbors.

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On a quiet street of mostly empty lots in Altadena, a celebration recently took place. Steve and Charlotte Gibson’s new home is nearly finished — they expect to move in at the end of this month.

“It seemed like nothing was happening for a long time. ... We didn’t see any movement for months and months,” Steve Gibson said. “And now it feels really rapid.”

The couple had lived in their 1923 wood-framed house for 22 years before it was reduced to ash by the Eaton Fire. Their new house is dramatically different — a 900-square-foot, hyper modern, steel-framed prefabricated home. It’s all electric, with solar panels and a battery. The Gibsons plan to landscape with mostly California native plants, as well.

They had concerns about being one of the first to rebuild. Would their old neighbors return? Would they be alone and surrounded by construction for years to come?

But on a recent day, as they looked at the modern, rectangular boxes that will become their new home, “the hope, the promise, the future outweigh those concerns by a mile,” Charlotte Gibson said.

It’s why they hosted a “construction viewing party” in December — to show their neighbors rebuilding is possible.

Another couple from up the street stopped by to say they were going with the same Gardena-based prefab housing company, called Cover.

“ We're nowhere near this yet, but we’re very excited,” the wife said as a toddler gripped her hand. “We came to stalk your house to see what it's going to look like, so thanks for doing this.”

The Gibsons are in for a big change. The home they lost was built in the 1920s. Their new home is prefabricated and modern.

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Plans show what the Gibsons' new home will look like when complete.

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The Gibsons still face a several-hundred-thousand-dollar gap in how much their insurance paid out and how much they’ve had to spend on their rebuild. They hope the Small Business Association disaster loan they applied for will cover that.

Despite the uncertainty and the grief of all that’s been lost, their determination and stamina to rebuild and return has remained in large part due to community ties made long before the fire.

“Thankfully our neighbors on this block ... the ones that are closest to us and that we're closest to, they're all rebuilding,” Charlotte Gibson said. “ And that was a huge lift.”

The family next door, the Pattersons, are among those neighbors. They hope to move in by summer.

“ I feel so hopeful for the future and for Altadena,” said 22-year-old Mona Patterson. “It's just nice knowing that our community's coming back and that the Altadena that I knew and grew up with is still here.”

The block may end up looking very different. But as long as the people who made it what it was come back, the Gibsons are sure it will once again feel like home.

“We’ve heard from people who were here today, the progress they've made, so that's encouraging,” Steve Gibson said. “That makes me think, 'Hey, we're not going to be here all alone for long.'”

Rebuilding side-by-side

The Horusickys, left, with their daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren (and Roxy the dog) at one of their homes under construction.

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The sound of construction is a constant on a formerly quiet street in the Marquez Knolls neighborhood of Pacific Palisades.

A foundation is being laid on one lot. Next door, the new wood framing of a single-story house is getting finishing touches. When they’re done, three generations will live side by side. Again.

The sound of hammers and drills is a welcome symphony as Andrea Horusicky Heindel, her husband, Jason Heindel, and their teenagers, Misha and Jakob, enter the partially built home.

Andrea Horusicky Heindel grew up in the house that stood here before, a place that encompassed the family’s history — her father, Michael Horusicky Sr., and mother, Jana, landed in the Palisades after escaping from Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet invasion. Andrea was born soon after.

In 2012, Andrea and her husband were able to purchase the house right next door. They built a little gate in the fence between them so the kids could easily visit their grandparents.

“We’ll try to bring that back again,” Andrea said.

Michael Horusicky Sr., now in his 80s, built a successful construction company for over 40 years in the Palisades — a reason he has the know-how to move so swiftly on his rebuild today, as well as the friends to get it done, electricians and contractors, many of whom lost their own homes in the fire.

Jana and Michael Horusicky Sr. can see the progress on their daughter's home next door from their own home under construction.

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Michael Horusicky Sr.'s construction experience has helped jump-start the families' rebuilds.

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He hopes he and Jana can move in by May, but he knows it won’t be the same. His daughter and her family hope to be in their house by late fall.

“ I don't have a problem building a house, but I have problem with losing the house — it’s going to be empty,” Michael Horusicky Sr. said. “And my age is another problem. So I have to do it quick.”

Meanwhile, the family of six and one dog are living in a rental nearby. The kids are rotating paying for Ubers to see displaced friends whose houses they used to bike to. The parents are navigating insurance and contractors as they both work full-time jobs. Their temporary housing insurance is running out, and the family is having to take out loans to afford the rebuild.

“We’re determined to make it work, but it’s stressful, and there’s a lot of uncertainty,” Jason Heindel said.

A year after the fire, the timeline to recover seems to be getting longer — permitting is moving slowly, the rains have caused delays, and they say there’s little guidance from the city about connecting to new infrastructure.

“ We have to just keep going, it seems like, at a marathon's pace since Day 1,” Andrea Horusicky Heindel said. “The list of things to do is endless.”

Being back in the Palisades, despite being surrounded by destruction, feels more comfortable. The family doesn’t have to explain themselves. Everyone they run into here lost something.

The family is sure the jacaranda tree out front, though a bit charred, will bloom again. Despite their love-hate relationship with the tree’s sticky purple flowers, they can’t wait for spring this year.

“We're saving our tree because that was the only thing we had left,” Andrea Horusicky Heindel said. “We decided if it survived, it deserves to stay.”

LAist partnerships producer David Rodriguez contributed to this report.

The Trump administration says it’s planning to freeze about $10 billion in federal support for needy families in California and four other Democrat-run states, as the president announced an investigation into unspecified fraud in California.

The plans come on the heels of the Trump administration announcing a freeze on all federal payments for child care in Minnesota, citing fraud allegations against daycare centers in the state.

The state’s Democrat governor, Tim Walz — who ran for vice president against Donald Trump’s ticket in 2024 — announced Monday he was dropping out of running for reelection. He pointed to fraud against the state, saying it’s a real issue while alleging Trump and his allies were “seeking to take advantage of the crisis.”

On Monday, the New York Post reported that the administration was expanding the funding freeze to include California and three other Democrat-led states, in addition to Minnesota. Unnamed federal officials cited “concerns that the benefits were fraudulently funneled to non-citizens,” The Post reported.

Early Tuesday, President Trump alleged that corruption in California is worse than Minnesota and announced an investigation.

“California, under Governor Gavin Newscum, is more corrupt than Minnesota, if that’s possible??? The Fraud Investigation of California has begun. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP,” the president wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.

He did not specify what alleged fraud was being examined in the Golden State.

LAist has reached out to the White House to ask what the president’s fraud concerns are in California and to request an interview with the president.

“For too long, Democrat-led states and governors have been complicit in allowing massive amounts of fraud to occur under their watch,” said an emailed statement from Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which administers the federal childcare funds.

“Under the Trump administration, we are ensuring that federal taxpayer dollars are being used for legitimate purposes. We will ensure these states are following the law and protecting hard-earned taxpayer money.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office disputed Trump’s claim on social media, arguing that since taking office, the governor has blocked $125 billion in fraud and arrested “criminal parasites leaching off of taxpayers.”

Criminal fraud cases in CA appear to be rare for this program

Defrauding federally funded programs is a crime — and one LAist has investigated, leading to one of the largest such criminal cases in recent years against a California elected official, which surrounded meal funds.

When it comes to the federal childcare funds that are being frozen, the dollar amount of fraud alleged in criminal cases appears to be a tiny fraction of the overall program’s spending in California.

A search of thousands of news releases by all four federal prosecutor offices in California, going back more than a decade, found a total of one criminal case where the press releases referenced childcare benefits.

That case, brought in 2023, alleged four men stole $3.7 million in federal childcare benefits through fraudulent requests to a San Diego organization that distributed the funds. All four pleaded guilty, with one defendant sentenced to 27 months in prison and others sentenced to other terms, according to authorities.

It appears to be equivalent to one one-hundredth of 1% of all the childcare funding California has received over the past decade-plus covered by the prosecution press release search.

Potential impact on California families

The plans call for California, Minnesota, New York, Illinois and Colorado to lose about $7 billion in cash assistance for households with children, almost $2.4 billion to care for children of working parents, and about $870 million for social services grants that mostly benefit children at risk, according to unnamed federal officials speaking to the New York Times and New York Post.

In the largest category of funding, California receives $3.7 billion per year. The program is known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF.

 ”It's very clear that a freeze of those funds would be very damaging to the children, families, and providers of California,” said Stacy Lee, who oversees early childhood initiatives "at Children Now, an advocacy group for children in California.

 ”It is a significant portion of our funds and will impact families and children and providers across the whole state,” she added. “It would be devastating, in no uncertain terms.”

About 270,000 people are served by the TANF program in L.A. County — about 200,000 of whom are children, according to the county Department of Public Social Services.

“Any pause in funding for their cash benefits – which average $1000/month - would be devastating to these families,” said DPSS chief of staff Nick Ippolito.

Ippolito said the department has a robust fraud prevention and 170-person investigations team, and takes allegations “very seriously.”

It remains to be seen whether the funding freeze will end up in court. The state, as well as major cities and counties in California, has sued to ask judges to halt funding freezes or new requirements placed by the Trump administration. L.A. city officials say they’ve had success with that, including shielding more than $600 million in federal grant funding to the city last year.

A union representing California childcare workers said the funding freeze would harm low-income families.

“These threats need to be called out for what they are: direct threats on working families of all backgrounds who rely on access to quality, affordable child care in their communities to go to work every day supporting, and growing our economy,” said Max Arias, chairperson for the Child Care Providers United, which says it represents more than 70,000 child care workers across the state who care for kids in their homes.

“Funding freezes, even when intended to be temporary, will be devastating — resulting in families losing access to care and working parents facing the devastating choice of keeping their children safe or paying their bills.”

Federal officials planned to send letters to the affected states Monday about the planned funding pauses, the New York Post reported. As of 3 p.m. Tuesday, state officials said they haven’t gotten any official notification of the funding freeze plans.

“The California Department of Social Services administers child care programs that help working families afford safe, reliable care for their children — so parents can go to work, support their families, and contribute to their communities,” said a statement from California Department of Social Services spokesperson Jason Montiel.

“These funds are critical for working families across California. We take fraud seriously, and CDSS has received no information from the federal government indicating any freeze, pause, or suspension of federal child care funding.”

Housing officials in the city of Los Angeles say a pandemic-era voucher program is set to run out of money later this year, putting thousands of renters at risk of homelessness.

The federal Emergency Housing Voucher program was launched in 2021 as a way to get vulnerable people off the streets and into housing during the COVID-19 crisis. The city of L.A. received more than 3,300 of the vouchers.

With federal funding now running out, the city is preparing to wind down the program. On Monday the city’s housing authority said it had told 2,760 tenant households and 1,700 landlords that unless new funding is found, vouchers will expire by November or December of this year.

“We are providing this notice nearly a year in advance because our families deserve the respect of time to prepare, but this is not a notice of resignation,” said L.A. Housing Authority President Lourdes Castro Ramírez said in a news release. “We are exhausting every avenue — at the local, state and federal levels — to bridge this funding gap.”

The Housing Authority said each household using a voucher had an average of 1.58 members. That puts more than 4,000 Angelenos at risk of losing their housing later this year.

Homelessness progress could be reversed

Congress originally intended the program to continue through 2030, but last year, the Trump administration announced funding would end sooner. The program’s demise risks reversing L.A.’s reported progress at stemming the rise of homelessness.

After years of steady increases, the city has registered slight reductions in the number of people experiencing homelessness for the past two years. In 2023, the region’s homeless services authority reported 46,260 people experiencing homelessness in the city of L.A. By 2025, that number had fallen to 43,695.

The accuracy of those official counts has been questioned by local researchers, but elected officials have cheered the numbers as a sign that the tide is turning in addressing one of L.A.’s most vexing problems.

With thousands of renters now at risk of losing a key resource helping them afford the city’s high rents, sharp increases in homelessness could be on the horizon, said Mike Feuer, a senior policy advisor with the Inner City Law Center.

“They're going to fall into homelessness, and they're going to increase L.A.'s homeless population by almost 10%,” Feuer said. “Those are the implications of what the Trump administration is doing.”

Voucher holders have low incomes; many have kids

According to L.A.’s Housing Authority, about 1-in-4 voucher holders has children and 1-in-5 is elderly. And about 40% are disabled. These households have an average income of less than $14,000 per year, and they receive an average of $1,789 per month in rental subsidy while paying about $350 out of their own pockets.

The loss of federal funding for Emergency Housing Vouchers is distinct from the issues facing renters using Housing Choice Vouchers, another federally funded program often referred to as Section 8. Existing vouchers in the Section 8 program have continued to be funded, but federal funding reductions have caused city officials to cut the amount of rent new vouchers in that program can cover by 10%.

L.A. Housing Authority officials said they have dedicated staff reaching out to tenants to explore other housing resources that might keep them housed after the vouchers expire.

Manuel Villagomez, an attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles specializing in subsidized housing, said with city and state budgets strapped, tenant advocates are not counting on California to find alternative funding sources to continue the program.

“It seems like it's a tragedy in the making,” Villagomez said. “We're preparing for the worst.”