The Brief

L.A.’s homelessness agency revised the locations of over 400 sheltered people in its 2025 homeless count — moving them out of the city of L.A. — in the days before the public release of the findings this week. The moves were made without informing elected officials who had seen the earlier numbers.

On July 7, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority told local elected officials and their aides that overall homelessness had declined by 2.5% within the city of L.A. This week, the agency publicly touted a slightly larger 3.4% reduction in the city.

The changes — which revised the city’s count down by 437 people — were not disclosed to elected officials when LAHSA provided the updated numbers Monday morning ahead of their public release that afternoon.

Following questions from LAist, LAHSA said it acknowledged and explained the changes to city elected officials on Tuesday, the day after the count’s public release. Representatives of several L.A. City Council offices told LAist they are asking LAHSA for more information about the revisions.

LAHSA gathered the data used in the estimate in February, as part of a tally mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD.

LAHSA officials said the last-minute revisions were made because the agency discovered that several hundred interim housing units had been incorrectly tagged as being in the city of L.A. by LAHSA’s new housing inventory system, agency spokesperson Ahmad Chapman told LAist. He pointed to HUD’s rules requiring that so-called scattered site beds be tagged as all being in the city where most of the beds in a given project are located.

The issue was fixed after LAHSA briefed council members and staffers on July 7 and before the data was released publicly this week, the agency said. But the homelessness agency did not inform the city’s elected officials until after LAist asked about the revisions.

L.A. Councilmember Monica Rodriguez told LAist that LAHSA should have been more transparent about the changes and that information was withheld by the agency. She said the revisions were made after LAHSA had delayed the briefing for elected officials multiple times.

LAHSA representatives declined to respond to that accusation.

“I don’t think that the outcomes reflect a moment of celebration because it’s unclear to me how real these numbers really are,” Rodriguez added.

"Any changes made to the numbers, the public is entitled to know because these are their taxpayer dollars that are being used for this work.”

A spokesperson for Mayor Karen Bass told LAist the mayor was first provided the updated numbers on Thursday, July 10, a few days after LAHSA's initial briefing to public officials. That’s when the mayor received an updated draft slide deck indicating the updated numbers, the spokesperson said.

The changes made by LAHSA, which happened after when city officials were briefed on the results of a yearly homelessness count, have led elected officials to raise questions about the report's accuracy.

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What changed?

These revisions did not alter the total population estimates across L.A. County, but the overall homeless population estimate for the city of L.A. was revised down to 43,699, from 44,136.

That downward revision consisted of a 475-person reduction to the city’s sheltered count and a 38-person increase in the city’s unsheltered estimate.

While past year’s shelter counts publicly list the service provider names for each shelter site, LAHSA declined LAist’s requests to identify which shelter locations they revised. The agency said the issue was with multi-site or “scattered site” programs with housing units across multiple jurisdictions.

In response to LAist’s question about which shelter spots had their locations revised, LAHSA officials said: “The most important thing is that LAHSA identified the misassignment in the draft data and corrected it before the results were finalized and announced.”

Regarding the revision increasing the city’s unsheltered estimate by 38 people, the presentation to officials and their staffs on July 7 provided a city unsheltered number that was from an earlier set of draft data that was supposed to be updated before the briefing, LAHSA officials told LAist.

LAHSA communication

When LAHSA presented its findings to officials July 7, the agency told them the information was subject to change but that any “possible changes would not be expected to change the overall narrative of the Homeless Count," Chapman said in LAHSA’s written response to LAist’s questions.

After that meeting, LAHSA said it discovered that the way it was tagging cities for multi-site or scattered housing programs did not follow HUD’s geographic coding specifications.

LAHSA said it then adjusted the official addresses accordingly and submitted the information to USC School of Social Work to recalculate the results.

(The agency did not answer how it discovered the issue. HUD’s geographic coding specifications for scattered sites did not change from 2024 to 2025, according to the federal agency’s records.)

USC’s Ben Henwood, an expert on housing and homelessness, told LAist that LAHSA informed him last week that some shelter data had been misclassified and required updating. He said that kind of change is not uncommon.

“The annual count is an intensive process conducted in a compressed period of time, so it is not unusual for us to have to rerun our estimates during this process as we work closely with LAHSA,” Henwood said.

In arriving at the final estimate for the region’s overall homeless population, USC combines estimates of the unsheltered count conducted by volunteers from February and the count of people living inside shelters and other interim housing sites on the same nights. The sheltered portion of the count does not rely on volunteers, but is reported to LAHSA by the shelter providers and is considered an exact count of people.

A spokesperson for L.A. Mayor Karen Bass did not respond to questions about the changes.

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On Monday, when the agency publicly announced slightly lower homeless population numbers in the city of L.A. than they had a week prior, LAist asked LAHSA for an explanation of any changes to the main numbers since the briefing of officials.

“There were no significant differences in the data that was shared,” LAHSA’s deputy chief external relations officer Paul Rubenstein responded, as Bass stood nearby.

“The topline numbers were the same.”

Further reporting from LAist found that LAHSA’s top bullet point of numbers had been revised from a 2.5% drop in the city count to a 3.4% drop.

Chapman later told LAist that Rubenstein had been referring to the overall countywide point-in-time results and associated percent decrease, which stayed the same.

On Tuesday, LAHSA first informed public officials of the revisions via email, with the following message:

“You might see slight differences in the Council District, Supervisorial District, and SPA sheltered counts compared to last week’s draft. The data collected did not change, but we corrected some interim housing locations. This happened because our new inventory system initially misassigned some locations for multi/scattered-site programs, which required updates due to HUD’s rules for reporting these types of sites. We identified and accounted for this issue prior to the public release on July 14 by ensuring all programs were accurately assigned, using last year’s address for consistency when appropriate. We’ll refine this mapping for next year’s Housing Inventory Count to comply with HUD’s requirements while also addressing our need for precise local mapping of locations.”

LAHSA says its annual homeless count was conducted in accordance with HUD regulations and the official data released at Monday’s news conference met HUD’s standard.

HUD did not respond to LAist’s request for comment.

Count concerns

Several City Council members and their aides told LAist that slight revisions to the count sometimes happen after their offices are briefed but that LAHSA typically informs them of these changes.

Meanwhile, Councilmember John Lee is raising concerns about the sheltered counts provided in his district. Lee said he’s worked to bring 371 shelter beds online in his San Fernando Valley district and believes they are typically occupied. However, he says data shared with his office last week indicated just 78 of those beds were being used, while the rest sat empty.

“Based on district-specific PIT count data we have received from LAHSA, we have questions regarding the sheltered count: how 'sheltered' is defined and how the data is collected and verified,” said Roger Quintanilla, Lee’s communications director. “Our office continues to seek clarity from LAHSA in order to better understand how they arrived at these figures.”

Asked by LAist about Lee’s concerns, LAHSA officials did not provide an explanation but said they would follow up with Lee.

The agency said it will be releasing more information from the 2025 homeless count this week. That is expected to include breakdowns of the raw homeless count by council district, as well as demographic information about the region’s unhoused population.

Some California Democrats have a plan to avoid disaster in the governor's race: Wait until the last minute to vote.

With no one candidate emerging as a clear favorite and an open primary where the top two advance regardless of party affiliation, panic has set in for some who plan to vote Democratic.

To avoid a dreaded scenario in which Democrats are locked out of the November general election, many Democrats coalesced around former U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, who ultimately flamed out after multiple women accused him of sexual assault.

That fear has morphed into wariness, leading some party activists and influencers to encourage people to hold off on voting early, watch the polls, then vote for the candidate with the most support just before Election Day.

In a “normal year,” Katie Evans-Reber of San Francisco said she would probably back former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter even though the Democrat is not likely to advance to November given her current polling. But this year the stakes are higher, she said, and as a lesbian woman, any of the Democrats would be more aligned with her core values than a Republican.

She fears supporters of President Donald Trump who have soured on him could back Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, giving him enough of a boost to match the power of Trump’s endorsement for Steve Hilton, the former Fox News host who is leading all other candidates in the polls. That would send both Republicans to the runoff.

“The thing that flipped for me was going from, ‘I don't really know what to do,’ to, ‘I strategically am not making a decision,” Evans-Reber said.

In pole position is Xavier Becerra, the former Health and Human Services secretary who surged from single digits to the top of the polls after Swalwell’s downfall. As his popularity soared, so has the scrutiny of his record at HHS and as California’s attorney general.

Behind Becerra are progressive Democratic challengers Tom Steyer, a former businessman turned billionaire activist, and Porter. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan has also positioned himself as a tech-friendly moderate and ally of Silicon Valley.

Evans-Reber and other impassioned Democrats have been urging others to follow the wait-and-see strategy by sharing videos and posts on social media.

One post even falsely attributed the strategy to Heather Cox Richardson, a political historian and popular Democratic influencer who writes the Substack newsletter Letters from an American. That erroneous post was the first one Evans-Reber saw and forwarded. She later had to follow up with a disclaimer that Cox Richardson was not the author.

“It's not like, bad advice, but it's 100% not coming from me,” Cox Richardson told CalMatters in an interview.

Democratic political consultant Paul Mitchell disagrees.

“It's just a bad message,” he said. “I think they should always have a message of, ‘As soon as you get your ballot, fill it out, turn it in, mail it in and get it done.”

Mitchell said although activists might talk about and push for a strategic voting plan, trying to organize a movement like that at scale would likely not produce significant results.

“I think people vote for whoever they were going to vote for anyway,” said Mitchell, whose company tracks how many ballots are turned in each day statewide.

An empty stage after the gubernatorial debate on the campus of Pomona College in Claremont on April 28, 2026.

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The push to vote late flies in the face of recent pleas from election officials and Gov. Gavin Newsom for voters to get their ballots in early in the hopes of speeding up California’s notoriously slow vote-counting process. Attorney General Rob Bonta, a fellow Democrat, told reporters last week that the social media posts urging late voting could be misinformation, disinformation and “potentially unlawful,” and Secretary of State Shirley Weber said her office would “look into” those social posts.

“Time is of the essence in preventing election lies from taking hold,” Newsom wrote in a recent letter addressed to all 58 county registrars urging them to “tabulate and release results quickly and accurately.”

Turning in a mail-in ballot on Election Day, as some activists propose, is the worst possible scenario for election administration officials.

It creates what Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, calls the “pig in the python effect.” County election offices are inundated with in-person ballots on Election Day, as well as mail-in ballots that require a meticulous process of signature matching, envelope opening and extracting the ballot before it can be counted.

Returning ballots even a few days earlier can give counties a head start, Alexander said at a recent CalMatters forum on election integrity.

Mark DiCamillo, who runs polling for the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, said pollsters are doing their best to produce accurate results, but in an election with so many variables, even the best surveys could be off-base.

The past trend of low voter turnout in gubernatorial primaries, plus a potentially confusing array of 61 candidates for governor alone, make it difficult to determine who the likely voters will be and account for that in their surveys.

“This election's got all the elements you have to deal with,” DiCamillo said. “It’s a challenge for the polling profession.”

Despite the concerns about a slow vote count and imprecise polling, Evans-Reber says she still plans to stick to her last-minute voting strategy. She doesn’t trust that mailing her ballot will reach the county elections office in time. She plans to bring her completed ballot to the office or one of the county’s vote centers and hand it directly to an election official.

“I am going to cast the ballot at the very last possible moment,” Evans-Reber said. “I’m going to wait until polling day.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. Sign up for CalMatters' newsletters.

The story first appeared on The LA Local.

More than 15 months after the Eaton Fire, residents of an Altadena apartment complex say they are still fighting a “notorious” landlord to repair a fire-damaged building that remains unlivable and contaminated with toxic ash and soot.

Longtime tenants of 403 Figueroa Dr., who describe the complex as a close-knit village, say their property manager, Regency Management Inc., has ignored years of repair requests and pleas to clean up the property after the fire razed most of the block.

Although Regency Management replaced the windows, residents said they were forced to camp out in their apartments without electricity or hot water for months in the fire’s aftermath because most could not afford to move as the fire strained the area’s housing market.

“Homes in this community are being rebuilt up to code, but our building remains frozen in time since Jan. 7,” said Brenda Lopez-Ardon, a community organizer and tenant, at a press conference last month. 

Brenda Lopez-Ardon (second from right) speaks at a community rally and press conference with members of tenants’ union Comité 403 in front of their building. March 26, 2026.

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She spoke in front of the building where she has lived her whole life and is raising her young daughter. 

Later that evening, as kids raced on scooters through the courtyard of the rundown two-story building, Lopez-Ardon and several tenants ushered state Sen. Sasha Pérez through the property, pointing out damages from the fire and water, along with buckling floors and discolored tap water. 

In one apartment, mold bloomed through paint on a wall in a children’s bedroom, and also grew on a mattress and plush toys. Residents complained of rat and cockroach infestations.

Brenda Lopez-Ardon (center) shows state Sen. Sasha Pérez (right) water damage from a leak inside an apartment at her Figueroa Drive building during a tour of the property. March 26, 2026.

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“We are not animals, to be living this way,” said Yoselin Ayala, one of the tenants sharing her experience with Pérez.

“I’m very upset and frustrated to see what’s happened here,” said Pérez, who represents California’s 25^th Senate District. 

“Things like broken bricks and falling walls and, you know, other fire damage, melted parts of the building, those are things that should have been taken care of a long time ago,” she told The LA Local. 

Regency Management and its owner Swaranjit “Mike” Nijjar, have not responded to requests for comment.

Brenda Lopez-Ardon (second from right) speaks at a community rally and press conference with members of tenants’ union Comité 403 in front of their building. March 26, 2026.

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Going on offense 

The Eaton Fire blew out nearly all of the building’s windows, destroyed large sections of the property’s perimeter wall, burned down carport shade structures in the parking lot and left the building without power or hot water for months. 

The fire also left the units coated in toxic ash and soot containing dangerously elevated levels of lead, according to a report by the LA County Department of Public Health.  

Lopez-Ardon said many of the apartments were cleaned by local volunteers, and when Regency Management finally sent cleaners, they were maintenance workers, not a professional remediation company with special equipment and training on dealing with disasters.

Children take part in a community rally in front of their apartment building in Altadena. Parents say they’re concerned about toxins left behind from the Eaton Fire affecting kids’ health. March 26, 2026.

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In response, the residents formed a tenants’ union to demand their rights as renters and move “from the defense to the offense,” Lopez-Ardon said. 

Their efforts have met with limited success, and the group is now exploring options including forming a co-op to buy the property from Nijjar, a man California’s attorney general has called “notorious” for exploiting tenants.

California sues landlord 

Attorney General Rob Bonta sued Nijjar, his companies and several of his relatives last summer. The suit alleges “inhumane living conditions” across properties owned by the real estate developer, his sister and children. It also alleges the company had several breaches of lease agreements and violations of the state’s Tenant Protection Act. 

“The Nijjar Companies rent out unsafe and uninhabitable units, disregard tenants’ requests for repairs, and fail to eradicate pests, inflicting harm and anguish on tenants,” according to the complaint filed in June in Los Angeles Superior Court.

The family’s empire encompasses 22,000 rental units throughout California, owned through a byzantine collection of more than 150 limited partnerships and corporations and administered by 11 management companies, including Regency Management.

The lawsuit is ongoing.

Brenda Lopez-Ardon (left) stands with neighbors at a community rally and press conference with members of tenants’ union Comité 403 in front of their building. March 26, 2026.

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For the tenants on Figueroa Drive, the fire damage was simply the last straw on top of longstanding neglect and repair requests they say Regency has ignored for years. 

Lopez-Ardon, 26, said the pedestrian entrance gate has been broken off and wide open for at least 10 years. Lax security has also made some residents fearful of another major threat in the area: ICE. 

Blanca, who only gave her first name because of privacy concerns, has lived in the building for more than 20 years. She said that immigration enforcement agents have entered the building twice in the last year looking for a specific person. They left empty-handed both times.

Spots of mold on a plush toy in a children’s bedroom where it also grows on a wall and a mattress in an apartment at 403 Figueroa Dr. in Altadena, owned by the Nijjar family. March 26, 2026.

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The U.S. war with Iran has pushed inflation to its highest level in almost three years.

Consumer prices in April were up 3.8% from a year ago, according to a report Tuesday from the Labor Department. That was the biggest annual increase since May 2023.

Prices rose 0.6% between March and April.

From gas prices to housing, here are three things to know about the rising cost of living.

Gas prices are a big driver

Gasoline prices have jumped sharply since the war began, snarling tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital corridor for energy shipments. The average price of regular gas is $4.50 a gallon, according to AAA. That's up 38 cents from a month ago. The jump in energy prices accounted for 40% of the monthly increase in the consumer price index in April.

Rising fuel costs are affecting other prices as well

When energy costs jump sharply, it can have spillover effects. Air fares, for example, jumped 2.8% last month and are more than 20% higher than they were a year ago, as airlines struggle with a spike in jet fuel prices.

The cost of diesel fuel has risen by $1.88 a gallon since the war began. If that lasts, it could put upward pressure on the price of everything that's delivered by truck or train.

Excluding volatile food and energy costs, "core" inflation was 2.8% in April.

Housing prices also contributed to higher inflation in April

Housing costs were also a driver of inflation, jumping 0.6% between March and April, but some of that is a statistical fluke resulting from the six-week government shutdown last fall. Government number-crunchers were temporarily idled in October, so were unable to collect housing prices that month. That's had the effect of artificially lowering the measure of housing inflation. Tuesday's report provides a kind of catch-up.

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