The Brief

If you’re trying to address homelessness in L.A., there is some foundational information you need in order to evaluate what’s working and what’s not, such as:

• How many unhoused people is the city moving into housing? 
• How many of those people are staying housed?
• How has this changed from the number of people housed last year?

For almost a year, we’ve been hunting down answers to these seemingly simple questions for the Promise Tracker, a project to hold L.A. Mayor Karen Bass accountable to her campaign pledge to house 17,000 unhoused Angelenos by the end of her first year in office.

For most of the year, we couldn’t get accurate answers. In fact, no one has been able to give clear answers to these questions for years, so this was a problem long before the current administration. But the Bass administration set their goal of housing 17,000 Angelenos without a thorough understanding of how such data is tracked and logged, meaning that for much of her first year in office, they — and therefore us at LAist — were operating without a clear picture of how much their interventions were working.

We revealed in late April that council members were not receiving the data reports they had ordered months earlier about the mayor’s signature homeless housing program Inside Safe, which would show exactly where the money is going and how many people have been sheltered. Council members then pressed the mayor’s office for the data, and numbers eventually started being provided to the council about two months later.

Until November, the overall housing numbers reported out by the city were rife with duplicates and other issues. As we investigated each of these issues, we learned that there were two key reasons why:

• The data collection process for some housing programs left room for many errors and missing information, and there wasn’t a system in place to ensure accuracy.
• Data on people entering housing was collected separately by program, so it wasn’t clear how much overlap there was among people moving between programs or cycling in and out.  

Although government officials say they have been working to address both issues, this was the obstacle in front of us all year: Even though we received updates on how many times people were housed, the numbers were likely inflated, and we had no idea by how much.

We also didn’t know how many of those people were still housed, or how many returned to the streets. Nor how this year’s numbers compare to previous years. All this made it impossible to have a clear picture of how progress was or wasn’t being made.

The city has allocated $1.3 billion for this year alone to invest in solutions for the homelessness crisis — a budget Bass called “unprecedented.” The state of emergency she declared as one of her first acts as mayor increased her powers to tackle the crisis.

Getting clear and accurate answers on how many people are being housed is essential to holding the Bass administration accountable on this problem. Government entities are calling out data issues as well. Just last week, the city controller’s office released an audit report showing that the lack of accurate data has prevented people who are unhoused from accessing available shelter and temporary housing.

L.A. City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez also referenced this problem during an August city council meeting about Bass’ signature temporary housing program: “There's a fundamental problem with getting some very basic information here, and it's costing taxpayers millions of dollars.”

Tracking programs, not people's overall path

There actually is a lot of data about how many people are being housed, but it’s tracked by program, making an overall picture of progress challenging to get.

The government funds several programs to place people into temporary and permanent housing: Bass’ Inside Safe program, tiny home villages, family shelters, permanent housing vouchers issued by the federal government, vouchers for veterans, and more. Different agencies track data for certain types of programs — the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) manages data for temporary housing, the Housing Authority of the City of L.A. (HACLA) oversees vouchers, and the city’s Housing Department tracks how many people live in new permanent housing units funded by the city’s Proposition HHH.

Because a person might be a part of more than one homelessness program over time, they might be recorded more than once. And because these agencies don’t have direct access to each other’s data, this leads to duplicates, which can lead to inflated numbers.

At a Dec. 6 press roundtable showing homelessness progress numbers for Bass’ first year, city officials urged reporters not to add up the number of people housed in each program to get a total number of people housed because they had not removed any duplicate records.

The data is set up this way because individual programs are tracked separately.

Tracking the outcomes of programs makes sense — there are a lot of taxpayer funds on the line. Inside Safe alone has a budget of $250 million for just this fiscal year. And the city’s HHH housing program is authorized to borrow up to $1.2 billion, with additional funds for this housing coming from other levels of government. So it’s important to make sure that money is being spent effectively.

Program-oriented data answers questions like:

• How many times did people enter a particular housing program?
• How many times did people leave?
• What do numbers look like at specific shelters?

This can tell you whether services are being utilized and how much it costs, on average, to provide a service, like housing one person in one Inside Safe motel room.

But when the numbers only tell a story about programs and not people, it’s hard to get a sense of what’s happening overall. It prevents government leaders — and the public — from getting answers that measure overall progress, such as:

• How many people moved into housing across all programs this year?
• How many moved from one program to another? 
• How many returned to encampments? 
• How many left for other housing alternatives not provided by the government? 

Bass summed up the problem when she spoke with our radio program AirTalk in November.

“The data is process-oriented — how many people came into housing,” she said. “It’s not outcome oriented, meaning: How many people stayed in housing and what happened to them four to five months down the line? That data is not available.”

The numbers themselves were often inaccurate

In fact, there were many data points we couldn’t get at all — and neither could the City Council for nearly the first half of the year. As we reported in April, the Bass administration said the numbers couldn’t be trusted.

For example, in a July report the Bass administration said that when it looked at the March 2023 numbers for Inside Safe collected by LAHSA and compared it to reports from people running various shelters, they found that only 59% of Inside Safe’s data on people entering the program matched what was in LAHSA’s system.

The accuracy rates were far worse for permanent housing data and program exit data: 4% and 0%, respectively, according to the report.

Although LAHSA collects and maintains data across all the temporary housing programs in L.A., LAHSA officials usually aren’t the people handling the data entry of when someone enters or leaves a shelter or housing program. That responsibility falls to the service providers, usually nonprofits paid by LAHSA to run the shelter or housing under a contract.

According to LAHSA officials, there are about 6,000 people across different service providers who enter data into this system, making it challenging to ensure consistency and accuracy across the board.

When service providers record a new intake — that is, someone entering one of the government housing programs — sometimes the information they have is pretty limited, perhaps just a first name or a physical description, according to Bevin Kuhn, LAHSA’s senior advisor for IT and data management. These incomplete records of individuals are another challenge that leads to duplicates, Kuhn says. LAHSA officials say they constantly work to de-duplicate by merging profiles that have similar information.

Since we launched the Promise Tracker in May, we had been warned there were duplicates, and we flagged this in our earliest updates. It wasn’t until November, six months later, that the Bass administration shared numbers that it said were de-duplicated for temporary housing.

Providing detailed data entry while trying to move people out of encampments and into housing is “a lot for on-the-ground workers, especially if I’m a caseworker and I’m not data savvy,” said Kuhn. “It’s really hard to capture all those data elements perfectly.”

Most shelters don’t have much day-to-day turnover, Kuhn said. But one Inside Safe operation — in which an encampment is cleared and people living there are offered temporary housing — can lead to dozens of new housing placements in one day, making it a lot more challenging to enter data efficiently.

The L.A. Grand Hotel in downtown, one of the sites used as temporary housing for Inside Safe.

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Brian Feinzimer

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LAist

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LAHSA requires service providers to enter data on people entering and exiting shelters within 24 hours, according to the recent city controller audit. But the audit found that “LAHSA does not monitor or enforce their data entry requirements” to make its bed reservation system function properly.

For the Inside Safe motel program, providers also are required to log when unhoused people exit the motel room program, but LAHSA doesn’t enforce this requirement, a LAHSA executive told city council members in August. This means that a lot of service providers skip this step, she said at the time.

That meant the city might have been unknowingly paying for empty motel rooms, nearly eight months after the program had launched, council members were told by the mayor’s staff.

The mayor’s staff say they worked closely with LAHSA to deploy a system to resolve the discrepancies, and that LAHSA started using a revamped tracking methodology in June that improved the accuracy rates. And Kuhn said the agency beefed up their teams on the ground to work alongside providers to verify the accuracy of data.

It took most of this year to put the necessary changes in place and for the data to reach what the Bass administration considered an acceptable rate of accuracy for sharing with the public.

We're finally getting some clarity

Many of the data problems we encountered appear to be longstanding issues that Mayor Bass inherited when she came into office. She’s expressed frustration multiple times over these systems and the quality of the numbers. And she’s said her administration is working to establish new and better data systems, with the help of a new LAHSA CEO, Va Lecia Adams Kellum.

Bass is also taking on more of a direct oversight role at LAHSA — in a way that prior mayors have not — by putting herself on its governing commission. County supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Kathryn Barger have done the same, with Horvath now serving as the commission’s chair.

They’ve already made some changes to address some of these issues. LAHSA and the mayor’s office confirmed that they removed duplicates from their temporary housing numbers. We now know how many individual people moved into temporary housing.

As of Dec. 1, they reported that 21,694 people had moved into temporary housing in the year since Bass came into office in December 2022.

They also reported a 65% retention rate across all temporary housing programs — that is, 65% of the people who entered temporary housing are still housed as of today in either temporary or permanent housing.

But when it comes to the overall picture, we still don’t have reliable numbers.

There could still be double-counting of people who went from temporary housing into a permanent housing program. We don’t know how many people have left permanent housing and fallen back into homelessness. And we don’t know if that 65% retention rate is an improvement over prior years, because we don’t have a retention rate for 2022.

However, officials say more clarity is on the horizon. According to the mayor’s office, LAHSA and the city Housing Authority (which keeps data on permanent housing) have agreed to share more of their data going forward, so that everyone can better understand how many individuals are being housed across all types of housing, not just temporary housing.

What we know today

Here are the current, best-available answers to those simple, foundational questions that we’ve spent all year trying to figure out:

How many unhoused people has the city moved into housing?

At least 21,694 people as of Dec. 1, according to temporary housing numbers from LAHSA and the mayor’s office. Adding people who’ve used vouchers or moved into new permanent housing units, that number could be as much as 11,000 higher — but because there’s likely some overlap with those in temporary housing, we don’t know how much higher it actually is.

How many of those people are staying housed?

A 65% retention rate for 21,694 people suggests that around 14,000 people who moved into temporary housing this year would still be housed. We don’t know what the retention is for people who have moved into permanent housing.

How has this changed from 2022?

The mayor’s office provided these numbers on Dec. 6:

• 21,694 people moved into temporary housing in 2023, up from 16,931 the year before
• 7,717 people moved into housing using vouchers in 2023, up from 5,223 the year before
• 3,551 people moved into new permanent housing units in 2023, up from approximately 1,361 the year before

This suggests increases all around, but because there are still potential duplicates between different types of housing across both years, we still don’t know what the actual change is in the overall number of people housed.

Heading into Year 2 of Bass’s term, here are the questions we’ll be asking:

• How many people are being moved from temporary housing into permanent housing, especially in Inside Safe?
• What is the retention rate and how does it compare to retention for 2023?

Are there other questions we should be asking? Let us know by submitting your question below.

Angelenos took to the streets of downtown Los Angeles and Westwood on Saturday in response to the U.S.-Israeli military strikes in Iran.

• Read: What you should know about local protests, reaction and law enforcement actions

A coalition of organizations, including the National Iranian American Council, the ANSWER coalition and 50501, held protests nationwide in reaction.

Local demonstrations took place outside City Hall in downtown Los Angeles, as well as in Ventura and Orange counties.

In Westwood, Iranian Americans gathered to celebrate the strikes. More demonstrations are planned for today and tomorrow.

Here are photos from Saturday.

Westwood

Hundreds rally seeking regime change in Iran in Westwood on Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026, in Los Angeles. The rally was organized after word spread that the U.S. and Israel had bombed Iran overnight, Pacific time, killing Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, among others.

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Genaro Molina

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/Los Angeles Times via Getty Image

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Hundreds rally waving the historical Iranian Lion and Sun and American flags in Westwood on Saturday.

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Genaro Molina

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Los Angeles Times

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Hundreds rally in Westwood seeking regime change in Iran.

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Genaro Molina

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Image

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A man walks under the colors if Iran while joining hundreds in a rally seeking regime change in Iran in Westwood on Saturday.

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Genaro Molina

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Image

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Downtown Los Angeles

A protester holds a poster reading "drop the files not the bombs" during a demonstration against the war in Iran in front of City Hall in Los Angeles on Feb. 28, 2026.

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Etienne Laurent

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AFP via Getty Images

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A crowd gathered at Los Angeles City Hall to protest against United States and Israel bombing Iran on Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026.

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Myung J. Chun

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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A protester holds a portrait of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a flag of Iran during a demonstration against the war in Iran in front of City Hall.

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Etienne Laurent

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AFP via Getty Images

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Protesters hold placards reading "no new US war in the Middle East" during a demonstration against the war in Iran in front of City Hall.

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Etienne Laurent

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AFP via Getty Images

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A man holds a sign at Los Angeles City Hall to protest against United States and Israel bombing Iran.

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Myung J. Chun

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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Walk through cities around the world and it's easy to spot the trend: utility boxes painted and transformed into public art to spiff up neighborhoods.

In downtown Los Angeles, street artist S.C. Mero has taken the idea of the utility box as art in a different direction with one she’s installed in the Arts District.

“Would you like me to open it up and you can see?” she asked on a recent morning.

At first glance, it looks like an ordinary electrical cabinet — gray, about the size of a refrigerator, with slotted vents. But instead of the usual fire-resistant metal, this one is made of wood with a faux concrete base.

The box theater incognito.

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Courtesy of S.C. Mero

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Mero spins two combination locks and pulls open the door.

A hidden theater

Inside, instead of a tangle of cables and cords, red crushed velvet covers the walls from top to bottom.

A gilded clock and gold-framed pictures of two other electrical boxes (“possibly its mother, and its great-grandfather”) adorn the tiny interior, inspired by one of downtown’s oldest and grandest movie palaces, the Los Angeles Theatre.

“The first time I went into that theater, the feeling that I had, I wanted people to have a similar feeling when they opened this up,” she said.

Like the theater, the box is meant to bring audiences together. Mero invites performers to step inside, and since its installation a few weeks ago, some 30 poets, magicians, puppeteers and clowns have reached out about using the space.

Many are female artists.

“Maybe it's because of the scale of it, they feel like they can actually have a chance to get inside,” Mero said.

A tradition of unexpected art

The box theater sits on the 800 block of Traction Avenue, across the street from the historic American Hotel, an early hub for artists in the neighborhood.

Jesse Easter, the hotel’s night manager, has a front-row seat to the box theater performances.

“The Arts District is still alive,” he proclaims.

Easter first arrived in the neighborhood in the 1980s, a blues and rock musician who also professionally installed art.

He said the Arts District has long been known for unconventional public art. Famously, in 1982, artist Dustin Shuler pinned a Cessna airplane to the side of the American Hotel with a 20-foot-long nail.

“I was one of the people that was in the hotel that saw the room that the nail came down into, went through the brick wall, into the floor and stopped,” Easter recalls.

Easter says Mero’s installations boldly continue that tradition of guerrilla street art in the neighborhood.

After graduating from USC in 2011, she started to make sculptural works with overlooked street fixtures, exploring issues such as addiction and homelessness.

Before the box theater, there was a giant mailbox.

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Courtesy of S.C. Mero

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Before the theater box, Mero installed an oversized mailbox at the same corner, towering over passersby, symbolizing a housing market that remains out of reach for many Angelenos.

Elsewhere in the Arts District on Rose Street, she has installed a 13-foot-tall parking meter sculpture, commentary on the overwhelming nature of parking in the city.

Realizing a dream 

The box theater is perhaps the piece that has invited the most participation.

Jesse Easter, a musician and night manager at the American Hotel, prepares to perform at the box theater.

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Courtesy of S.C. Mero

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Last week, Mero asked Easter and other local artists to perform there. He played a blues song he wrote more than 40 years ago when he first moved to the Arts District.

“It was sunset, and I was thinking, this kind of is the bookend,” he said.

Other participants performed spoken word poetry and played saxophone.

One performer, Mike Cuevas, discovered the theater by accident.

An Uber driver, Cuevas was waiting for his next delivery order by the box theater as it was being prepped ahead of the night’s performance.

Mero recalls him getting out of his car to look at what she was doing.

“He's like, what's going on here? This looks so cool,” Mero said. “He said as he's driving throughout the city, in between his rides, he writes poetry.”

Cuevas, who goes by the pen name Octane 543(12), left to make a delivery in East L.A., but he said “something in his heart” told him to return that evening.

After watching others perform, he stepped up to the box and read his poetry in public for the first time, a piece about Latino pride.

Mike Cuevas, aka Mike Octane 543-12, publicly reads his poetry for the first time.

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Courtesy of S.C. Mero

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“Another generation will pass through,” he recited. “And they'll understand why we honor with proud delight, the continuous fight for the history of our brothers and sisters.”

Cuevas didn’t know Mero by name or anything about her work, but thanked her for giving him a venue.

“I just felt something beautiful with her art,” Cuevas said. “It's time for me to start expressing myself. She inspired me to do exactly what she's doing, but through poetry.”

He now plans to read again at an open mic in downtown L.A. next week.

An overture to look inside

Mero says the project has spoken to her personally, too. Growing up in Minnesota, she loved art as a child but later focused on playing lacrosse and hockey. At USC, she studied public relations.

“Once I started getting so into art, everyone was kind of shocked,” Mero said. “That's why I really want to encourage people to go inside themselves and see what's there, because you never know.”

Mero is hoping for a long run for the box theater. Its predecessor, the supersize mailbox, stayed up for five years, only toppled, she heard, after skateboarders accidentally ran into it.

In the meantime, the small theater sits unassumingly on the sidewalk waiting for its next performer, its exterior starting to collect graffiti like any other utility box.

It’s whale watching season, which always makes me think of the novel Moby-Dick.

In the book, Captain Ahab chased a whale for vengeance. I recently chased whales off the coast of Los Angeles, but in my case, it was in pursuit of the beauty and majesty of the natural world.

With warm — relative to Alaska — spring waters, migratory rest-stops and great feeding grounds, Los Angeles County’s coast is considered part of the “Blue Highway,” a crucial whale migration corridor and one of the best places to spot the gentle giants.

According to Cabrillo Marine Aquarium program director Jim DiPompei, many whales can be seen right in our backyard.

“There’s a little over 90 species of cetaceans (marine mammals) in the world, and we see about 30% of the species we could possibly see here in Southern California,” DiPompei told The LA Local.

Cetacean species you may spot in our waters include humpback whales, orcas, blue whales and dolphins. Your best chance, however, is spotting a gray whale. As school bus-sized gray whales migrate back and forth between Alaska and Baja, they consistently hug LA’s coastline.

But where should you go to actually get a good look at whales? Don’t worry — I got you. Here’s The LA Local guide to cruising the Blue Highway.

Top spots to watch whales from shore

Point Vicente Interpretive Center
31501 Palos Verdes Drive West, Rancho Palos Verdes
Free, laid-back, on the mountains!

At the Point Vicente Interpretive Center in Rancho Palos Verdes, you’ll find an overlook dedicated to whale watching. While this is a great free spot for amateurs to come and look out for whales, this is no playground. Professionals conduct the annual whale census here, tracking the migration of whales.

This is a great place to bring a picnic basket and some binoculars to relax while scanning the ocean. Even if you don’t spot any whale action, you can visit the free natural history museum inside, which focuses on the region and its most famous inhabitants: whales. Afterward, step outside and chat with a museum docent accompanying the census watch.

If you want to see whales, stick to the coastal canyons. Canyons aren’t just massive structures above water — they are also mountains beneath the surface, offering depth, cold water and nutrients that attract food for whales. Gray whales tend to follow the canyons to stay away from the dangerous orcas.

Whale spotting 101

Whale watching season typically runs from December through May. It peaks from January to March.

When looking for a whale, try to spot their water mist blowing above the water. Gray whales typically surface for air every five minutes. When they do, they’ll blow out a water mist — that’s your chance to spot and track them until they surface again.

Get on a boat!

If you want to get eye-to-eye and really feel a cetacean’s scale, there are plenty of whale-watching cruises. They typically depart from Marina Del Rey, Redondo Beach, Long Beach, San Pedro, Dana Point and almost anywhere with a port.

Many cruises have a naturalist on board to answer questions and provide expert context to ocean wildlife.

On my tour departing from Long Beach, we saw five gray whales and a swarm of common dolphins feeding.

But be warned: If you get seasick easily, this trip might not be for you. On our two-and-half-hour trip, the boat rocked emphatically as we approached feeding sites. It’s fun if you can imagine yourself on a see-saw, but it might not be that enjoyable if that sounds nauseating.

While boat captains are not allowed to approach the whales too closely due to environmental protections, the whales can approach the boat if they choose. Sometimes the whales seem curious and watch us in return — it’s up to them and how they are feeling.

Get involved

Cabrillo Marine Aquarium
3720 Stephen M. White Drive, San Pedro

If you really catch the whale-watching bug, you’re in luck.

At the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, they offer a whale-watching naturalist program where you can volunteer and train to be a naturalist on board whale-watching cruises.

DiPompei said they train anyone over the age of 18 “who’s interested in learning about whales and volunteering their time to be on these whale-watching boats to talk to the general public and to talk to students.”

This program was started in the 1970s by John Olge, one of the founders of Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, with an emphasis on education and showing schoolchildren the beauty of our natural world.

The aquarium is also a great place to introduce whales to children. With kid-sized exhibits and educational programs throughout the year, it’s an ideal way to show young ones just how big and beautiful our oceans are.