Homelessness On LA County Streets Skyrockets 40% In 5 Years

L.A. city and county are continuing to see a sharp rise in homelessness — with newly released point-in-time count numbers showing the number of unsheltered people rising 14% from the prior year.

That continues a longer-term trend of more and more people living on L.A.’s streets. Unsheltered homelessness — which refers to people living outdoors in vehicles, tents and makeshift shelters like propped-up tarps — is up 40% over the past five years, rising to 55,155 people countywide.

“The system overall has failed — each of our systems, both the rehousing system, [and] the health and human services system,” said Va Lecia Adams Kellum, who leads the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) that oversaw the count, in response to a question from LAist at a media briefing.

“Certainly we have learned from these last two years or so that more coordination and more alignment of resources is needed.”

When including people in shelters in the tally, the count found that 75,518 people were unhoused in L.A. County, including 46,260 in the city of L.A. The latest numbers were gathered during a three-day count that took place Jan 24. to Jan. 26 — just six weeks after L.A. Mayor Karen Bass took office and immediately declared a state of emergency on homelessness.

“The results are definitely disappointing, with all the hard work and all the investment. But they’re not surprising,” Adams Kellum said.

“People remain in a situation of vulnerability where they're falling into homelessness faster than we can house them,” she said, pointing to unaffordable rents and loss of income as driving the growing crisis.

How the count works

The count, which is conducted annually and aims to count every unhoused person, is considered the most comprehensive data on the unhoused population in the L.A. area.

Volunteers counted tents and vehicles people were living in, and demographers estimated the number of people inside based on in-depth surveys of people experiencing homelessness. The count also gathered data directly from shelter operators to capture the number of unhoused people staying inside on those nights.

The findings were released Thursday morning by LAHSA.

Some of the key findings

Among the count’s other findings:

• Far more vehicles in L.A. County are being used as dwellings (about 14,100) than tents or makeshift shelters (about 9,300). The number of vans being lived in jumped about 44% since last year.
• The number of people sheltered was similar to last year, while the overall shelter system has grown significantly since before the coronavirus pandemic — from around 16,000 beds to around 26,000. During the count in January, there were at least 5,800 more beds than the number of people sheltered, according to the data. LAHSA did not immediately respond to questions from LAist regarding why that was the case.
• 30% of unhoused people reported using substances, up from 26% the prior year. And 25% reported experiencing a severe mental illness.

Yolanda Orellana, who lived on a bike path in Palms and now lives in a temporary apartment under L.A.’s Inside Safe program, told LAist she’s seen a lot more people on the streets over the last year — including people with college degrees and professional careers.

“It’s just crazy. I never thought I’d see this like this. And of all ages and of all walks of life,” she said.

“This is going to continue unless affordable housing is provided …They’re building apartment complexes and we just look at them because you know we’ll never be able to live in them. They’re super super high priced.”

Shortage of affordable housing

Benjamin Henwood, a USC professor who helped with the count, said the results show homelessness is being driven by huge challenges — mainly the housing crisis — that will require large-scale changes to fix.

“Looking at the homeless service system to solve homelessness is probably not the right way to think about it when it really is driven by issues in our housing markets and shortage of affordable housing,” he told LAist.

People pack their belongings while others move to the opposite side of a parking lot in Venice Beach.

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Brian Feinzimer

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LAist

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“The pace of housing construction has really lagged … so that’s what really pushed the shortage of housing,” he said. And then as income inequality becomes worse, the housing that exists becomes unaffordable.

“Laws and zoning issues have to be changed to try to make up for that lost [housing] capacity as quickly as possible,” Henwood said.

An LAist community survey of about 4,300 people in L.A. conducted earlier this year found that 33% cited homelessness as their biggest personal stressor — outranking every other issue. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said homelessness is the top issue citywide that Bass should prioritize.

Large increase in chronic homelessness

The latest point-in-time count also showed a large year-over-year increase — 18% — in people considered “chronically homeless,” defined as being on the streets for at least one year during the last four years and having a disabling health condition.

Researchers suspect the driving factor there is people’s “negative health outcomes are starting to pile up” as they stay on the streets longer, said Randall Kuhn, a professor at the UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health who was a lead demographer on the count.

Kuhn told LAist a key challenge that remains is a lack of permanent affordable housing for unhoused people to move into.

“You still have the problem that you’re placing people into interim, not permanent housing. And we don’t know how well they’ll do there,” he said. “So there’s lots more to be done.”