What Drove This Year's Spike In LA Homelessness? Tenant Advocates Say It's 'What We Were Afraid Of'

This week, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported a 9% spike in the number of people experiencing homelessness across L.A. County over the past year.

The large jump in this year’s homeless count was disappointing, but not surprising to L.A. tenant advocates who have long said that removing local COVID-19 tenant protections would put more people out on the streets.

“This is what we were afraid of. It is happening,” said Carla De Paz, an organizer with Community Power Collective and a member of the Keep L.A. Housed coalition, which advocates for tenant rights.

“People are not okay,” she said. “They're not just ready to go back to business as usual. They needed that social safety net to keep them housed as they recover from all the bad impacts of this pandemic.”

Eviction filings, lockouts began to spike last year

Earlier this year, De Paz and other tenant advocates urged L.A. County leaders to extend local COVID-19 tenant rules past their March 31 expiration date. Those rules gave low-income tenants legal defenses against eviction over delayed payment of rent if they had been economically hurt by the pandemic.

This year’s homeless count was conducted in late January 2023. At that point, local eviction protections were still on the books. But previous LAist reporting showed that evictions returned to pre-pandemic levels months before L.A. County’s COVID-19 rules fully went away. Housing advocates say as news spread that tenant protections would soon go away, landlords took action to try and evict tenants months behind on rent.

Eviction court filings and lockouts started to spike in the summer and fall of 2022. By June 2022, landlords were filing evictions at rates similar to pre-pandemic volumes. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department carried out close to 1,000 lockouts in September 2022, comparable to the number they executed in February 2020 just before the pandemic struck.

“Very predictably, as those protections were peeled back, you saw a corresponding increase in the number of evictions being filed — and even less surprisingly, a corresponding increase in homelessness,” said Kyle Nelson, a researcher and policy analyst with Strategic Actions for A Just Economy.

Tenants are going to eviction court without lawyers

The county and city of L.A. have been funding eviction defense programs since the beginning of the pandemic. But even with that additional public support, most tenants facing eviction are unable to obtain a lawyer. Unrepresented tenants typically lose to landlords, who almost always have an attorney.

“In terms of eviction filings, this was something [elected officials] could have done something about and chose not to,” Nelson said, arguing homelessness often starts with an eviction.

Tenants currently do not have the right to a free attorney in eviction court, as defendants do in criminal court. Some L.A. city councilmembers have put forward a proposal to create a “right to counsel” program for L.A. renters facing eviction.

The 2022 homeless count also showed an increase in homelessness in L.A. County, but at a slower rate of 4%. At the time, local officials credited COVID-19 eviction protections with “flattening the curve,” along with $2.6 billion in rent relief pumped into L.A. County by a state program that ended in April 2022.

New waves of eviction on the horizon? 

Paul Rubinstein, deputy chief of external relations at the L.A. Homeless Services Authority, said the dismantling of pandemic safety net programs increased homelessness not just in L.A. but across the country.

“We've seen COVID protections expiring everywhere,” Rubinstein said, chalking up part of the increase to “the end of a lot of those protections that had been in place.”

However, the authority’s CEO Va Lecia Adams Kellum told reporters the evidence that expiring eviction protections fueled the increase in homelessness was less clear to her. She said that theory doesn’t align with the 18% increase in this year’s count of people experiencing long-term, chronic homelessness — people who were not evicted within the last year.

“We’re still scratching our heads a bit,” Adams Kellum said. She said it is clear that high rents are a primary cause of homelessness, as shown in a recent comprehensive study of California’s homelessness crisis led by UC San Francisco researchers. But she said “we’re not exactly sure” why chronic, rather than first-time homelessness was so prominent in this year’s spike.

On the role played by pandemic safety net programs going away, Adams Kellum said, “I think it’s all speculation.”

The lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic aren’t over yet, and tenant advocates say new waves of eviction could be on the horizon. On Aug. 1, tenants in the city of L.A. will have to begin repaying the rent debt they owe to their landlords from months they missed earlier in the pandemic.

“There are still folks who have thousands of dollars of rent debt, who will not be able to pay it come August, and they will also be at risk of eviction,” De Paz said.