Some of Mayor Karen Bass’s supporters are trying to sugarcoat it, the news that homelessness is up in her city as she faces an already tough campaign for re-election. They say that news that the city’s homeless population increased by 3.4% from last year, based on the annual January point-in-time count, doesn’t pass the eye test — that it seems, at least in some neighborhoods, that the homeless numbers are down. But you don’t get to pick the years in which you like the numbers.
Not only did the city’s overall homeless numbers go up in the period from early 2025 to early this year: Among the 45,194 people in Los Angeles who were counted as homeless, which includes people in shelters; the number of people sleeping outside in tents, encampments or in vehicles increased by 7.9% over the previous year.
Countywide, homelessness was up by 1.2%.
As Staff Writer Steve Scauzillo reports, officials say most of the reasons for the reversals of progress were the drop of homeless people moving into shelters and a roadblock from federal funding cuts. That doesn’t help, but the bureaucracies formed to fight homelessness in the city and county are a dumpster fire.
Mayor Bass has resisted efforts by City Controller Kenneth Mejia to audit her initiatives on homelessness. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority was audited at the order of U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter and shown to be almost entirely without financial controls to monitor its data and work with outside contractors.
Bass’ challenger, Councilmember Nithya Raman, gets it right when she says, “By now you’ve probably seen the reports: despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent—and repeated assurances that Los Angeles had turned a corner—unsheltered homelessness increased by nearly 8% in this city. That is a moral outrage. And it is a failure of leadership. Homelessness is not an unsolvable problem. It’s a mismanaged one.”
Voters consistently say homelessness is our biggest problem. Politicians continue to bungle every scheme they concoct to lessen the ongoing tragedy. More of the same won’t solve this crisis.