Homelessness up 10% in LA despite a flood of money for programs

If LA County’s homeless population were its own city, it would be the 124th largest city in the entire state. Every year the city does a homeless count designed to help keep track of whether the problem is getting better or worse. This year, despite a flood of money directly at programs, the news was pretty bad.

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…

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.

That works out to a 9% jump in LA County and a 10% jump in the city itself compared to last year. That’s bad but it’s not for lack of trying. The NY Times calls LA the “test case” for addressing homelessness.

Los Angeles is hardly the only American city to struggle with homelessness, but its homeless population is disproportionately large, and about 30 percent of the nation’s homeless population lives in California. As a result, Los Angeles is a kind of large-scale test case for which solutions work and which don’t…

Mayor Karen Bass, a longtime community organizer and former member of Congress, was elected last year on promises to make a dent in a colossal problem quickly. She vowed to move thousands of people living in encampments humanely, by spending more time on outreach before cleanups. She has said that the only way to achieve that goal is to improve communication among nonprofit groups and government agencies.

In fact, Mayor Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness on her first day in office.

Bass has promised to bring 17,000 people inside in her first year in office. There are more than 41,000 people who are homeless living in the city of Los Angeles, according to the most recent count. The count found roughly 69,000 people experiencing homelessness across L.A. County.

To be fair here, the actual count on which the new figures are based happened in January. Bass had only been in office about six weeks at that point. Still, the fact that the trend hasn’t changed despite all of the money and time poured into it has some local officials pretty upset.

Councilmember Traci Park, who represents part of the Westside, said the city has been relying on “bad policy,” devoting too few resources to the issues of substance abuse and mental health.

“It is clear to me what we have done so far has not worked,” she said. “Despite throwing billions of dollars at this problem over the last number of years, we have failed to address the growth of encampments on the streets.”

The results of the homelessness count, called “devastating” by one council member, have also become routine at this point. The city has logged an increase in seven of the last eight annual counts, even as its yearly budget for addressing the issue has exceeded $1 billion…

In the months since the count was conducted, Bass has secured the approval of a record $1.3 billion in spending on homelessness, as part of a city budget that goes into effect Saturday. Of that total, at least $250 million will be devoted to Inside Safe.

It’s pretty hard to argue that LA hasn’t focused on the problem enough or devoted enough money to dealing with it. And yet the numbers get worse every year. The general line of argument from activists is that this is all the result of a lack of affordable housing. There may be some truth to that. California has become a place where any and every project can be blocked by local officials or random individuals using environmental regulations. It’s part of the reason the high-speed rail effort has been such a disaster.

But I think the activists have also been downplaying the degree to which the chronic homeless, i.e. the people who are on the street year after year, are dealing with drug abuse and mental problems. Back in 2019 the LA Times did its own estimate of the number of homeless people suffering from these problems and it was dramatically different from the numbers shown to local officials.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which conducts the annual count, narrowly interpreted the data to produce much lower numbers. In its presentation of the results to elected officials earlier this year, the agency said only 29% of the homeless population had either a mental illness or substance abuse disorder and, therefore, 71% “did not have a serious mental illness and/or report substance use disorder.”

The Times, however, found that about 67% had either a mental illness or a substance abuse disorder. Individually, substance abuse affects 46% of those living on the streets — more than three times the rate previously reported — and mental illness, including post-traumatic stress disorder, affects 51% of those living on the streets, according to the analysis…

The findings lend statistical support to the public’s frequent association of mental illness, physical disabilities and substance abuse with homelessness.

Obviously a difference like that is going to impact how you deal with the problem. If two-thirds have problems that go beyond affordable housing, maybe we should focus more on helping people deal with those problems.