The unhoused population of Los Angeles has grown by 9%, with more than 75,000 people now experiencing homelessness across the county, according to data from the government’s annual count, released on Thursday.
The Los Angeles homeless services authority (Lahsa) report suggests that there was a sharper increase in homelessness this year compared with last year, when the agency estimated a 4% rise in the population. The agency count includes people living on the street and people in shelters.
While the overall population saw a 9% increase, there was a sharper increase in people considered “unsheltered”, defined as those living outside in tents, cars, RVs and other makeshift encampments. The unsheltered population increased by 14% from 2022 to 2023, with more than 50,156 people living outside, making up 70% of the overall homeless population. The number of homeless people living indoors in shelters has remained steady at roughly 20,000 people.
The counts are a rough estimate gathered between 24 to 26 January of this year, and the numbers have previously been found to be an undercount.
The data comes amid an escalating humanitarian catastrophe in the most populous county in America, which has prompted scrutiny from the United Nations and where an average of six unhoused people are now dying each day. Overdoses have been driving the sharp increase in fatalities of people living outside, along with heart disease, traffic accidents, homicides, hypothermia and heat exhaustion.
The crisis has disproportionately affected Black residents, who make up 7.6% of the overall LA county population, but 31.7% of unhoused people, the count found. Lahsa also counted 2,151 youth living outside. Within the city of LA, Lahsa reported a 10% increase in the total homeless population to 46,260 people. That group includes 32,680 people counted living outside, a group that saw a 15% jump.
Lahsa also found that 30% of the total unhoused population reported having substance use disorders, and 25% said they had serious mental illnesses.
The largest study of California’s unhoused population in decades, released this month, found that nearly half of homeless adults in the state are over the age of 50, with Black residents significantly overrepresented. Research from the University of California, San Francisco, also revealed that 90% of the unhoused population had housing in the state before they experienced homelessness, with 75% of them remaining in the same county. The findings debunked the persistent false claim that unhoused people mostly come from out of state and made clear that the high cost of housing was a primary cause of the crisis.
LA officials said on Thursday that the Lahsa count had similar findings – that the majority of unhoused people in LA are from California.
“It’s a popular myth in the city that people are coming from far away, they come here for our weather, and they come here because we’re lax in terms of our laws,” Karen Bass, the mayor of the city of LA, said at a press conference. “That’s not true.”
Bass has focused on clearing encampments and getting people into shelter, with her office reporting that her Inside Safe initiative has moved 1,300 people indoors from street camps in the first six months of her administration. Her initiative, which launched after this year’s count, has faced some obstacles, including difficulties getting people into permanent housing, lack of adequate services and unhoused residents raising concerns about the tight restrictions and poor conditions of temporary placements. Overall, her office said, 14,000 unhoused people had entered temporary or permanent housing this year.
“We also have to figure out how to prevent people from falling into homelessness,” Bass said, noting that Covid-era relief had ended, making people more vulnerable to losing housing. “I’m worried that next year the count might be even larger.”
Lahsa officials said on Thursday that there had been a nearly 40% increase in placements into shelters, and that the the county had reduced the time it takes to get people off the streets into temporary housing programs – from roughly 110 days in 2021 to 61 days for adults.
The city and county are also on track to create roughly 8,200 affordable housing units this year, according to Lahsa. But Va Lecia Adams Kellum, Lahsa’s CEO, said people continued to lose housing at a faster rate than those living on the streets were moving indoors.
“The primary causes of homelessness are economic,” she said. “Our brothers and sisters who are unhoused are struggling with poverty and houselessness because the rent is just too darn high.”
