The number of people living on the street, both in the city of Los Angeles and across much of Los Angeles County, is up compared to the previous year, dealing a fresh blow to Mayor Karen Bass as she runs for reelection.
L.A.’s unsheltered homeless population — those living outdoors or in their vehicles — went up by 7.9% after two consecutive years of decreases, according to two people familiar with the numbers presented by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority in closed-door briefings.
Overall homelessness, which includes those living in shelters and other temporary facilities, increased by 3.4% compared to the previous year, those sources said.
Both asked to remain unnamed because they were not authorized to publicly discuss LAHSA’s presentation, which focused on this year’s annual point-in-time count conducted in January.
The numbers represent a significant setback for Bass, who is seeking a second term in the Nov. 3 election and has made the fight against homelessness a central part of her agenda, touting her administration’s progress in moving people indoors.
Bass, in a statement, attributed the increases to an array of issues, including funding cuts by the state and federal governments. She described a lack of adequate county services, such as mental health and substance counseling, as a contributor to the crisis.
Even with those obstacles, the city has reduced unsheltered homelessness by 11% since 2023, while also housing more than 1,000 homeless veterans, Bass said.
“This crisis was ignored by city leaders for decades, it’s only now that we’ve seen a historic decline,” she said. “I will never stop fighting until we end street homelessness, because no Angeleno should be sleeping on the street.”
LAHSA has been briefing city and county officials in the run-up to the public release of the numbers on Friday. The agency did not immediately provide comment on the latest count, or the reasons for the increases.
LAHSA also declined to provide this year’s margins of error. Because the increases in the city and county numbers were close to last year’s margins of error, it wasn’t clear whether they would be considered statistically significant.
City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who heads the council’s committee on housing and homelessness, is running for mayor against Bass. A Raman campaign spokesperson had no comment.
Bass had repeatedly touted a 17.5% drop in unsheltered homelessness over two years in L.A., offering signs of hope in a city where homelessness had been steadily trending upward for a decade.
Inside Safe, the mayor’s signature homelessness program, has moved more than 6,000 people into hotels, motels and other types of interim housing since Bass took office in December 2022. But by May 31, 41% of those people had returned to homelessness, according to LAHSA figures collected separately from this year’s homeless count.
The increases in homelessness are “bad for Los Angeles, and therefore bad for the incumbent mayor,” said political science professor Fernando Guerra, who heads the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.
“For her political campaign, there’s nothing good about this count,” he said. “It contradicts her main campaign theme. It contradicts the successes of her first term. It contradicts the narrative of her reasons for running for reelection.”
Bass was already facing an array of challenges this summer: anger over the protracted cleanup from the Lineage fire in Boyle Heights, where smells and vermin have plagued the surrounding neighborhood; multiple water main breaks, including one that caused major flooding; and questions about the overlapping roles held by a crisis communications consultant who advised her office for free.
The mayor’s favorability ratings took a nosedive last year in the wake of the Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead. In the months that followed, Bass was also confronted with a major budget crisis and federal immigration raids that devastated families and businesses.
The numbers from this year’s homelessness count were not as grim in other parts of the region.
Overall homelessness increased by 1.2% in the “continuum of care,” which covers 85 of Los Angeles County’s 88 cities, including L.A., according to people familiar with the numbers presented by LAHSA. Unsheltered homelessness in those communities increased by 3.5%, those sources said. (Long Beach, Pasadena and Glendale conduct their own counts.)
L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, in her own statement, described the point-in-time count as one data point and “not the whole picture.”
“People experiencing homelessness — and the communities impacted by this crisis — care less about esoteric debates over the numbers,” she said. “They care more about what they see on our streets — whether people are getting into housing, accessing the care they need, and being accountable for how their tax dollars are being spent.”
The backsliding comes at a difficult time not just for Bass but for LAHSA, a joint city-county agency that has become a major target of the Trump administration, which moved last month to suspend LAHSA from seeking or receiving funds for housing and homelessness programs. At stake are hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to help some of the region’s neediest residents.
LAHSA sued the federal government to halt that effort. A court hearing is scheduled for Aug. 6.
Last year, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted to pull hundreds of millions of dollars out of LAHSA, shifting the money to a new county-run agency focused on homelessness. Supervisor Hilda Solis said that move provided greater transparency for a system that was “unaccountable and lacked oversight.”
City officials have been contemplating their own pullout from the agency but have not taken any action.
“The City must build something better — results-driven, transparent, and centered around the people we’re trying to help, not the bureaucracy,” said Bass, who sits on LAHSA’s board.
