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iAUDIT! - It’s no secret Los Angeles is the epicenter of the homelessness crisis. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, there were about 771,000 unhoused people in the United States in 2025. Of those, approximately 187,000 live in California, and about 72,000 are in LA County. Greater LA is home to more than nine percent of all the homeless people in the country. To meet this outsized crisis, local officials spend between $2 billion and $4 billion per year on homelessness. (How you calculate that number depends on what you choose to include. Audits are reviews have shown the City and County make little effort to calculate the true cost). For more than 20 years, the number of homeless people, and the money spent supporting them, has steadily increased. Also, remember the 72,000 number should be taken with a healthy dose of salt; LAHSA’s problems with the annual PIT count are well known and well documented. The actual number of unhoused people could easily be into six figures.
One would be perfectly justified in asking a simple question: Why are there so many homeless people in Los Angeles? There are several answers to that question. Some are obvious. LA’s moderate climate makes living outdoors easier than in most other places. The allure of making it big in Hollywood’s movie and music scene is still a powerful attraction to thousands of young people. LA’s sprawl makes it easier to move from place to place than it is in other, more compact cities. As I’ve written before, there are as many reasons someone is homeless as there are homeless people.
If we listen to many local officials, we are beginning to win the war against homelessness. LAHSA’s last two PIT counts have recorded small decreases in homelessness, although there is ample evidence the counts are the product of deeply flawed, and possibly intentionally manipulated, numbers. If we believe the evidence of our own eyes, there is little reason to think homelessness has decreased; encampments may be “cleared”, but their inhabitants simply move elsewhere, or return to the same locations, sometimes on the same day.
If there has been a decrease in homelessness, it is a Pyrrhic victory, with minor reductions coming at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. The cost is so high, there is simply no way we could afford to shelter or house all of LA’s homeless people using current programs. But the problem wouldn’t be so overwhelming if there weren’t tens of thousands of unhoused people on LA’s streets to begin with. Again, we return to the question of why there are so many homeless people in Los Angeles.
If you ask most housing and homelessness advocates, LA’s homelessness crisis is caused by the severe lack of affordable housing. Along with New York and San Francisco, Los Angeles is among the most expensive housing markets in the United States. Despite dozens of state and local laws making housing development easier, Greater LA still lags in housing production, especially housing for working-class families. My fellow CityWatch columnist Dick Platkin has written extensively about the failure of current housing policies. One of my earliest CityWatch columns was about the housing crisis for working-class families. In reality, if the cost of housing was the main driver of homelessness, then nearly every big city on earth would have the same unhoused population as Los Angeles. In most countries, housing costs in large cities far exceed costs in less populous areas. Unfettered development will never solve the homelessness crisis.
Some of the main reasons LA has such a large home unhoused population include:
· Every day, more people become homeless than exit homelessness. According to a 2023 McKinsey & Company study, 207 people exit homelessness each day, but 227 either become homeless for the first time or fall back into homelessness. The reasons people become homeless vary, but substance abuse plays a major role. A 2023 UCSF survey of unhoused people showed 65 percent of respondents said they used drugs regularly and 64 percent of those said they began abusing drugs before they became homeless. Untreated mental illness is also a major contributing factor; the UCSF study reported 82 percent of respondents said they’d experienced a serious mental health condition. Many unhoused people suffer from both a substance abuse problem and mental illness, both of which contribute to physical illness as well. LA’s large unsheltered homeless population, about 65 percent of the total according to LAHSA, experience high rates of serious health problems.
· One of the reasons more people become homelessness than exit is that LA does a remarkably bad job getting people off the streets, especially given its huge expenditures. Despite all the positive PR and staged press opportunities, there is no verifiable evidence the region’s homeless population has declined. In fact, there is ample evidence LAHSA’s PIT count has chronically undercounted the unhoused population, whether through inept management or deliberate manipulation. Since program managers focus on completing processes instead of measuring outcomes, any claim that the city has sheltered or housed thousands of people must be tempered by the fact an unknown, but large, number of them are repeat clients. A report from audit firm Alvarez & Marsal for the federal court found that 51 percent of shelter or interim housing clients were enrolled in more than one program simultaneously, (page 118). The report noted the percentage could include some people who progressed from one program to another, but it also said it could represent an unknown number of repeat participants. A 2019 audit from LA’s City Controller found that people who were sheltered, fell back into homelessness, and then were re-sheltered were counted as unique individuals if they reentered a shelter after more than one month. The City spends millions on CARE and CARE+ encampment clean-ups, which are supposed to include referrals to shelters, but camp occupants often move back, sometimes on the same day the clean-up is completed
· Just how ineffective the City’s homelessness programs are is shown in a recent City CAO report. Despite the cheery language, the report shows few people exit interim housing to permanent housing, especially those who have been trapped in temporary housing for more than two years. And as I have reported before, far more people fall back into homelessness than are housed.
· An argument can be made that some programs aren’t designed to reduce homelessness, but to make it more tolerable. While superficially compassionate, such programs can merely prolong life on the streets, causing more problems in the long-term. Many studies have shown that the longer someone is homeless, the more difficult it is to find them shelter and housing. While the City’s mismanaged programs do little to get people off the streets and keep them off, other programs contribute nothing to sheltering or housing people. A February 3 CAO report (page 17) shows the City budgets almost $16 million for Hygiene Services like portable showers and laundry services. While nobody should expect the unsheltered homeless to live in unnecessarily filthy conditions, all programs should share the goal of getting people off the streets and into proper shelter. There is also anecdotal evidence that the City, County, and LAHSA programs are vulnerable to fraud, such as the false promise of substance abuse recovery to draw people from other states, where they then find themselves on the streets. Debates about how many homeless people come from other states have been raging for years, and those on both sides of the argument can produce evidence to support their positions. In reality, the argument is secondary to the fact there are thousands of people on LA’s streets who need viable paths to shelter, housing, or a way to return to their home states. A program funded by the Santa Monica Coalition reports great success returning people with family connections to their home locations.
There could be a more ideological reason so many people remain homeless in LA. City and County officials have made their opposition to the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision very clear. The Court’s decision allows cities to clear encampments from the public right-of-way, even if they refuse shelter offers and regardless of shelter capacity. Yet Los Angeles continues to pursue a policy of “relentless outreach” as former head of homeless Lourdes Castro-Romero said. Contracts for outreach services contain few, if any, outcome-based performance measures, instead paying for the number of contacts providers record.
What would happen if the City adopted ordinances compliant with Grants Pass? No more endless outreach that pays providers for each "engagement". No more shelter operators paid for simply having beds available instead of for the number of people actually assisted. No more huge expenditures for housing because advocate groups can no longer try to build their way out of this crisis. Advocate groups will then lose their political clout, and candidates and elected officials won't be able to rely on them for support. Money will have to go for shelter, treatment, and recovery programs that actually work in keeping people off the streets. No more easy money.
If there are many reasons people become homeless, then there must be a variety of programs to meet their needs. Focusing on housing costs as the only solution is unrealistic and wasteful. If Los Angeles’ leaders are serious about solving the homelessness crisis, they must be more flexible, accountable, and realistic in their approach.
(Tim Campbell is a longtime Westchester resident and veteran public servant who spent his career managing a municipal performance audit program. Drawing on decades of experience in government accountability, he brings a results-driven approach to civic oversight. In his iAUDIT! column for CityWatchLA, Campbell emphasizes outcomes over bureaucratic process, offering readers clear-eyed analyses of how local programs perform—and where they fall short. His work advocates for greater transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness in Los Angeles government.)
