The number of people without homes in L.A. County now stands at 66,433, a 13 percent jump since last year’s count, according to new numbers released today by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA).
It’s the second year of double-digit increases in the homeless population for both the county and the city of Los Angeles, where the unhoused population is up 14 percent since 2019. Robin Petering, who runs a research and advocacy company that works with homeless organizations, responded with a breathless “Oh my God” and “Wow” when she was read the results over the phone.
“It’s disheartening,” she said upon hearing the numbers. “‘Are our leaders capable of solving this problem?’ I think is a really valid question at this point.”
Many frustrated Angelenos will have the same reaction. On the one hand, the numbers seem shocking because L.A. has invested so much to fix the problem over the past few years — namely $1.2 billion in voter-approved bonds for subsidized apartments and an emergency shelter program — only to have fallen even further behind. But the response to the crisis has not matched the scale of the problem. Heidi Marston, the head of the Homeless Services Authority, says “bolder” action and an additional $500 million is needed every year “over a long period of time.”
The surge continues to be fueled by high housing costs, low wages, and a severe shortage of subsidized apartments that people with low incomes can afford. Fifty-nine percent of those who were homeless for the first time in 2019 cited economic hardship. These issues disproportionately impact black Angelenos, who make up 34 percent of L.A. County’s homeless population — and die from COVID-19 at double the rate of white people — but comprise just 8 percent of the county’s overall population.
The newly released data is based on a point-in-time count conducted in January, before the novel coronavirus hit L.A., imperiling the economy and leaving nearly 600,000 people without work. The number of homeless people is probably higher now, even when you factor in that 6,010 people most at risk of dying from COVID-19 were rushed into shelters between March and May, which is also after the count was completed.
“Any projections that have been made say we’re due for a really high inflow into homelessness without significant intervention, and we haven’t seen a significant intervention,” Petering says. “We have some minor eviction protections, but I don’t think they were robust enough or even well advertised.”
One estimate, by Columbia University economics professor Brendan O’Flaherty, is that nearly 30,000 Californians could end up homeless because of the economic devastation the pandemic has caused.
The Homeless Services Authority was able to place 22,767 people into housing last year; it’s an area in which the agency has made steady headway. The number of housing placements has more than doubled since 2014. “There has been progress,” says Robin Hughes, president of nonprofit housing developer Abode Communities. “We are housing more people and getting more people off the streets.”
But LAHSA hasn’t been able to keep up with the influx. The number of people who became homeless last year was 82,955, and two-thirds of unsheltered adults were homeless for the first time. “The vast majority are from L.A. County and fell into homelessness while in L.A.,” says Marston.
She says the agency will try to stop a “flood” of evictions brought on by the pandemic. But if L.A. is going to prevent more people from becoming homeless, the solution can’t only be to build additional affordable housing, as important as it is. The city and county need to transform foster care, health care, and criminal justice, systems that have unequally harmed black people.
“We can settle for nothing less than ending homelessness for those who experience it and stopping it before it begins for anyone else,” Marston says.
Comments
Even a small studio with utilities will cost you $1,200.
That’s $40 per day.
The minimum wage in California is $12 per hour. A minimum wage person has to work 3-4 hours a day just to pay rent.
I know people who couldn’t match high expenses with their earnings, and moved back to Mexico and Europe.
By Ivan III on 06.12.20 9:44am
Imagine moving to a place where one can afford to live, instead of camping out on a sidewalk.
By metro1 on 06.12.20 3:27pm
So you’re saying nobody’s who works a minimum wage job deserves to afford an apartment and a modicum of stability? Those very same jobs, like working at a grocery store, the we have all come to realize are ESSENTIAL during the pandemic?
By Greyvagabond on 06.16.20 1:23am
No, that’s not what the poster said
If you can’t a afford a solo residence in an expensive coastal city, it’s called getting "roommates" or "moving somewhere more affordable"
By Entitlement Society on 06.16.20 5:06am
why would you live in the most expensive city in the country if you’re working at a grocery store?
By TheLastWhiteManInSouthCentral on 06.17.20 11:50pm
People who work in the service industry obviously have bigger dreams than bagging groceries their whole lives… Los Angeles, like any major city, is full of opportunities (education, industry, culture, etc.)
People come (or stay) for a variety of reasons. These people have to put food on the table and pay their rent. Do you really not understand how a modern economy works?
If anything, major cities need low wage workers more than most places because there’s just an insane amount of economic activity up and down the pay scale. Who’s gonna bag your groceries, stock the shelves, deliver your packages, serve you meals, wash your dishes? How are you going to work if there’s no childcare to watch your kids? Who’s gonna drive elderly people to cancer treatment or for dialysis?
I could go on… but you get the point (I hope?)
By corner soul on 06.18.20 10:55am
Thanks for the lesson in economics. There are plenty of people in this town who don’t have bigger dreams. I’m curious as to why they’d want to live in the most expensive city in the nation, when there are plenty of other places, despite the narcissism of Californians, with education, industry, culture, etc., and without the traffic, crime, overcrowding, and exorbitant cost of living
By TheLastWhiteManInSouthCentral on 06.19.20 5:48pm
Have you every tried working at a grocery store? They pay well over minimum wage. They provide benefits, health and retirement.
By RXBXUXNX on 06.18.20 3:37pm
It’s $14.25 in Los Angeles
So unless people want to work in Kern County but live in LA, they should be making a little more.
By RXBXUXNX on 06.18.20 3:34pm
SIMPLE SOLUTION: Move to a cheaper city! Sane people do not allow themselves to fall into homelessness.
By Jose Rios7 on 06.22.20 7:13pm
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/pods-for-coronavirus-patients-may-actually-be-temporary-housing-for-homeless-people/2355592/
66,433 x $4,000 per pod = $265,732,000
Authority, says "bolder" action and an additional $500 million is needed every year "over a long period of time."
Pods are a win-win for the NOW. Homeless get a safe and private space and the taxpayers get the public streets back to use. We could have been well on our way to focusing on affordable or permanent housing if this was immediately enacted with 1.2B of HHH money. There would have been a lot of money left over. We wouldn’t have needed Project Roomkey funding either.
Let’s just use the entire budget on the homeless and forget the taxpayers or city infrastructure improvements. Come one. Come all. California is going to house, feed you, give you money. And you don’t need to work or do anything of substance for yourself or the city.
California has spun off the planet.
By Ravid Dyu on 06.12.20 10:23am
That is the logical solution.
Meanwhile, Garcetti is focused on building each homeless individual a new apartment that costs $500k+ per unit. That pencils out to approximately $33 billion overall and will never happen.
By LA.Irish on 06.12.20 10:43am
For the current homeless population.
According to the article "The number of people who became homeless last year was 82,955"
So to provide everyone with a new apartment, they will need $41 billion per year.
By RXBXUXNX on 06.18.20 3:39pm
Queue some dumb obstructionist response without proposing an alternative from LosFeliz$ean in 3, 2, 1…
By LADude on 06.12.20 11:06am
Yep. He’ll cry about the "concentration camps" or where are we going to put them with the city’s 2K vacant owned city lots.
San Francisco is at least finally coming to the conclusion this is the only feasible solution in the near future. And they’re just opening safe lots for tents.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-22/san-francisco-sanctions-once-shunned-homeless-encampments
By Ravid Dyu on 06.12.20 11:27am
Hell, if the city would just open some parking lots and allow churches and charities to build these, it would probably cost even less.
Elvis Summers was building tiny homes for the homeless couple years back for like $1200 a pop until the authorities shut him down… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhFKPZqFd3o
By corner soul on 06.12.20 12:14pm
There are so many feasible options but the city insists on building luxury apartments. How many have been built after 4 years? Like 150 units right?
By LADude on 06.12.20 3:45pm
Elvis wasn’t providing the land to place his "housing" upon, nor sanitary sewer hookups. He wasn’t solving anything, he was creating and furthering a public nuisance and health hazard, and expropriating pubic space in the process.
Any "solution" that does not involve removing the vagrants from the public square is a non-starter.
"Pods" may be useful for short-term triage, but ultimately, we have to send people back where they came from, rather than proclaiming everyone a "resident" and somehow deserving of a taxpayer-funded $700K apartment.
By smartalex on 06.13.20 8:16am
Like I said, city owns a bunch of parking lots… build cheap ad-hoc shelter, bring in portable toilets and sinks, food trucks, social workers, physicians, etc.
If we had bare minimum shelter available for all the homeless (which should be doable with the HHH money and what I outlined above) then anyone who refuses can be shown the door.
By corner soul on 06.13.20 10:47am
I was in Amsterdam right before Covid Broke out and was surprised there are no homeless people anywhere and began asking locals how they managed to do this . I learned that Amsterdam has very strict vagrancy laws and these strict laws combined with mental health and drug addiction services for the the poor and homeless have proven successful. Amsterdam was not always like this, they committed themselves to treatment options combined with strict laws for vagrancy and a huge social safety net. I also learned that the taxes are so high that when you apply for a job they tell you the net dollar amount you will receive since the actual number is totally misleading. There is a compromise for everything, if we don’t want homeless people taking over the street we need to provide the services these people need as well as strictly enforce vagrancy laws – oh – while also agreeing to part with over half of your middle class incomes to pay for it. Would a middle class person rather have an extra 20K in their pocket at the end of the year or would they rather have the drug addicted homeless guy on the corner have a cozy life on the tax payers dime ? This is the real choice we have – pay for programs and enforce the laws if you want the results. Meanwhile white privileged virtue signaling bloggers like Ms Chandler and crew will make you believe this is solely the fault of racism and successful developers in order to get your clicks and keep their jobs. Talk about shame …. – how about white privileged Karens using polarizing issues like homelessness, and systemic racism in order to further their personal careers and incomes ?
By Mr Balls on 06.12.20 10:38am
LA chose to go the route of zero enforcement of vagrancy laws and zero mental health assistance.
By LADude on 06.12.20 11:03am
Big part of the problem with housing is cost to build… if woke liberals want to see more affordable housing, they need to allow more housing to be built (and allow policies that minimize the red tape and litigation involved.) From what I’ve seen, a lot of these people in LA are fighting for just the opposite, claiming that if we scale back exclusionary zoning it’ll lead to more speculation and gentrification (as if flippers aren’t already doing that already.)
By corner soul on 06.12.20 11:17am
R-1 isn’t "exclusionary" zoning. Its why people want to live here.
If you can’t afford your rent today, you certainly can’t afford R-1.
Destroying R-1 will not solve anything. ADUs are never going to be rented to at-risk tenants at low prices. Minneapolis already demonstrated what happens with up-zoning R-1 to R-2. No one who owns a single-family home wants that.
Its the multifamily districts that need an overhaul. Visit most any street east of La Cienega with pre-war, dingbats and "Historical" properties – its a hellhole.
(And no, I don’t live in an R-1 district.)
By smartalex on 06.13.20 10:09am
If you can’t build a duplex or corner store in your neighborhood, then by definition it is exclusionary. Obviously, many prefer it that way… but that doesn’t absolve them of the fact they’re excluding lower income neighbors and bottom-up investment.
By corner soul on 06.13.20 10:50am
What’s the point of your R-1 with a row of tents on your sidewalk?
By Mpascal on 06.15.20 7:37am