Homelessness declined in Los Angeles for the second year in a row, a key survey showed on Monday, marking a sustained drop in the number of people sleeping outdoors amid a yearslong push to bring people out of street encampments.
The results of the regional count, conducted in February, were viewed as generally positive news in the nation’s second-largest city, which saw a spike in homelessness after the Covid-19 pandemic and has been vexed by a severe housing shortage.
Even with the declines, more than 72,000 people remain homeless in Los Angeles County, a sprawling and fragmented metropolis with a population of about 10 million people.
In particular, the number of people sleeping in vehicles, abandoned buildings, sidewalk camps and other places unfit for habitation declined from the year before by 9.5 percent in Los Angeles County and by 7.9 percent in the City of Los Angeles.
Over two years, the count showed that unsheltered homelessness fell cumulatively by 14 percent in Los Angeles County and by a record 17.5 percent in the city, as thousands of people moved indoors.
Local officials attributed the trend to a regionwide barrage of initiatives and to billions of dollars in public spending over the past several years, including countywide taxes to help fund affordable housing and a state of emergency on homelessness declared by Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles after her 2022 election.
Los Angeles County has spent nearly $2.5 billion over the past eight years on rent subsidies, programs to add housing units and on mental health and addiction outreach. A program launched by Mayor Bass, Inside Safe, has moved thousands of people out of tent camps and into motels and permanent housing.
“These results aren’t just data points — they represent thousands of human beings who are now inside, and neighborhoods that are beginning to heal,” said Mayor Bass, who campaigned in 2022 on a vow to address squalid encampments that had spread to more sidewalks, driveways, parks and underpasses during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The progress on homelessness, which a year ago seemed to be the most pressing of Los Angeles’s problems, came as Southern California has fought to rebound from a string of natural disasters, economic disruptions and political disputes with the federal government.
The city and county have mounted an accelerated recovery from the epic wildfires that devastated Pacific Palisades and Altadena in January. Officials also have stretched to cover yawning budget shortfalls and battled the Trump administration, which has targeted Southern California with persistent immigration raids and a military presence.
Last week, armed federal agents and National Guard troops marched through MacArthur Park, at the heart of an immigrant enclave abutting downtown Los Angeles, in a show of force that Ms. Bass compared to an “armed occupation.”
Last year’s point-in-time count marked the first drop in homelessness in Los Angeles in a half-dozen years. The survey, which was designed by the University of Southern California and conducted in alignment with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development standards, was announced on Monday by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
The post Homeless Population Declines in Los Angeles for a Second Straight Year appeared first on New York Times.
