The annual survey that tracks homelessness in Los Angeles County has increasingly missed people in three key neighborhoods, falling short by nearly a third this year in Hollywood, Venice and Skid Row, a study by Rand found.
Rand’s researchers, who canvass the three neighborhoods every two months, found that the shortfalls coincide with an increase in the percentage of people “sleeping rough,” without the protection of a vehicle or tent.
“This means that the places with the highest needs are becoming the very places where the county’s official count is most underestimated,” said the report, released Wednesday.
The shift to rough sleeping likely results, at least in part, from the success of city encampment reduction programs such as Inside Safe.
Since 2021, programs offering motel rooms to people living in tent encampments nearly halved the number of tents identified by Rand.
“However, as the initiatives drove a real decline in unsheltered homelessness, they also removed the easiest-to-count unsheltered subpopulation,” likely contributing to the annual count’s growing inaccuracy, the report said.
The failure to count those living in the harshest conditions could distort the distribution of local and federal funds that is geared to the point-in-time, or PIT, count, lead author Louis Abramson said.
Communities with high numbers of rough sleepers will get less than those where homeless people still predominately live in vehicles and tents.
“That’s bad because rough sleepers need greater resources than people in tents,” Abramson said. “If there’s an undercount and that undercount correlates with need, you’d be systematically pushing resources away from need.”
To improve the annual count, the report recommended that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which conducts it, should employ professional field teams to independently cross-check the counts of thousands of volunteers who spread out over the county on three nights in January.
Mayor Karen Bass and LAHSA both issued measured responses to the report.
“The report shows that homelessness numbers are down and Inside Safe is working,” Bass said in a statement. “Everyone agrees that the PIT count needs improvement, and while there is still work to be done we welcome any opportunity to substantially improve reporting methodology. However, there is no disputing the fact that homelessness IS down.”
LAHSA interim CEO Gita O’Neill said in a statement that the agency “welcomes critical analysis of the count data and the opportunity to compare our findings with RAND.”
The point-in-time count, though “a vital and standardized tool,” is not “the last word on understanding homelessness in our region,” she said.
Data collected year-round by outreach and services teams “is the single most important source that informs systems planning and design,” O’Neill said. “Unlike the single-night PIT Count, this continuous, 365-day data allows us to precisely track needs and adjust service delivery approaches.”
The statement suggested that Rand respond to a forthcoming request for proposals to serve as LAHSA’s technical partner on the homeless count for 2027-2029.
The Rand report stopped short of disputing the countywide 9.5% decline in unsheltered homelessness reported by LAHSA in the last two years. It noted that extrapolating the undercount in the three neighborhoods, which account for about 10% of the entire homeless population in a typical year, would indicate that up to 7,900 homeless people living in the city of Los Angeles may be missing in the 2025 count.
But the different mix of people living rough and in vehicles and tents in different parts of the city makes comparisons unreliable, Abramson said.
“The actual decline LAHSA has quoted, we’re not arguing with that,” he said, but added, “If you want to see the decline continue, you’re going to have to develop outreach strategics for the non-encampment population.”
Rand’s Los Angeles Longitudinal Enumeration and Demographic Survey (LA LEADS) has been tracking homeless populations in the three neighborhoods since 2022, both as a check on the official count and to observe changes throughout the year.
Researchers return to each neighborhood every two months. They count individual tents, vehicles, makeshift shelters and people sleeping unsheltered. Using a methodology similar to LAHSA’s, they estimate the number of people occupying each type of shelter to calculate total populations.
Their results initially jibed with the annual count, falling within five percentage points above or below it. But then Rand’s count remained almost flat over the next two years, with ups and downs midyear, as the annual count showed decreases in the three neighborhoods. A gap of 26% in 2024 widened to 32% this year.
Rand’s results varied considerably by neighborhood: LAHSA reported only 61% of Rand’s number in Skid Row but 81% in Hollywood. Venice was in between.
They also showed swings during the year as the number increased in the summer months and declined in winter.
“Rough sleepers show a pronounced up-and-down trend which is the lowest in the winter,” Abramson said.
There’s also an inverse correlation between tents and rough sleepers. When one goes up, the other goes down.
“We don’t know what’s causing that,” Abramson said. One possibility is that it’s a response to the weather. Another is that people get tents and then lose them in cleanups.
But overall the dominant population in the city is vehicle dwellers, while in the three neighborhoods it’s now rough sleepers, he said.
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