The 2026 homeless count tallied just 671 recreational vehicles scattered across the Antelope Valley’s 400 square miles of desert, a steep drop from the 1,432 counted the year before. That decline of 761 RVs sounds like progress on paper, but people who actually live out there say it doesn’t match what they’re seeing on their own back roads.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the Antelope Valley’s reported drop accounted for three-fourths of a 21% countywide decrease in counted RVs this year. That’s a huge chunk of the county’s overall improvement riding on one desert region’s numbers. Residents aren’t buying it. “The number hasn’t gone down. If anything, it’s increased,” one resident told the paper, and others said they simply haven’t seen the kind of mass towing operation that would explain hundreds of RVs disappearing from the landscape.
A Count That Swings Wildly by Neighborhood
The inconsistency isn’t just countywide versus local — it shows up community by community within the Antelope Valley itself. In Littlerock and Pearblossom, the RV tally jumped from just four one year to 349 the next, then fell back to 253, per the same Times report. Llano saw a similar whiplash: its count more than tripled to 631 before more than halving to 298 in the latest survey.
Those swings raise an obvious question — are RVs actually moving in and out of these communities at that pace, or is the counting method itself the problem? The count is organized by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which runs what the nonprofit research group RAND describes as a volunteer-led visual survey spanning more than 2,800 census tracts across the county. In the Antelope Valley specifically, the Times reports the count relies on a combination of outreach teams, the Palmdale Police Department’s drone, and a consistent group of local volunteers.
A Possible Glitch, and a Defense From Officials
One name that surfaces in the Times’ reporting is Christopher Minsal, who suggested a digital glitch may have doubled the prior year’s count across three large census tracts — a theory that, if true, would help explain why this year’s number looks like such a dramatic drop by comparison. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, for its part, has defended its methodology, telling the Times the Antelope Valley presents a unique counting challenge because of its vast, often desolate terrain…