iAUDIT! – As a public sector auditor, I heard time and again was the old saying that “Liars figure and figures lie”. It expressed a widely held belief that numbers can be manipulated so they say whatever you want them to say. If that were true, I would have been out of a job 30 years ago. Numbers are immutable, as constant as gravity and just as unforgiving. Two plus two is always four no matter how many times we’re told its five or three. You can try to bend them, cook them, ignore them, or spin them, but numbers do not change. This fact is especially important in Los Angeles’ homelessness environment, where numbers fly around like bees on a warm spring day. We’re told 23,000 people have been sheltered or housed, and that “thousands” more were housed in 2024 than in previous years. Officials tell us unsheltered homelessness has decreased five percent (or maybe 10 percent depending on the source). We’re told the numbers prove the multi-billion dollar business of homelessness interventions is having an effect. But can we trust the numbers? Where do they come from and what are they based on? Questioning the numbers is especially relevant as the City and County move away from funding LAHSA as the primary conduit of providing services to LA’s unhoused population.
Let’s start with the most important number: the number of homeless people in LA County. LAHSA’s 2024 Point in Time (PIT) count was 75,312 homeless people, of whom 51,365 (69.5 percent) were unsheltered. Both numbers were down from the previous year (.27 percent for overall homelessness and 5.1 percent for unsheltered homelessness). Leaders like Mayor Bass and LAHSA’s then-CEO Va Lecia Adams Kellum were quick to claim victory, saying the numbers were finally going down after years of increases. The problem was the numbers were based on deeply flawed methods. As detailed by Christopher LeGras, who participated in the count, in the All Aspect report, the count process was plagued by software glitches and missed areas. In addition, the count is founded on a set of assumptions, like a certain number of people in a tent or RV, which are assumed to be correct but have not been verified. To make things even more confusing, LAHSA’s volunteer count teams were told not to count some areas like PCH and Will Rogers State Park because other entities would do it. But when Sue Pascoe at Circling the News asked for the data from those counts, she received no response. Despite those problems, and a lack of substantive answers, LAHSA once again claimed the 2025 count showed a reduction in unsheltered homelessness of between five and ten percent, based on “raw data”. However, the initial count did not include youths, nor people in parks or near state highways. Once could speculate the early release of raw data was intended to counter negative publicity following two damning audits and the revelation Dr. Adams Kellum was approving contracts for a nonprofit where her husband is a senior manager.
So how many people live on LA’s streets? We’ll never know an exact number because the homeless population is by its nature transient, often moving from place to place. Many people live in a cycle of chronic housing insecurity, slipping in and out of homelessness. Limited-scope counts in selected areas in the City performed by the RAND Corporation indicate homelessness is much higher than LAHSA’s PIT counts suggest. Some advocates believe the real number of the unhoused could be twice as high as the official numbers. A September 2024 study sponsored by the Economic Roundtable estimated the real number of the homeless population at 139,000. While a precise estimate may be impossible, undercounting the homeless population means the programs meant to reduce homelessness are even more inadequate than we believe…