Los Angeles residents, long exhausted by homelessness, were optimistic when Mayor Karen Bass started an aggressive effort to move people from encampments into motel rooms in late 2022, soon after she took office. Piles of belongings were removed from freeway underpasses. Sidewalks that had been blocked by lines of tents were cleared.
But even as Ms. Bass touted the success of Inside Safe, her signature program aimed at moving people off the streets, she warned that the population of homeless Angelenos could still grow before her efforts made a dent.
Ms. Bass and her allies on Friday received major validation: For the first time in six years, the number of people who were homeless in Los Angeles decreased from the year before, according to the region’s most recent point-in-time count, which took place in January.
In Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest city, where encampments have vexed neighbors for years, the overall number of people experiencing homelessness decreased by 2.2 percent, while the number of unsheltered people in the city — homeless people who are not in emergency shelter and are sleeping on the street, in tents or in cars — decreased by 10.4 percent.
Homelessness has become a top concern of voters on the West Coast, where cities have struggled to figure out how to move people indoors and into permanent homes. California has a severe housing shortage, and more encampments emerged during the pandemic, including in suburban areas where they did not exist before.
Hours before the Los Angeles data was released on Friday, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that will make it easier for local governments on the West Coast to ban sleeping in public. But Ms. Bass said that Los Angeles’s progress in convincing people to move indoors had demonstrated that arresting homeless people was a “failed response.”
At a news conference Friday morning about the region’s homeless count, she said that she feared the ruling would usher in a wave of mass incarceration, similar to one that took hold in the 1990s in response to the crack addiction crisis.
“We know for a fact it will not work,” she said of arresting people who are homeless. “It will not get people housed. It will not get people off our streets.”
The results of the point-in-time count in January indicate that Los Angeles leaders had success in moving encampment residents indoors, but made less progress in finding them permanent homes, experts said. That finding was bolstered by an increase in the number of homeless people who were living in shelters or in temporary housing, including motels.
“It shows some signs of progress, or at least, bending the curve,” said Dr. Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco. “We’re beginning to do the right things, but we’re not doing them at scale.”
It is certainly better for people experiencing homelessness to be in shelters rather than on the street, she said, both for homeless people and for the neighborhoods in which they camp. New York and California have a comparable share of residents who are homeless. But in New York City, nearly all homeless residents stay indoors because the city is required by law to provide shelter for homeless people.
The federal government mandates that local officials conduct point-in-time homeless counts at regular intervals in regions across the country; in Los Angeles, the count takes place annually.
Every year, dozens of volunteers fan out across Los Angeles County and tally the number of people they see who appear to be homeless. Professional outreach workers then gather demographic data by asking homeless people more specific questions, including how long individuals have lived on the street and how they became homeless.
The counts are meant to be snapshots of a region’s homeless population. And because so many factors can influence the outcomes — such as the weather, volunteer errors or subtle changes in data analysis — the counts are imperfect.
The counts try to capture not only the number of people living in homeless shelters or on the streets, but also those sleeping in cars. Anyone in a tent or sleeping in a car is considered unsheltered.
The results this year have been mixed in California: Sacramento’s biennial count found a sharp decrease in the local homeless population overall. San Francisco leaders highlighted a significant decrease in street homelessness, but the city’s overall homeless population increased. In Orange County, where housing is expensive and there are few emergency shelter beds, the region’s biennial count found large increases in unsheltered and overall homelessness.
The counts are, for the time being, one of few concrete ways to measure progress. And for many leaders in Los Angeles, the results this year are a critical proof point that it is possible to reverse course after years of spending millions of dollars to address homelessness only to watch the numbers rise, in some recent years by more than 10 percentage points.
Dr. Kushel’s research has found that the biggest drivers of homelessness are economic, particularly a lack of access to affordable housing. Los Angeles has an acute housing shortage, which most likely means people will continue to become homeless and strain an already stretched supply of temporary housing. And moving people into permanent housing remains an even bigger challenge.
The momentum in Los Angeles is at further risk, Dr. Kushel said, because pandemic-era funding to address homelessness is drying up, and the state and city are facing budget deficits.
“If the underlying economic conditions don’t change, and if the money gets cut, you’re going to see an increase again,” she said. “The hope is we’ll see signs of progress and they’ll continue to make those absolutely essential investments.”
Nithya Raman, a member of the Los Angeles City Council who was elected in 2020 on promises to reduce homelessness, said that Inside Safe was one of many initiatives that were starting to make a difference. In the last couple of years, the city has added thousands of shelter beds and intends to create hundreds more this year.
Ms. Raman pointed to tenant protections that helped to stave off a feared wave of evictions after renters lost pandemic aid. City officials also have helped to get more affordable housing built.
“All of those are yielding fruit now,” she said.
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