Sometimes it seems that the government’s approach to solving the problem known as homelessness is some kind of cosmic experiment designed to demonstrate, once and for all, that government cannot competently manage anything.
The outer limit of its competence may be the posting of a stop sign at an intersection. And even that costs astronomically more than any other entity would charge to do it.
On Friday, December 27, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released its January 2024 Point-in-Time Count homelessness report. “This report reflects data collected a year ago and likely does not represent current circumstances,” HUD said in its news release.
The news release is a lot of bragging about the Biden administration’s “targeted funding and interventions that utilize evidence-based practices.” HUD celebrated “a nearly 8% decrease” in the number of veterans experiencing homelessness.
In January 2023, according to HUD, there were 35,574 homeless veterans, and in January 2024, there were 32,882. The number of unsheltered homeless is broken out separately and showed an 11% decline from 15,507 in 2023 to 13,851 a year ago.
Meanwhile, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced that it has “permanently housed 47,925 veterans experiencing homelessness in Fiscal Year 2024.”
“Since day one, the Biden-Harris Administration has been tackling the nation’s homelessness crisis with the urgency it requires,” said HUD.
There are two things to note about all this bragging. The first is that the administration waited until after the November election to release the numbers. The second is that the numbers are terrible: More than 770,000 people were “experiencing homelessness” in January 2024, an 18% increase from January 2023.
Buried in the HUD announcement was this: “Some communities reported data to HUD that indicated that the rise in overall homelessness was a result of their work to shelter a rising number of asylum seekers coming into their communities.”
The Biden-Harris administration’s open-border policies resulted in millions of people entering the country with no place to live. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance told interviewer Joe Rogan that there are 25 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.
How much of the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles County is the result of illegal immigration? That’s not a question L.A.’s elected officials want to answer as they battle the incoming Trump administration over “sanctuary” laws.
There’s one thing L.A. officials all agree on, and that’s the need for higher taxes to pay for homelessness programs.
With the help of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, which lobbied Sacramento for a law to allow the county to further exceed the legal cap on local sales taxes, and of L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, who boasted to the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association that she wrote part of the “citizens’ initiative” sales tax increase that was Measure A on the Los Angeles ballot, L.A. County voters approved a permanent increase of 0.5% in the county’s sales tax rate, with the revenue dedicated to homelessness programs.
How much has been spent already? In California, the total is well into the tens of billions of dollars, and that doesn’t count the indirect costs. When people are camped out on sidewalks and streets, in abandoned buildings, next to freeways and in hillside areas, the fire department runs up a lot of overtime. So does the Department of Sanitation.
And here’s another cost: legal liability.
On September 19, the parents of a murder victim who was stabbed to death on a Metro train in downtown L.A. filed a lawsuit against Metro and the city of Los Angeles for lack of security and failing to enforce loitering laws, alleging that transients and mentally ill individuals are allowed to intimidate passengers. The city of L.A. is suing Metro, saying it’s the transit agency’s fault. Either way, you’ll pay.
L.A. officials were bursting with pride at HUD’s report, which said the estimated number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in L.A. County dropped year-over-year by 5%, from more than 55,000 in 2023 to more than 52,000 in 2024.
Overall, there were 71,201 homeless individuals in L.A. County in January 2024, compared to 71,320 in January 2023, according to HUD data.
In 2015, before the Measure H sales tax increase for homelessness programs, that number was 41,174.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley