By JOSE HERRERA
Citing raw data from the 2025 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, officials announced Thursday that they expect to see a 5% to 10% decrease in unsheltered homelessness in the region, which would mark the second consecutive year of such a decline.
According to the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority, the city-county joint homeless agency, the preliminary results are in line with last year’s outcome, which showed a 10.7% and 5.1% decrease in unsheltered homelessness within the city and the county of Los Angeles, respectively. The final results of the 2025 count are expected to be released in late spring or early summer.
“When I first came to LAHSA, I publicly stated that we wanted to reduce unsheltered homelessness within three years,” LAHSA CEO Va Lecia Adams Kellum said in a statement. “We’ve done it in two.”
“The turning point came when the city and county aligned by declaring states of emergency on homelessness and proceeded to collaborate through LAHSA to address the crisis. We commend them for that,” she added.
LAHSA officials noted preliminary numbers do not include an annual multiplier developed by its partners at USC which plays a crucial role in developing the annual count estimate. Compared to 2024, the 2025 raw data showed approximately 3,600 fewer counts of unsheltered homelessness, or individuals living in tents, makeshift shelters and cars.
The agency hailed the early results, which officials say show the region is on the right track to “solving” homelessness.
Data reflect a decline in unsheltered homelessness within the L.A. Continuum of Care, consisting of every city and unincorporated area the county — with the exception of Glendale, Pasadena and Long Beach. Those three cities have separate departments that conduct annual homeless counts.
In January, LAHSA released system data for fiscal year 2023-24, which showed that within 12 months, the re-housing system performed more efficiently with 45% more people moving from the street into permanent housing, 32% more unhoused people moved into interim housing, and another 29% of people moved from interim to permanent housing.
LAHSA officials credited four measures for the positive change — encampment resolution efforts such as L.A. Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe initiative and the county’s Pathway Home; strike teams tasked with preventing bottlenecks in the re-housing system; batch matching, a method that identifies multiple people for every supporting housing placement through one application; and master leasing, an initiative that allows the agency to lease entire apartment buildings and house people faster.
“It’s important for decision-makers to focus on change while continuing the momentum LAHSA, the re-housing system, the city and county have produced over the last two years,” Kellum said in her statement. “LA has been waiting years for this moment. Let’s trust what we have built and the real progress we are making.”
On Wednesday, the Los Angeles City Council authorized the creation of a new bureau to ensure taxpayer funds on homelessness are resulting in the appropriate outcomes. The entity will live within the city Housing Department, consisting of temporary members from LAHSA, the Mayor’s Office, LAHD, the city administrative office and L.A.’s Housing Authority.
City staff are expected to report on the exact number of employees that will serve in that department, as well as potential funding sources. Councilwoman Nithya Raman, who chairs the Housing and Homelessness Committee, led the effort following growing concerns over transparency and performance outcomes.
“No one in City Hall is tasked with knowing, for example, how often encampments are being visited by outreach workers, how many shelter beds are filled on any given night, how many vacancies we have across our PSH (permanent supportive housing) units, and how long those vacancies take to get filled,” Raman said.
Raman described the future bureau as a “lightweight and fiscally responsible” response to this gap. Recent audits ordered by the city, county and court illustrated failures in LAHSA’s ability to provide oversight of funding and services.
Auditors with the firm Alvarez & Marsal identified $2.3 billion of funding, including appropriations, commitments or spending related to city programs, according to the assessment released by U.S. District Judge David Carter.
Further, auditors said, the city and LAHSA “did not initially provide all requested financial data, prompting A&M to make multiple efforts to identify, trace and reconcile relevant data as it was produced to A&M.”
Limited financial oversight and performance monitoring of homeless programs resulted in oversight that frequently missed verifying the quality, legitimacy or reasonableness of expenses, A&M determined.
In response to financial management concerns with LAHSA, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors approved a motion to explore the creation of a county department to centralize homeless services. The city is also exploring similar action.
Kellum has previously contended that several issues identified were “in whole or in part attributable to LAHSA’s fiscal practices during the COVID-19 years. … Therefore, these actions should be considered within a broader context of the public health emergency, rather than being assessed solely through the conventional accounting framework.”
The homeless agency has led significant efforts to bolster transparency through the creation of accessible databases, which in turn better track available shelter beds and outcomes of services.