Street Homelessness Surges Nearly 8% in Los Angeles Despite $1 Billion Annual Budget

Street homelessness in the City of Los Angeles jumped 7.9 percent in the latest annual count, even as the city continues to pour roughly $1 billion a year into homelessness programs. 

Overall homelessness rose 3.4 percent year-over-year, reversing two consecutive years of modest declines and dealing a political setback to Mayor Karen Bass as she seeks reelection.

The figures, drawn from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s (LAHSA) 2026 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count conducted in January, are expected to be formally released Friday. 

Sources briefed on closed-door presentations told multiple outlets that the city’s total homeless population climbed from approximately 43,699 in 2025 to about 45,194. Unsheltered individuals—those living in tents, vehicles, or completely exposed—drove the increase.

Bass has made reducing street homelessness the centerpiece of her administration since taking office in December 2022. Her signature Inside Safe program has moved more than 6,000 people into interim housing such as hotels and motels. Yet by late May, LAHSA data showed 41 percent of those participants had returned to the streets. 

In a statement, Bass blamed external forces. “For two years straight, we drove down homelessness by historic margins, but as expected, last year our efforts ultimately couldn’t keep up with policies and funding cuts at the federal and state levels that pushed more people onto the streets,” she said. 

She pointed to a 50 percent cut in state Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) funding that cost the city $70 million, higher costs of living under the Trump administration, and inadequate county mental health and substance-abuse services. 

City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s office has repeatedly documented that Los Angeles budgets more than $1 billion annually for homelessness—$961 million adopted in FY 2025, rising to about $1.1 billion with additional appropriations and carryovers—yet routinely underspends by hundreds of millions. 

In FY 2025 the city spent only about half of available funds, leaving nearly $473 million unspent. Similar patterns appeared the prior year. 

California Globe has extensively documented the broader failure of California’s multi-billion-dollar homelessness industrial complex. Statewide spending has exceeded $37 billion since 2019 under Governor Gavin Newsom, equating to roughly $200,000 per homeless individual, while the state still accounts for roughly one-quarter to one-third of the nation’s homeless population. 

Project Homekey alone directed $745 million to Los Angeles-area projects, many of which sat empty. Audits have flagged waste, fraud, and poor financial controls at LAHSA and related agencies; federal authorities suspended funding earlier this year citing mismanagement of hundreds of millions. 

Earlier Globe reporting on Inside Safe found the program widely disliked by those it was meant to help. Homeless individuals described shelters as dehumanizing, temporary holding facilities that offered little pathway to permanent housing, jobs, or addiction recovery. 

One year into Bass’s tenure, street conditions remained largely unchanged for many, with tents often preferred over the city’s interim options. Permanent housing placements through related programs remained a tiny fraction of the overall population. 

The timing amplifies the political stakes. Bass faces a competitive November runoff after the June primary. Prediction markets currently give her roughly a 64% chance of winning reelection. 

Challengers, including progressive City Councilmember Nithya Raman who chairs the council’s homelessness committee, have seized on the rising numbers as evidence that the current approach is unsustainable.

Los Angeles County, which spends hundreds of millions more and recently created its own Department of Homeless Services and Housing after pulling funds from LAHSA, reported a smaller overall increase of about 1.2 percent in its continuum of care. 

Separate counts in Long Beach, Pasadena, and Glendale also showed rises in unsheltered numbers.

Taxpayers have watched successive waves of new taxes—Measure H, Measure ULA, the county’s Measure A sales tax expected to generate over $1 billion annually—flow into an expanding network of nonprofits, interim beds, and outreach teams. Despite billions spent on a cure, homelessness has metastasized. 

For two years officials celebrated percentage-point declines after years of steady growth. Those fleeting gains have now evaporated amid record and opaque spending.

The official LAHSA release is scheduled for Friday afternoon. Until then, the preliminary figures stand as a stark reminder that in Los Angeles, billions of dollars and repeated declarations of emergency have failed to reduce the number of people living on the streets—while expanding the bureaucracy and handsomely enriching the nonprofit leaders and fraudsters (some now under federal indictment) who have every incentive to manage the crisis rather than end it.