More than half of LA’s homeless are from out of – Latest News
Los Angeles hosts the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population. In current years, regardless of billions of {dollars} in metropolis and county spending, LA’s once-pristine streets have turn into suffering from tents, medicine and feces.
City leaders have made elaborate guarantees about managing the homeless downside, however few appear to have requested a easy query: Where, precisely, are these people coming from?
There is a motive for that. In 2020, the city-county Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) discovered that one-third of “unsheltered Angelenos” grew to become homeless outdoors of Los Angeles County. In 2024, the nonprofit RAND Corp. reported that 41% of the road homeless surveyed throughout three LA neighborhoods — Hollywood, Venice and Skid Row — had been “last housed” someplace different than LA County.
Los Angeles hosts the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population. Apu Gomes for California Post
Both reviews cut towards the narrative of left-wing politicians and activists, who insist that any declare that the out-of-town homeless are flooding LA is a “myth.”
In 2021, LAHSA stopped publishing previous-location knowledge. In 2025, RAND eliminated the metric from the group’s annual report and included it in a separate, lesser-read “annex.”
We requested LAHSA and RAND why they buried this knowledge. LAHSA mentioned it stopped publishing previous-location figures as a result of of respondents’ “varying interpretations of the question.” RAND claimed that it moved the information to the annex “due to a need to save costs on publishing,” and confirmed that the information would stay there within the group’s upcoming report.
Another motive may be that the huge migration of homeless people to LA violates progressive pieties — and a few would slightly suppress these knowledge than face their implications. (In response to this accusation, LAHSA mentioned it stopped publishing outcomes for the previous-location query “solely due to the statistical uncertainty,” however famous that the “question is in the queue for revision and validation”; RAND again cited “scarce resources” and the need to “streamline the main report.”)
We determined to get the data ourselves.
We spent two days recreating RAND’s 2024 research of LA’s homeless population, utilizing a barely bigger pattern measurement to make sure precision. We approached people on the streets of the identical three neighborhoods — Hollywood, Venice, and Skid Row — and, after figuring out ourselves, requested more than 200 homeless people a easy query: “Where are you from, originally?”
LA’s once-pristine streets have turn into suffering from tents, medicine and feces. Andy Johnstone for California Post
The outcomes had been astounding: 64% of the LA homeless mentioned they had been from outdoors the town of Los Angeles, and 53% mentioned they had been from outdoors LA County — a vital increase in contrast with the LAHSA and RAND research.
Nearly 40% informed us they had been from different states, largely from states that voted for President Trump in 2024. Six p.c informed us that they had been from different nations, together with Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea.
Several of these non-LA residents had been candid, describing their migration to the town for its honest climate or beneficiant companies.
In Hollywood, a younger lady mentioned that after being a foster youngster in New York, she served within the Marine Corps, and had simply arrived in LA days earlier than. Proudly pointing to a full set of clean, straight tooth, she mentioned that she didn’t use medicine. Holding a plastic bottle of vodka, she mentioned she was consuming to deal with the ache of residing on the streets the place, she mentioned, she has already been raped.
On Skid Row, we encountered a younger man as he was about to manage intravenous medicine. He informed us that he got here to Los Angeles from a small city in upstate New York for sobriety remedy however had departed the ability resulting from issues about this system director’s “shady” actions. He wouldn’t elaborate and returned to his drug preparation.
Later, we encountered an earnest-looking aged black lady sitting primly on her suitcase outdoors of a Skid Row shelter. She informed us that she had bought her own Greyhound ticket from Washington, DC at a value of $379. She gave the impression to be in shock.
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The homeless reply to incentives. They flock to locations the place it’s simple to camp, do medicine, and commit crimes, and the place the authorities supplies housing, advantages, and drug paraphernalia. That’s precisely what LA has executed. As a end result, there’s a “magnet effect” that repeatedly attracts the homeless from all over the world.
The implications of our survey are clear: Just building housing gained’t clear up Los Angeles’ homelessness downside. The improper variety of housing program would possibly even make it worse. Giving more homeless people a everlasting home, with no strings connected, merely evokes nonresidents to come back right here.
The actual approach to clear up Los Angeles’ homelessness disaster is to reverse the polarity of the magnet: Enforce drug and tenting legal guidelines, mandate remedy, and demand on clean and orderly streets. The solely various is lawlessness — the tip end result of an strategy that has turned the City of Angels into an open-air homeless encampment.
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow on the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the writer of America’s Cultural Revolution. Kenneth Schrupp is an investigative reporter at City Journal.
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