Four charts on the Los Angeles homelessness crisis

The abrupt increase in the 2026 homeless count erased two years of progress, illustrating that the numerous housing programs aren’t enough to absorb the waves of new people losing shelter across Los Angeles County.

The annual point-in-time count, released by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority on Friday, estimated that 73,040 people across the county are without permanent housing, more than the entire population of Beverly Hills and Culver City combined. Some 49,000 of that total live on the streets. The situation is only expected to get worse, as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last month announced it was cutting off all federal funding to LAHSA.

While other funding cuts this past year forced LAHSA to curtail some of its programs, the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles is also driven by a set of economic forces and policy decisions that have conspired to make housing increasingly scarce and costly.

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Under construction

Over the past decade, homelessness in the city of Los Angeles has risen by 59%, and now totals 44,194. During that period, the amount of new housing permitted by the city has slowed significantly. Last year, the city permitted only 6,611 new apartments, less than half the total from 2015. So far this year, however, the pace appears to be quickening, with 7,745 new units approved through June, as several major projects, including a proposed 800-unit development in Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw, move forward.

Even a building boom wouldn’t make up for the several decades of sluggish new housing production. According to the Southern California Association of Governments, the city of Los Angeles must produce 456,643 housing units during the decade, a benchmark it is nowhere close to meeting.

For rent

The median rent on a two-bedroom apartment in the city is $2,343, based on data from rental platform Apartment List. That number hasn’t moved that much in recent years, but it is still a burden for more than half of the city’s rent-paying households. The Los Angeles Housing Department estimated that 36% of households are rent-burdened, meaning they pay more than 30% of their income for housing, and an additional 26% are extremely rent-burdened, meaning housing costs more than half their income.

This is a problem gripping all of California’s coastal cities, with a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco now running $3,979, according to Apartment List data. This year, median rents in San Diego surpassed those in Los Angeles. Many Angelenos who flee the city because of high costs move to places like Phoenix, where the median rent on a two-bedroom is currently $1,279.

Sale price

Across Los Angeles County, the median sale price for a single-family home is now $857,468. The number has risen by 61% since 2017. But the increase in other major coastal counties has been steeper, with the median home price in San Francisco now topping $2,039,000. (San Francisco County and the city share the same boundaries, meaning that recorded sales there only occur in the already densely packed area.)

Who wants to be mayor?

The jump in homelessness in Los Angeles comes just three and a half months before the city will decide to either re-elect Mayor Karen Bass or replace her with Councilmember Nithya Raman. How each candidate makes her case for addressing the housing crisis will be the main focus of this race, as it has been in previous ones.

Before the latest numbers were released, Bass recorded a video in which she sought to explain the increase in homelessness by placing it in a particular context. “We are facing two challenges. We have a hostile federal government that has driven up the cost of rent, groceries, gas, and everything in between for all Americans. This has pushed more families into homelessness across our region,” she said in the video, adding, “A 50% cut in funding from the state meant we could not get as many people off the street as we would have liked.”

Her signature program, Inside Safe, is credited with removing numerous homeless encampments, but it has been criticized because almost half of the people it took in have returned to homelessness, according to a dashboard from City Controller Kenneth Mejia.

Raman, meanwhile, chairs the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, and must also confront the city’s failure to make progress. After the numbers came out, Raman posted a statement to her Instagram account, saying, “… despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent—and repeated assurances that Los Angeles had turned a corner—unsheltered homelessness increased by nearly 8% in this city.  That is a moral outrage. And it is a failure of leadership.”

In a barb directed at the mayor, she noted that homelessness in her district had dropped by 49%.

In addition to dwindling state and federal dollars, LAHSA, charged with implementing much of the homelessness policy for the city and county, is facing its own crisis. After failing to account for how it spent some of its funds in previous audits, the County Board of Supervisors voted last year to pull its $300 million in annual support.

More recently, another audit pointed out additional failures to manage costs, accurately account for whether services had been rendered, and detailed potential cronyism in awarding contracts, as well as a broader failure to keep its financial books in order. On April 20, LAHSA announced it was laying off nearly 300 people as it tries to manage with a smaller budget. Now the city is also contemplating whether it should keep sustaining LAHSA.

A report published last year by the Santa Monica-based think tank RAND Corporation charged that LAHSA’s signature program, its annual count of unhoused people across the county, is plagued by poor methodology and may be undercounting some people sleeping on the street.

How we did it: We examined homeless count data going back to 2015, sale price data from the California Association of Realtors, building permit data from the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety, and rent data from Apartment List.

Have questions about our data? Write to us at askus@xtown.la.