Los Angeles Homeless Count Drops for the First Time in 6 Years

Los Angeles residents, long exhausted by homelessness, were optimistic when Mayor Karen Bass started an aggressive effort to move people from encampments into motel rooms in late 2022, soon after she took office. Piles of belongings were removed from freeway underpasses. Sidewalks that had been blocked by lines of tents were cleared.

But even as Ms. Bass touted the success of Inside Safe, her signature program aimed at moving people off the streets, she warned that the population of homeless Angelenos could still grow before her efforts made a dent.

Ms. Bass and her allies on Friday received major validation: For the first time in six years, the number of people who were homeless in Los Angeles decreased from the year before, according to the region’s most recent point-in-time count, which took place in January.

In Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest city, where encampments have vexed neighbors for years, the overall number of people experiencing homelessness decreased by 2.2 percent, while the number of unsheltered people in the city — homeless people who are not in emergency shelter and are sleeping on the street, in tents or in cars — decreased by 10.4 percent.

Homelessness has become a top concern of voters on the West Coast, where cities have struggled to figure out how to move people indoors and into permanent homes. California has a severe housing shortage, and more encampments emerged during the pandemic, including in suburban areas where they did not exist before.

Hours before the Los Angeles data was released on Friday, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that will make it easier for local governments on the West Coast to ban sleeping in public. But Ms. Bass said that the ruling made little difference for Los Angeles, because the city was able to make progress without arresting homeless people.