The number of people in Los Angeles County living in cars, on the sidewalks or in tucked-away tents, or sleeping in shelters, rose by 9 percent from a year ago, the latest measure of how intractable the homelessness crisis has become in California.
Local officials described the latest count, 75,518 people, as a disheartening sign that efforts to move Angelenos off the streets have not caught up with the rate at which families are losing their homes. “People remain in a state of vulnerability, where they’re falling into homelessness faster than we can house them,” Va Lecia Adams Kellum, the chief executive of the homeless-services agency that leads Los Angeles’s annual count, told reporters this week.
The number has ticked upward over the past several years, from 52,765 in 2018. (A count was not conducted in 2021.) Dr. Adams Kellum noted that this year’s data offered some encouragement: The region has thousands more shelter beds available than before the pandemic, and it has reduced the time it takes to move homeless adults into temporary housing.
The increase in Los Angeles mirrors trends playing out in cities across the country, including Phoenix, as a housing shortage has led to rising costs, squeezing families. A recent study led by an expert on homelessness at the University of California, San Francisco, found that a lack of affordable housing, not mental illness or substance abuse, was the main driver of homelessness in California.
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