A key survey of homelessness in Los Angeles determined that the number of people sleeping without shelter fell again. More than 72,000 people remain homeless in Los Angeles County
By Shawn Hubler
Reporting from Los Angeles
Published July 14, 2025Updated July 15, 2025, 11:03 a.m. ET
Homelessness declined in Los Angeles for the second year in a row, a key survey showed on Monday, marking a sustained drop in the number of people sleeping outdoors amid a yearslong push to bring people out of street encampments.
The results of the regional count, conducted in February, were viewed as generally positive news in the nation’s second-largest city, which saw a spike in homelessness after the Covid-19 pandemic and has been vexed by a severe housing shortage.
Even with the declines, more than 72,000 people remain homeless in Los Angeles County, a sprawling and fragmented metropolis with a population of about 10 million people.
In particular, the number of people sleeping in vehicles, abandoned buildings, sidewalk camps and other places unfit for habitation declined from the year before by 9.5 percent in Los Angeles County and by 7.9 percent in the City of Los Angeles.
Over two years, the count showed that unsheltered homelessness fell cumulatively by 14 percent in Los Angeles County and by a record 17.5 percent in the city, as thousands of people moved indoors.
Local officials attributed the trend to a regionwide barrage of initiatives and to billions of dollars in public spending over the past several years, including countywide taxes to help fund affordable housing and a state of emergency on homelessness declared by Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles after her 2022 election.
Los Angeles County has spent nearly $2.5 billion over the past eight years on rent subsidies, programs to add housing units and on mental health and addiction outreach. A program launched by Mayor Bass, Inside Safe, has moved thousands of people out of tent camps and into motels and permanent housing.
“These results aren’t just data points — they represent thousands of human beings who are now inside, and neighborhoods that are beginning to heal,” said Mayor Bass, who campaigned in 2022 on a vow to address squalid encampments that had spread to more sidewalks, driveways, parks and underpasses during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Supervisor Hilda L. Solis, who represents some of the most economically disadvantaged parts of the county, said that the numbers “represent real progress.” But she said that with more than 72,000 people still unhoused, “there is more work yet to be done.”
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The progress on homelessness, which a year ago seemed to be the most pressing of Los Angeles’s problems, came as Southern California has fought to rebound from a string of natural disasters, economic disruptions and political disputes with the federal government.