The city of Los Angeles and the greater LA region both reported a second consecutive year of declines in people experiencing homelessness, according to figures released today. By contrast, Long Beach, which conducts its own count, reported a 6.5% increase when it released numbers last month.
Los Angeles’ annual point-in-time homeless count showed there was a 4% decrease in unhoused people across most of the county, while in the city of LA, there was a 3.4% drop, according to data released by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which was created as a joint city-county organization overseeing funding and programming to address the homelessness crisis. Los Angeles County has since opted to pull funding from the agency and create its own homelessness department.
“Homelessness has gone down two years in a row because we chose to act with urgency and reject the broken status quo of leaving people on the street until housing was built,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement responding to the latest numbers.
Data showed that unsheltered homelessness in the county declined by 9.5% in 2025 compared to the prior year, and it has dropped by 14% over the last two years. Additionally, there has been about an 8.5% increase of unhoused individuals entering interim housing, such as shelters and other forms of temporary housing.
In the city of LA, unsheltered homelessness declined by 7.9% in 2025, and it has dropped by 17.5% over the last two years. LAHSA reported there has been a 4.7% increase in unhoused individuals entering temporary housing in the city.
The 2025 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count was conducted over the course of three days, Feb. 18-20, after it was postponed in January due to the devastating wildfires that ravaged areas of LA County and city.
Long Beach did not postpone its count, conducting it on Jan. 24, which officials pointed to as a major contributing factor for the city’s disappointing numbers. Even without the fires as a factor, however, surveys of unhoused people indicated homelessness in Long Beach would’ve risen by 1.5%.
In Los Angeles, officials credited housing programs with driving down homelessness. LAHSA touted an increase in permanent housing placements, a record high of 27,994 in 2024, which has contributed to the positive results.
LAHSA noted that the region still needs more than 485,000 affordable housing units to meet the need in the region.
Homelessness in the county in 2019 stood at 58,936 people, with the city of Los Angeles accounting for a majority of that figure with 35,550 individuals.
In the following years, homelessness ballooned across the LA region as a result of several factors, such as a lack of affordable housing and the coronavirus pandemic, among other issues. The crisis reached its highest point in 2023 when LAHSA recorded 75,518 homeless people in the county with 46,260 of them in the city.
Elected officials and homeless service providers marked 2024 as a pivotal point when the annual homeless count showed the first decline — a slight decline — in homelessness. That year, LAHSA recorded 75,312 homeless people in the county with 45,252 of them in the city.
In 2025, those figures further dropped to 72,308 homeless people in the county, with about 43,669 of them in the city.
Across the region, there was a 12.6% decrease in various encampments on streets, LAHSA reported, meaning there was a reduction of people living in their cars, vans, recreational vehicles, tents and other makeshift shelters.
The city of Los Angeles experienced a similar reduction in temporary street encampments of about 13.5%. In 2024, LAHSA recorded 12,717 street dwellings compared to 11,010 of these structures in 2025.
The homeless count encompasses what is known as the Los Angeles Continuum of Care, covering most cities and unincorporated areas in the region except Pasadena, Glendale and Long Beach.
Benjamin Henwood, director of the Homelessness Policy Research Institute at USC, told City News Service in a telephone interview there was a margin of error of about plus-or-minus 1,300 people, based on a 1.75 multiplier.
The USC team conducted a separate survey, during which members interviewed about 5,000 unsheltered people, who were encountered at randomly selected Census tracts through the county. Henwood said the margin of error comes from estimating the number of unsheltered people who live in those dwelling units.
“For most people seeing these numbers and seeing fewer people on the streets, and more people in shelters, is interpreted as a step in the right direction,” Henwood told CNS.
“To be clear, and we have seen an overall decrease in numbers, which again is a positive sign, but shelter, in and of itself, is not a solution to homelessness,” he added.
He emphasized that the homelessness crisis is challenging to address but he hoped that we will continue to make progress.
“I don’t know that this should be regarded as a celebration of sorts, given the difficulties ahead, especially with the changing federal landscape,” Henwood added.
Staff writer Jeremiah Dobruck contributed to this report.