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More than half of LA’s homeless are from out of town

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Los Angeles hosts the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population. In recent years, despite billions of dollars in city and county spending, LA’s once-pristine streets have become littered with tents, drugs and feces. 

City leaders have made elaborate promises about managing the homeless problem, but few seem to have asked a simple question: Where, exactly, are these people coming from?

There is a reason for that. In 2020, the city-county Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) found that one-third of “unsheltered Angelenos” became homeless outside of Los Angeles County. In 2024, the nonprofit RAND Corp. reported that 41% of the street homeless surveyed across three LA neighborhoods — Hollywood, Venice and Skid Row — were “last housed” somewhere other than LA County.

Both reports cut against the narrative of left-wing politicians and activists, who insist that any claim that the out-of-town homeless are flooding LA is a “myth.” 

In 2021, LAHSA stopped publishing previous-location data. In 2025, RAND removed the metric from the organization’s annual report and included it in a separate, lesser-read “annex.”

We asked LAHSA and RAND why they buried this data. LAHSA said it stopped publishing previous-location figures because of respondents’ “varying interpretations of the question.” RAND claimed that it moved the data to the annex “due to a need to save costs........

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