9 Questions for City of Los Angeles, LAHSA to Answer on Methodology and Accuracy of Numbers

On Monday July 17, 2025, the Los Angeles Homeless Count for 2025 was released. While the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) count showed a slight decrease in homelessness in the City of Los Angeles, just prior to its release, Judge David Carter, a federal judge, criticized the City of Los Angeles for providing inaccurate data and not meeting its goals in a settlement agreement for a lawsuit filed in 2020 by the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights. The settlement agreement overseen by Carter mandates the city create 13,000 units of new shelter beds and housing by 2027.

As of this writing, LAHSA’s release of the data from the Homeless Count 2025 Raw Count Dashboard and the Homeless Count Local Data Dashboard is still To Be Determined. Housing is a Human Right (HHR) has nine questions we would like answered, given the discrepancy between findings of the Federal Court and the LAHSA Homelessness Count released this week.

1. How many actual units of permanent or long-term interim housing units have been created by the City of Los Angeles and how does that number compare with the reduction reported in the homeless count?
2. Judge Carter stated in his ruling that the city incorrectly reported encampment reductions by counting tents, rather than people. Is this the reporting methodology used by LAHSA for the homeless count?
3. While the homeless count shows a 13.5% drop in encampment dwellings (cars, vans, RV’s, tents, makeshift shelters), it does NOT indicate where the people who lived in these encampments have gone. If someone living in an encampment is left on the sidewalk, while their tent is removed, is LAHSA counting that as a reduction in homelessness? If so, how many people is LAHSA counting per tent, car, etc.?
4. The federal court found that the city failed to provide accurate, comprehensive data or evidence to support the numbers it was reporting. The court pointed to the difficulty in “getting accurate numbers from LAHSA on the amount of money spent for the 2,000 housing subsidies the city has taken credit for to show compliance.” Given these findings by the Court, how accurate then is the 2025 count?
5. With the forcible removal of encampments, many in the homeless community have gone into hiding inside empty buildings or other scattered sites not typically part of the count. Has the crackdown on encampments led to a larger portion of uncounted individuals?
6. On March 6, 2025, the LA Times reported that an audit (which was later reframed as an assessment) by the global consulting firm Alvarez and Marsal, found the City was “unable to track exactly how much it spent on homeless programs and did not rigorously reconcile spending with services provided, making it impossible to judge how well the services worked or whether they were even provided.” How many people have been housed for the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on homelessness?
7. The Alvarez and Marsal assessment also pointed out that it found discrepancies that suggested some beds were double-counted, and it found NO documentation to validate that hundreds of others existed. How has LAHSA ensured shelter, interim housing and permanent housing beds were not double counted in its survey?
8. If the reduction in encampments has reduced the number of people living on the streets, why has the number of people reported dying on the streets of Los Angeles gone up to seven people per day, on average?
9. How much money has been spent, on average, to tackle the homelessness crisis compared to the number of people permanently housed or placed in long-term interim housing?

With the number of people, on average, dying on the streets of Los Angeles going up, and tens of millions of dollars being spent each year with minimal placement into permanent housing, it is extremely important to have answers from LAHSA and the City to what appear to be significant discrepancies in reports to the federal court and the numbers reported in the 2025 homeless count.

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9 questions for the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) to answer on the methodology and accuracy of the latest L.A. homeless count numbers