Hint: It’s not the Hollywood Dream
It’s no secret that Los Angeles has one of the largest homeless populations of any major city in the United States. While the Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count has shown decreases in the last two years, in 2025 it still found that an estimated 72,308 people experienced homelessness on any given night in Los Angeles County, and 43,699 people experienced homelessness on any given night in the City of Los Angeles.
One question that many people have asked, and just as many have attempted to answer, is a simple one: Why are there so many people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles? There is no one answer to that question, but we do know several truths that, when combined, paint a clear picture.
One of the primary drivers of homelessness is a lack of affordable housing. Many studies have borne this out, including an analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which found a strong connection between rent and homelessness, and that when one rises, so does the other.
One of the main practices that LAHSA uses to house unhoused Angelenos is to provide subsidies that offset the market price of rent. Pew notes that those successes point directly to housing costs as the primary cause of homelessness.
“Interventions to address housing costs by providing housing directly or through subsidies have been effective in reducing homelessness,” the Pew report reads. “That makes sense if housing costs are the main driver of homelessness, but not if other reasons are to blame. Studies show that other factors have a much smaller impact on homelessness.”
The California Housing Partnership’s 2025 Housing Needs Report for Los Angeles County stated that nearly 500,000 households do not have access to affordable housing.
The report goes on to state that LA County renters need to earn $48.04 per hour, or 2.9 times the City of LA’s minimum wage, to afford the $2,498 average rent of a two-bedroom home.
Several of the world’s other great cities—New York, London, Paris—don't have nearly as much unsheltered homelessness (or any homelessness) as Los Angeles. However, it’s important to look closer at what differs between those cities and Los Angeles.
In New York City, street homelessness remains low due to a 1979 court case that helped establish the so-called Right to Shelter, which guarantees safe, decent, and appropriate shelter so people experiencing homelessness don’t have to end up on the streets. In Europe, government-subsidized housing has helped keep low-income people housed for decades, with about 17% of housing in both England and France being subsidized, compared to 2.7% in the US.
To delve even deeper, while there is no doubt that mental illness, poor medical care, substance abuse, growing income inequality, job loss, racism, and other causes have driven people to the street, “the housing problem is why they had nowhere else to land,” according to a Los Angeles Times article detailing the history of homelessness in Los Angeles. “And it was decisions by policymakers, judges, law enforcement, and industrial leaders that caused the shortage.”
Policy decisions at every level contributed to this crisis, from public housing plans in Los Angeles being slashed in the 1950s to President Reagan slashing social services in the early 1980s. Even more recent decisions that ruled that arrests for resting or sleeping on sidewalks is cruel and unusual punishment without sufficient shelter beds available led to tents popping up throughout the region.
While drug use is certainly prevalent among people experiencing homelessness—overdoses remain the leading killer among people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County, despite the first drop in a decade last year—the homelessness and drug crises appear to be largely separate, as towns like Huntington, West Virginia, were once dubbed the overdose capital of America but had a homelessness rate of 0.5% in 2023 despite nearly two-thirds of those people experiencing homelessness self-reporting struggling with addiction. For comparison, the City of Los Angeles’ homelessness rate was 1.2% in 2023, with only 27% of people experiencing homelessness self-reporting substance use disorder.
And finally, one common misconception is that people come to live outdoors in LA because of the weather, or that they come seeking stardom but quickly fizzle out. That may be true in some cases, but data shows it isn’t true most of the time. The demographic survey conducted by USC as part of the 2025 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count found that 70.4% of the unhoused 18+ population lived in Los Angeles County when they lost housing. Also, 57.4% of the unhoused 18+ population lived in Los Angeles County for more than 20 years. In fact, 90.4% had lived in LA County for at least one year, and nearly 80% had lived in LA County for more than five years.
All of this means that most people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County had lived here for a significant amount of time before they lost their housing. The unhoused are not, for the most part, made up of outsiders. They are people who live in our communities but may have been priced out by an ever-increasing housing market.
LAHSA’s role in this is to continue leading the Los Angeles Continuum of Care, which means we will continue coordinating regional planning to strategically use increasingly limited resources to address homelessness throughout our broader community. With decreases in homelessness seen in the past two years, it’s more important than ever for everyone—LAHSA, its government partners, and service providers—to work together to make sure this downward trend continues in Los Angeles.