LAHSA releases 2022 Homeless Count

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority released the results of the 2022 Homeless Count, which show a slight uptick of homelessness in Los Angeles. As the first city-wide Homeless Count conducted since 2020, the results suggest that homelessness may be rising more slowly than in previous years.

At the time that the count was conducted in February, there were 69,144 people experiencing homelessness in the county of L.A. — a 4.1% increase from the data collected in 2020. In the city of L.A., there were found to be 41,980 people experiencing homelessness — a 1.7% increase from the data collected in 2020.

This growth is less severe than that from 2018 to 2020, where the county and city saw a 25.9% and 32% increase in homelessness, respectively.

Ben Henwood, an Associate Professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and expert in health and housing services research, annually teams up with L.A. county to produce estimates for the Homeless Count. To collect the data, a team of researchers gather surveys among people experiencing homelessness in the area, and analyze numbers collected by volunteers. These numbers are then combined and analyzed to produce the annual estimate.

“It’s not a perfect science, and the numbers are often contested. But when we calculate, we do provide the error that we think is involved in the estimates,” Henwood said. “So, sort of plus-or-minus, I think this year the numbers report that there was a slight increase … if you look, statistically speaking, they’re sort of unchanged from 2020.”

This year was the first to utilize an electronic data gathering system, through which most of the obtained figures were imported into an app that made the different facets of the data easier to understand and analyze.

Brenda Wienwel, a USC alumna and ex-faculty member appointed by the Dean of the School of Social Work to help with an initiative to eliminate homelessness, said that the coronavirus pandemic both decreased the number of volunteers willing to participate in the count and possibly made it more difficult to locate homeless individuals.

“Because of COVID, a lot of people who … had been on the streets for a while were going in and out of shelters, and the city started up sweeps where they were going into areas and clearing them,” Wienwel said. “That caused a lot of dislocation on the part of people who were living in the community … so I think what ended up happening is it may have been harder to find people.”

Wienwel also credits the pandemic for an influx in funding to house people — at least temporarily — and increase resources that worked to reduce the number of evictions.

Henwood agrees with Wienwel, believing the pandemic introduced new programs that may be linked to the relatively stagnant growth rate of homelessness in the county, like Project Room Key that allowed unsheltered individuals to stay in hotels or receive an increase in unemployment benefits. Despite this, Henwood thinks the major driving factors of homelessness remain.

“[A lot of homelessness] has a lot to do with housing affordability, inequality, institutional racism, and those things [didn’t] somehow fundamentally change during the pandemic,” Henwood said.

Due to the coronavirus, no data could be collected in 2021; Henwood said that the 2022 collection process was also impacted by the lasting effects of the pandemic.

“It was a lot more challenging to do a survey-based count when things like drop-in centers where we often might collect surveys were closed because of the pandemic,” Henwood said. “Our ability to estimate … in large part relied on our ability to do surveys at Family Solution Centers located throughout the county, but a lot of these had limited hours or were closed or people were reluctant to go in.”

There is a general acceptance that homelessness is one of the most prominent problems that Los Angeles faces — in order to effectively address the issue, there needs to be a more uniform approach to determining solutions, Henwood said. 

“There’s not one person in charge. County supervisors play a large role, probably a more significant role than the mayor in terms of deciding about funding,” Henwood said. “So there’s a lot of people in charge, and they all have different political pressures.”

Some people believe investing in affordable housing is the preferred solution, while others vouch for building more shelters or sleeping encampments.

Henwood also noted that there are various initiatives within USC to research homelessness and find solutions. The Price School of Public Policy hosts the Homelessness Policy Research Institute that convenes researchers and policymakers to examine homelessness through data and empirical sources, the Keck School of Medicine created a street medicine team to help homeless individuals with their health concerns, and USC launched a certificate program on ending homelessness where students can learn about effective ways to tackle the issue.

Wienwel thinks it is important to recognize that homeless people want to be housed, but oftentimes there are simply no options.

“The whole system is stuck because you can’t have temporary housing unless you have permanent housing at the end,” Wienwel said. “You can get people off the street, but they’re going to end up right back on the street within a very short period of time unless there’s someplace else for them to go … that would meet their long-term housing needs.”

According to Henwood, there are vast health disparities between homeless populations and housed populations — another reason why it is integral to promptly find solutions. Homeless individuals tend to experience premature aging, and have an average mortality rate two decades earlier than the general population. 

“Generally speaking from a public health perspective, homelessness is a real issue,” Henwood said. “It’s awful for the people in the population, but it can definitely have consequences for the larger population in terms of communicable diseases spreading.”

Antonio Okeke, a senior at USC studying Public Policy and pursuing a progressive degree in Public Administration, thinks that effective remedies for homelessness comes from a willingness to make sacrifices and introduce new policy, like rewriting zoning laws.

Okeke also said that USC should be taking more legitimate steps to address the issue.

“There [are things] being done to educate students, but at the same time, I just feel there’s a whole bunch of communication … at the back end that then makes it harder for students to take action,” Okeke said. “And oftentimes, that action might be performative, not just on the students’ end … but also from administrators.”

Wienwel believes that USC has introduced effective projects that have helped contribute to the slowing spread of homelessness, but still, there is more to be done.

“It’s one thing to say we care about homelessness, and we’re going to train our folks or we’re going to focus on research … and that’s an important task that the university has done well,” Wienwel said. “But in general, contributing to the actual stock of housing, in addition to housing students, would be good.”