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

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Los Angeles hosts the nation’s largestunshelteredhomelesspopulation. In recent years, despitebillions of dollarsin city and county spending, LA’s once-pristine streets have becomelittered with tents, drugs and feces.

City leaders havemade elaborate promisesabout 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-countyLos Angeles Homeless Services Authority(LAHSA) found that one-third of “unsheltered Angelenos” became homeless outside of Los Angeles County. In 2024, the nonprofitRAND Corp. reportedthat 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 ofleft-wing politicians and activists, who insist that any claim that the out-of-town homeless areflooding 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 on publishing,” and confirmed that the data would remain there in the group’s upcoming report.

Another reason might be that the massive migration of homeless people to LA violates progressive pieties — and some would rather suppress those data than face their implications. (In response to this accusation, LAHSA said it stopped publishing results for the previous-location question “solely due to the statistical uncertainty,” but noted that the “question is in the queue for revision and validation”; RAND again cited “scarce resources” and the need to “streamline the main report.”)

We decided to get the information ourselves.

We spent two days recreating RAND’s 2024 study of LA’s homeless population, using a slightly larger sample size to ensure precision. We approached people on the streets of the same three neighborhoods — Hollywood, Venice, and Skid Row — and, after identifying ourselves, asked more than 200 homeless people a simple question: “Where are you from, originally?”

Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos