More than half of LAs homeless are from out of town

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 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 �...