--- title: "Family Homelessness Is Officially Down in LA. The People Who Serve Families Don't Believe It" description: "The 2026 homeless count found sharply fewer families with children living outside in Los Angeles. Providers who run the shelters and family centers say the drop reflects a collapse in rental subsidies, not a wave of families getting housed, and LAHSA itself now says much the same." category: "Los Angeles" category_url: https://herald.la/category/los-angeles author: "Desmond Clarke" published: 2026-07-30T22:11:37.000Z updated: 2026-07-30T22:11:37.000Z canonical: https://herald.la/article/family-homelessness-is-officially-down-in-la-the-people-who-serve-families-don-t tags: ["homelessness", "housing", "lahsa", "los-angeles-county", "social-services"] --- # Family Homelessness Is Officially Down in LA. The People Who Serve Families Don't Believe It The 2026 homeless count found sharply fewer families with children living outside in Los Angeles. Providers who run the shelters and family centers say the drop reflects a collapse in rental subsidies, not a wave of families getting housed, and LAHSA itself now says much the same. One number in this year's homeless count reads like good news. The count found that families with children living unsheltered in the city of Los Angeles fell 27 percent, and that unsheltered families across Los Angeles County fell 34 percent. Counting sheltered and unsheltered families together, the countywide total was down 14 percent. The people who spend their days placing families into housing are not celebrating. Their argument, which the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority has now partly adopted itself, is that the count fell because the money that moved families indoors dried up, and because families with nowhere to go stopped coming forward to ask. ## What the providers see Constanza Pachon, chief executive of The Whole Child, told LAist the figure is "so unbelievably undercounted," and said the tally does not match [what her staff encounter at their own doors](https://laist.com/news/education/early-childhood-education-pre-k/family-homelessness-is-officially-down-in-la-why-so-many-dont-believe-it). Katie Hill, chief executive of Union Station Homeless Services, pointed to the basic behavior that makes families hard to count at all: "People who have kids will find places for their kids so that they don't have to live outside." That is the structural problem with the exercise. The point-in-time count is a federally required census of people in shelters, on sidewalks, in vehicles and in encampments on a single set of January nights. Families rarely sit still in any of those places. They double up with relatives, rotate between motels, or sleep in a car parked somewhere deliberately inconspicuous. The National Alliance to End Homelessness describes this as the recognized limitation of the method: [a snapshot, not a full accounting](https://endhomelessness.org/resources/policy-information/what-is-a-point-in-time-count/). ## The agency's own explanation LAHSA did not dispute the reading. Paul Rubenstein, the agency's chief of staff, said the agency has "reason to believe that declining resources available to families is behind this family point-in-time count decrease." The resources in question are documented. State funding to LAHSA [fell from about $115 million in 2024-25 to about $85 million in 2025-26](https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/la-homelessness-rose-in-2026-official-count-shows), a drop of roughly a quarter of the agency's state support and a fall from 13 percent of its budget to 9 percent. The Time-Limited Subsidies program, which carries families through up to two years of rent while they stabilize, was cut from $240 million to $123 million. The effect showed up downstream. The number of people moved into permanent housing fell from 28,600 in 2024 to 23,532 in 2025. "When our unhoused neighbors lost access to rental subsidies, the system slowed," Rubenstein said. Jennifer Hark Dietz, chief executive of the service provider PATH, described the same bottleneck from the shelter side: "Without these subsidies, people are staying in shelters longer because they cannot secure housing." ## Fewer surveys, smaller estimate There is also a mechanical piece. The unsheltered figure is an estimate built partly from demographic surveys conducted alongside the count. LAHSA spokesperson Ahmad Chapman has noted that when fewer people complete those surveys, the resulting estimate comes out lower. A family that has stopped visiting the resource center that once turned it away is a family that is not surveyed. Hill's organization counted 42 unsheltered families in its service area under the point-in-time method. Over the previous year, she said, Union Station had turned away roughly 500 families it could not serve. ## Why it matters beyond the headline The count is not an academic document. Federal and state funding formulas lean on it, and city and county officials cite it when they defend or attack their homelessness strategies. Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman has argued that "leadership at City Hall has not shown the willingness to shift toward an approach that moves people into permanent housing." A number that understates family homelessness makes it easier to move money elsewhere. The broader 2026 count was not encouraging in any case. Homelessness countywide rose 1.2 percent to 73,040 people, and in the city of Los Angeles it rose 3.4 percent to 45,194. Within that, the family figure is the one line trending the right way, and it is the one line the field says it cannot trust. ## Sources - [Family homelessness is officially down in LA. Why so many don't believe it](https://laist.com/news/education/early-childhood-education-pre-k/family-homelessness-is-officially-down-in-la-why-so-many-dont-believe-it) - [LA homelessness rose in 2026, official count shows](https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/la-homelessness-rose-in-2026-official-count-shows) - [What is a Point-in-Time Count?](https://endhomelessness.org/resources/policy-information/what-is-a-point-in-time-count/)