---
title: "LA approves a $496 million homeless budget, a 40 percent cut, as the crisis grows"
description: "Minutes before the 2026 count showed street homelessness rising again, the LAHSA commission unanimously approved a $496 million budget for the coming year, down from $829 million, a 40 percent drop. The city of Los Angeles now covers 73 percent of it as the county pulls back. The money still has to stretch across everything from safe parking to permanent housing."
category: "Los Angeles"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/los-angeles
author: "Julian Mercado"
published: 2026-07-25T01:48:00.000Z
updated: 2026-07-25T01:48:00.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/la-approves-a-496-million-homeless-budget-a-40-percent-cut-as-the-crisis-grows
tags: ["lahsa", "homelessness", "budget", "los-angeles", "housing"]
---
# LA approves a $496 million homeless budget, a 40 percent cut, as the crisis grows

Minutes before the 2026 count showed street homelessness rising again, the LAHSA commission unanimously approved a $496 million budget for the coming year, down from $829 million, a 40 percent drop. The city of Los Angeles now covers 73 percent of it as the county pulls back. The money still has to stretch across everything from safe parking to permanent housing.

The timing told the story. Minutes before Los Angeles learned that street homelessness had ticked back up, the agency that fights it approved a budget sharply smaller than last year's, [LAist reports](https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/lahsa-approves-budget-homeless-la).

## The number

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority commission voted unanimously on Thursday to adopt a $496 million budget for 2026-27. Last year's was $829 million. That is a drop of roughly 40 percent, more than $330 million, in the money available to move people off the street, in the same year the count of people on it went up.

The Herald reported the count earlier today: the city's unsheltered population rose 7.9 percent. So the two headline facts of the day sit uncomfortably together. Homelessness is rising, and the budget to address it is being cut by nearly half.

## Who is paying, and who is stepping back

The shape of the cut matters as much as the size. The city of Los Angeles now funds about 73 percent of LAHSA's budget, a larger share than before, and the reason is not that the city added money but that Los Angeles County pulled back. LAHSA is a joint city-county agency, and the county has been moving to stand up its own homelessness department and route money through it rather than through LAHSA.

So part of the $496 million figure is a genuine loss of resources, and part is money that still exists but now flows around LAHSA instead of through it. Untangling which is which is central to understanding whether services on the ground actually shrink, and by how much. What is not in dispute is that LAHSA, the agency at the center of the response for years, is being handed less to work with and a larger relative bill for the city.

## What the money buys

This is not abstract. LAHSA's budget pays for the unglamorous machinery of the response: safe parking lots for people living in their cars, outreach workers, shelter beds, and placements into permanent housing. A 40 percent cut is not a line on a spreadsheet; it is fewer of those things, in a year the count says more are needed.

## The bigger picture

LAHSA is cutting as it absorbs blow after blow. The agency has been battered by recent audits, criticized by a federal judge, hit by the county's withdrawal, and drawn into court fights over Trump administration funding cuts. The commission that runs it has ten members, half appointed by Mayor Bass, who appointed herself in 2023, and half by county supervisors, which is part of why the city-county tug-of-war plays out inside it.

The honest way to read Thursday is that Los Angeles is trying to run a growing emergency response on a shrinking budget, through an agency whose own future is contested. Whether the recent progress against street homelessness survives that is the question the next count will answer, and the Herald will track where the reduced money goes and what it stops paying for.

## Sources

- [$496M homeless services budget gets green light moments before release of disappointing 2026 numbers](https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/lahsa-approves-budget-homeless-la)