--- title: "LA's homeless count ticks back up in 2026 after two years of declines" description: "The official 2026 count finds 45,194 homeless people in the city of Los Angeles and 73,040 in the county, up 3.4 percent in the city and 1.2 percent in the county. LAHSA calls the rise within the margin of error and not statistically significant. It follows two straight years of decline, and officials blame deep state and federal funding cuts." category: "Los Angeles" category_url: https://herald.la/category/los-angeles author: "Hana Nakamura" published: 2026-07-24T22:48:00.000Z updated: 2026-07-24T22:48:00.000Z canonical: https://herald.la/article/las-homeless-count-ticks-back-up-in-2026-after-two-years-of-declines tags: ["homelessness", "lahsa", "karen-bass", "los-angeles", "housing"] --- # LA's homeless count ticks back up in 2026 after two years of declines The official 2026 count finds 45,194 homeless people in the city of Los Angeles and 73,040 in the county, up 3.4 percent in the city and 1.2 percent in the county. LAHSA calls the rise within the margin of error and not statistically significant. It follows two straight years of decline, and officials blame deep state and federal funding cuts. The numbers Mayor Karen Bass warned about this week are now official, [LAist reports](https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/la-homelessness-rose-in-2026-official-count-shows): homelessness in Los Angeles rose in 2026, ending a two-year run of declines, though by how much, and how much it means, is genuinely contested. ## The count The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority's point-in-time count, conducted in January, found 45,194 homeless people in the city of Los Angeles, about 29,000 of them unsheltered and 16,000 sheltered. Countywide, the figure was 73,040. The direction is up. In the city, the total rose 3.4 percent and the unsheltered population 7.9 percent. Countywide, the total rose 1.2 percent and the unsheltered count 3.3 percent. ## The caveat that matters Before anyone declares a trend, LAHSA itself supplied the crucial qualifier: the increases fall "within the count's margin of error and not considered statistically significant." That is not a dodge; it is how these counts work. A point-in-time tally is a single-night estimate built on volunteers canvassing the county, and small percentage moves can be noise as easily as signal. So the honest headline is not "homelessness surged" but "the two-year decline stopped, within a margin where stopped and slightly-up are hard to tell apart." That said, the unsheltered increase in the city, 7.9 percent, is the figure hardest to wave away, because unsheltered homelessness is the most visible and dangerous form and the one recent policy has most tried to reduce. ## The politics, given fairly The reaction split along predictable but substantive lines, and each side has a point. Bass, who is up for reelection, cast it as a setback caused from above: "I will never stop fighting until we end street homelessness, because no Angeleno should be sleeping on the street." Her allies note the count follows two years of real progress under her, a 17.5 percent drop in unsheltered homelessness across her first two years. Her chief critic on this issue, Councilmember Nithya Raman, drew the opposite lesson: "The Mayor's approach is not working well enough." And County Supervisor Janice Hahn captured the mood in between: "It felt like we had turned a corner these past few years, and this latest count feels like a setback." ## The causes underneath What makes Bass's "it came from above" framing more than spin is the funding picture, which is severe. The state cut its Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention grant by 26 percent. A separate Time-Limited Subsidies program was cut by nearly half, from $240 million to $123 million. Federal affordability programs changed. And the inflow kept coming: the number of newly unhoused people seeking services grew 30 percent between 2022 and 2025. That is the vise. The city and county spent two years pulling people off the street faster than new people arrived, and this year, with prevention and subsidy money slashed, the math tightened. Homelessness is downstream of housing cost and the money available to keep people housed, both largely set above City Hall. ## The long view One number puts all of this in perspective: since 2016, the unsheltered population is up 59 percent. Two years of decline, and now a statistically-ambiguous uptick, are movements on top of a decade-long climb that no single mayor created or can quickly undo. The fair reading of the 2026 count is therefore neither vindication nor indictment. It is a plateau, arriving exactly as the funding that produced the recent declines was cut, and it raises the question the next year will answer: whether the progress of the past two years was the start of a turnaround or a pause. The Herald will keep reporting the spending decisions in Sacramento and Washington that, more than any speech at City Hall, will decide which it was. ## Sources - [LA homelessness rose in 2026, official count shows](https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/la-homelessness-rose-in-2026-official-count-shows)