By: Yiling Sun

In 2022, Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles began moving homeless people from the streets to motels. The vacant homeless encampments were then cleared, leaving uncluttered sidewalks for pedestrians. Ms. Bass, even during this moving project, warned that the amount of homeless people could still increase.

On Friday, Ms. Bass received great news. The number of homeless people in need in Los Angeles, after an entire six years, had finally dropped by 2.2 percent since the last year. The number of homeless people not in need who are still sleeping on the streets in Los Angelos decreased by 10.4 percent.

A few hours before the news reached Ms. Bass, the Supreme Court ruled that it was constitutional to arrest homeless people for sleeping on public grounds. The Court said that this would help keep homeless people off the streets. Ms. Bass disagreed, stating that arresting these people was a “failed response” to addressing homelessness..

“We know for a fact it [arresting the homeless] will not work,” Ms. Bass said. “It will not get people housed. It will not get people off our streets.”

Experts said that following the success of moving homeless into motels, there was less progress finding permanent homes for these people. That progress was slowed by the lack of affordable housing.

Dr. Margot Kushel, the director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, believed that at least moving people into motels showed some progress. “We’re beginning to do the right things, but we’re not doing them at scale,” she said. “It is certainly better for people experiencing homelessness to be in shelters rather than on the street both for homeless people and for the neighborhoods in which they camp.”

Every year, many volunteers in Los Angeles County count the number of homeless people. They count anyone on the streets, in a tent, or sleeping in a car. Professional workers then come to these homeless people and gather data by asking them certain questions that reveals information about their homelessness. Their questions include, “how long have you been homeless for?” or “how did you become homeless?”

The counts are some of the concrete ways that data is collected to measure progress concerning homelessness. The results from a few years ago show proof that after spending millions of dollars to help homeless people, a reverse in progress is possible, meaning that the number of homeless people could rise again even after so much effort.

“If the underlying economic conditions don’t change, and if the money gets cut, you’re going to see an increase again,” Dr Kushel said. “The hope is we’ll see signs of progress and they’ll continue to make those absolutely essential investments.

Nithya Raman, a member of the Los Angeles City Council, said that this project was one of the projects that was actually making a change in the city, meaning that the streets were being cleared up, and homeless people aren’t suffering as much. In the last few years, thousands of shelters and temporary homes were added to the city. The city hopes to make many more.