By: Felix Xie

The recent downward trend of homelessness provides support for Mayor Karen Bass’s campaign, Inside Safe, which started in 2022 to combat the homeless problem aggressively.

Long exhausted by homelessness, Los Angeles residents were full of hope when the new mayor, Karen Bass, started an aggressive effort to change the status quo of the city that has long been known for homelessness. She started the campaign in late 2022, right after taking office. Belongings and other items were moved off of the highway bridges and underpasses. Sidewalks choked by lines of tents were finally cleared.

However, even as Ms. Bass touted the success of Inside Safe, her program made to move people off of the streets, she has said that the population of homeless Angelenos could still grow before her efforts made a dent.

Even with the warning, major evidence still supports her program. For the first time in 6 years, the homelessness rates have dropped in Los Angeles. Volunteer workers gathered this data by conducting a point-in-time survey of the homeless population in Los Angeles at the time of the survey. They tally the number of people who appear to be homeless to do the point-in-time survey.

In Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest city, where encampments have drawn the ire of neighbors for years, the overall number of people experiencing homelessness decreased by 2.2 percent, and the number of unsheltered people in the city decreased by 10.4 percent.

Voters on the West Coast, where cities have found it difficult to bring homeless people inside and into permanent homes, now rank homelessness as their top concern. Due to the extreme housing shortage in California, more encampments than ever before appeared during the pandemic, even in suburban areas.

Just hours before the Los Angeles data was released to the public on Friday, the Supreme Court issued a decision that will support local governments on the West Coast in their attempts to ban public sleeping. But Ms. Bass said that Los Angeles’s progress in convincing people to move indoors had demonstrated that arresting homeless people was a “failed response.”

At a news conference on Friday morning about LA’s homeless count, Bass said that she feared the ruling would usher in a wave of mass arrests, like the one that happened during the “crack” crackdown in response to the cocaine addiction in the 1980s.“We know for a fact [that] it will not work,” she said of arresting people who are homeless. “It will not get people housed. It will not get people off our streets.”