If you’re trying to address homelessness in L.A., there is some foundational information you need in order to evaluate what’s working and what’s not, such as:
For almost a year, we’ve been hunting down answers to these seemingly simple questions for the Promise Tracker, a project to hold L.A. Mayor Karen Bass accountable to her campaign pledge to house 17,000 unhoused Angelenos by the end of her first year in office.
For most of the year, we couldn’t get accurate answers. In fact, no one has been able to give clear answers to these questions for years, so this was a problem long before the current administration. But the Bass administration set their goal of housing 17,000 Angelenos without a thorough understanding of how such data is tracked and logged, meaning that for much of her first year in office, they — and therefore us at LAist — were operating without a clear picture of how much their interventions were working.
We revealed in late April that council members were not receiving the data reports they had ordered months earlier about the mayor’s signature homeless housing program Inside Safe, which would show exactly where the money is going and how many people have been sheltered. Council members then pressed the mayor’s office for the data, and numbers eventually started being provided to the council about two months later.
Until November, the overall housing numbers reported out by the city were rife with duplicates and other issues. As we investigated each of these issues, we learned that there were two key reasons why:
Mayor Bass promised to house 17,000 Angelenos during her first year in office. How’s she doing so far? Our Promise Tracker is keeping tabs on Bass' progress tackling homelessness in L.A.
Although government officials say they have been working to address both issues, this was the obstacle in front of us all year: Even though we received updates on how many times people were housed, the numbers were likely inflated, and we had no idea by how much.
We also didn’t know how many of those people were still housed, or how many returned to the streets. Nor how this year’s numbers compare to previous years. All this made it impossible to have a clear picture of how progress was or wasn’t being made.
The city has allocated $1.3 billion for this year alone to invest in solutions for the homelessness crisis — a budget Bass called “unprecedented.” The state of emergency she declared as one of her first acts as mayor increased her powers to tackle the crisis.
Getting clear and accurate answers on how many people are being housed is essential to holding the Bass administration accountable on this problem. Government entities are calling out data issues as well. Just last week, the city controller’s office released an audit report showing that the lack of accurate data has prevented people who are unhoused from accessing available shelter and temporary housing.
L.A. City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez also referenced this problem during an August city council meeting about Bass’ signature temporary housing program: “There's a fundamental problem with getting some very basic information here, and it's costing taxpayers millions of dollars.”
The city of L.A. has several distinct programs that house people, but they can be broken up into a few broad categories:
Temporary housing: Whatever you think of as a “homeless shelter” would be included here. This is kind of housing isn’t meant to be long term – whether it’s group shelters, tiny home villages, or repurposed hotels and motels. The goal of these programs is for people to stay until they can find permanent housing.
Permanent housing: This is housing you can stay in long term, like an apartment with a renewable yearlong lease. The government provides permanent housing for unhoused people in two main ways:
There actually is a lot of data about how many people are being housed, but it’s tracked by program, making an overall picture of progress challenging to get.
The government funds several programs to place people into temporary and permanent housing: Bass’ Inside Safe program, tiny home villages, family shelters, permanent housing vouchers issued by the federal government, vouchers for veterans, and more. Different agencies track data for certain types of programs — the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) manages data for temporary housing, the Housing Authority of the City of L.A. (HACLA) oversees vouchers, and the city’s Housing Department tracks how many people live in new permanent housing units funded by the city’s Proposition HHH.
Because a person might be a part of more than one homelessness program over time, they might be recorded more than once. And because these agencies don’t have direct access to each other’s data, this leads to duplicates, which can lead to inflated numbers.
At a Dec. 6 press roundtable showing homelessness progress numbers for Bass’ first year, city officials urged reporters not to add up the number of people housed in each program to get a total number of people housed because they had not removed any duplicate records.
The data is set up this way because individual programs are tracked separately.
Tracking the outcomes of programs makes sense — there are a lot of taxpayer funds on the line. Inside Safe alone has a budget of $250 million for just this fiscal year. And the city’s HHH housing program is authorized to borrow up to $1.2 billion, with additional funds for this housing coming from other levels of government. So it’s important to make sure that money is being spent effectively.
Program-oriented data answers questions like:
This can tell you whether services are being utilized and how much it costs, on average, to provide a service, like housing one person in one Inside Safe motel room.
But when the numbers only tell a story about programs and not people, it’s hard to get a sense of what’s happening overall. It prevents government leaders — and the public — from getting answers that measure overall progress, such as:
Bass summed up the problem when she spoke with our radio program AirTalk in November.
“The data is process-oriented — how many people came into housing,” she said. “It’s not outcome oriented, meaning: How many people stayed in housing and what happened to them four to five months down the line? That data is not available.”
In fact, there were many data points we couldn’t get at all — and neither could the City Council for nearly the first half of the year. As we reported in April, the Bass administration said the numbers couldn’t be trusted.
For example, in a July report the Bass administration said that when it looked at the March 2023 numbers for Inside Safe collected by LAHSA and compared it to reports from people running various shelters, they found that only 59% of Inside Safe’s data on people entering the program matched what was in LAHSA’s system.
The accuracy rates were far worse for permanent housing data and program exit data: 4% and 0%, respectively, according to the report.
Although LAHSA collects and maintains data across all the temporary housing programs in L.A., LAHSA officials usually aren’t the people handling the data entry of when someone enters or leaves a shelter or housing program. That responsibility falls to the service providers, usually nonprofits paid by LAHSA to run the shelter or housing under a contract.
According to LAHSA officials, there are about 6,000 people across different service providers who enter data into this system, making it challenging to ensure consistency and accuracy across the board.
When service providers record a new intake — that is, someone entering one of the government housing programs — sometimes the information they have is pretty limited, perhaps just a first name or a physical description, according to Bevin Kuhn, LAHSA’s senior advisor for IT and data management. These incomplete records of individuals are another challenge that leads to duplicates, Kuhn says. LAHSA officials say they constantly work to de-duplicate by merging profiles that have similar information.
Since we launched the Promise Tracker in May, we had been warned there were duplicates, and we flagged this in our earliest updates. It wasn’t until November, six months later, that the Bass administration shared numbers that it said were de-duplicated for temporary housing.
Providing detailed data entry while trying to move people out of encampments and into housing is “a lot for on-the-ground workers, especially if I’m a caseworker and I’m not data savvy,” said Kuhn. “It’s really hard to capture all those data elements perfectly.”
Most shelters don’t have much day-to-day turnover, Kuhn said. But one Inside Safe operation — in which an encampment is cleared and people living there are offered temporary housing — can lead to dozens of new housing placements in one day, making it a lot more challenging to enter data efficiently.
LAHSA requires service providers to enter data on people entering and exiting shelters within 24 hours, according to the recent city controller audit. But the audit found that “LAHSA does not monitor or enforce their data entry requirements” to make its bed reservation system function properly.
For the Inside Safe motel program, providers also are required to log when unhoused people exit the motel room program, but LAHSA doesn’t enforce this requirement, a LAHSA executive told city council members in August. This means that a lot of service providers skip this step, she said at the time.
That meant the city might have been unknowingly paying for empty motel rooms, nearly eight months after the program had launched, council members were told by the mayor’s staff.
The mayor’s staff say they worked closely with LAHSA to deploy a system to resolve the discrepancies, and that LAHSA started using a revamped tracking methodology in June that improved the accuracy rates. And Kuhn said the agency beefed up their teams on the ground to work alongside providers to verify the accuracy of data.
It took most of this year to put the necessary changes in place and for the data to reach what the Bass administration considered an acceptable rate of accuracy for sharing with the public.
Many of the data problems we encountered appear to be longstanding issues that Mayor Bass inherited when she came into office. She’s expressed frustration multiple times over these systems and the quality of the numbers. And she’s said her administration is working to establish new and better data systems, with the help of a new LAHSA CEO, Va Lecia Adams Kellum.
Bass is also taking on more of a direct oversight role at LAHSA — in a way that prior mayors have not — by putting herself on its governing commission. County supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Kathryn Barger have done the same, with Horvath now serving as the commission’s chair.
They’ve already made some changes to address some of these issues. LAHSA and the mayor’s office confirmed that they removed duplicates from their temporary housing numbers. We now know how many individual people moved into temporary housing.
As of Dec. 1, they reported that 21,694 people had moved into temporary housing in the year since Bass came into office in December 2022.
They also reported a 65% retention rate across all temporary housing programs — that is, 65% of the people who entered temporary housing are still housed as of today in either temporary or permanent housing.
But when it comes to the overall picture, we still don’t have reliable numbers.
There could still be double-counting of people who went from temporary housing into a permanent housing program. We don’t know how many people have left permanent housing and fallen back into homelessness. And we don’t know if that 65% retention rate is an improvement over prior years, because we don’t have a retention rate for 2022.
However, officials say more clarity is on the horizon. According to the mayor’s office, LAHSA and the city Housing Authority (which keeps data on permanent housing) have agreed to share more of their data going forward, so that everyone can better understand how many individuals are being housed across all types of housing, not just temporary housing.
Here are the current, best-available answers to those simple, foundational questions that we’ve spent all year trying to figure out:
How many unhoused people has the city moved into housing?
At least 21,694 people as of Dec. 1, according to temporary housing numbers from LAHSA and the mayor’s office. Adding people who’ve used vouchers or moved into new permanent housing units, that number could be as much as 11,000 higher — but because there’s likely some overlap with those in temporary housing, we don’t know how much higher it actually is.
How many of those people are staying housed?
A 65% retention rate for 21,694 people suggests that around 14,000 people who moved into temporary housing this year would still be housed. We don’t know what the retention is for people who have moved into permanent housing.
How has this changed from 2022?
The mayor’s office provided these numbers on Dec. 6:
This suggests increases all around, but because there are still potential duplicates between different types of housing across both years, we still don’t know what the actual change is in the overall number of people housed.
Heading into Year 2 of Bass’s term, here are the questions we’ll be asking:
Are there other questions we should be asking? Let us know by submitting your question below.
