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L.A.’s homelessness agency revised the locations of over 400 sheltered people in its 2025 homeless count — moving them out of the city of L.A. — in the days before the public release of the findings this week. The moves were made without informing elected officials who had seen the earlier numbers.
On July 7, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority told local elected officials and their aides that overall homelessness had declined by 2.5% within the city of L.A. This week, the agency publicly touted a slightly larger 3.4% reduction in the city.
The changes — which revised the city’s count down by 437 people — were not disclosed to elected officials when LAHSA provided the updated numbers Monday morning ahead of their public release that afternoon.
Following questions from LAist, LAHSA said it acknowledged and explained the changes to city elected officials on Tuesday, the day after the count’s public release. Representatives of several L.A. City Council offices told LAist they are asking LAHSA for more information about the revisions.
LAHSA gathered the data used in the estimate in February, as part of a tally mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD.
LAHSA officials said the last-minute revisions were made because the agency discovered that several hundred interim housing units had been incorrectly tagged as being in the city of L.A. by LAHSA’s new housing inventory system, agency spokesperson Ahmad Chapman told LAist. He pointed to HUD’s rules requiring that so-called scattered site beds be tagged as all being in the city where most of the beds in a given project are located.
The issue was fixed after LAHSA briefed council members and staffers on July 7 and before the data was released publicly this week, the agency said. But the homelessness agency did not inform the city’s elected officials until after LAist asked about the revisions.
L.A. Councilmember Monica Rodriguez told LAist that LAHSA should have been more transparent about the changes and that information was withheld by the agency. She said the revisions were made after LAHSA had delayed the briefing for elected officials multiple times.
LAHSA representatives declined to respond to that accusation.
“I don’t think that the outcomes reflect a moment of celebration because it’s unclear to me how real these numbers really are,” Rodriguez added.
“Any changes made to the numbers, the public is entitled to know because these are their taxpayer dollars that are being used for this work.”
A spokesperson for Mayor Karen Bass told LAist the mayor was first provided the updated numbers on Thursday, July 10, a few days after LAHSA’s initial briefing to public officials. That’s when the mayor received an updated draft slide deck indicating the updated numbers, the spokesperson said.
The changes made by LAHSA, which happened after when city officials were briefed on the results of a yearly homelessness count, have led elected officials to raise questions about the report’s accuracy.
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What changed?
These revisions did not alter the total population estimates across L.A. County, but the overall homeless population estimate for the city of L.A. was revised down to 43,699, from 44,136.
That downward revision consisted of a 475-person reduction to the city’s sheltered count and a 38-person increase in the city’s unsheltered estimate.
While past year’s shelter counts publicly list the service provider names for each shelter site, LAHSA declined LAist’s requests to identify which shelter locations they revised. The agency said the issue was with multi-site or “scattered site” programs with housing units across multiple jurisdictions.
In response to LAist’s question about which shelter spots had their locations revised, LAHSA officials said: “The most important thing is that LAHSA identified the misassignment in the draft data and corrected it before the results were finalized and announced.”
Regarding the revision increasing the city’s unsheltered estimate by 38 people, the presentation to officials and their staffs on July 7 provided a city unsheltered number that was from an earlier set of draft data that was supposed to be updated before the briefing, LAHSA officials told LAist.
LAHSA communication
When LAHSA presented its findings to officials July 7, the agency told them the information was subject to change but that any “possible changes would not be expected to change the overall narrative of the Homeless Count,” Chapman said in LAHSA’s written response to LAist’s questions.
After that meeting, LAHSA said it discovered that the way it was tagging cities for multi-site or scattered housing programs did not follow HUD’s geographic coding specifications.
LAHSA said it then adjusted the official addresses accordingly and submitted the information to USC School of Social Work to recalculate the results.
(The agency did not answer how it discovered the issue. HUD’s geographic coding specifications for scattered sites did not change from 2024 to 2025, according to the federal agency’s records.)
USC’s Ben Henwood, an expert on housing and homelessness, told LAist that LAHSA informed him last week that some shelter data had been misclassified and required updating. He said that kind of change is not uncommon.
“The annual count is an intensive process conducted in a compressed period of time, so it is not unusual for us to have to rerun our estimates during this process as we work closely with LAHSA,” Henwood said.
In arriving at the final estimate for the region’s overall homeless population, USC combines estimates of the unsheltered count conducted by volunteers from February and the count of people living inside shelters and other interim housing sites on the same nights. The sheltered portion of the count does not rely on volunteers, but is reported to LAHSA by the shelter providers and is considered an exact count of people.
A spokesperson for L.A. Mayor Karen Bass did not respond to questions about the changes.
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On Monday, when the agency publicly announced slightly lower homeless population numbers in the city of L.A. than they had a week prior, LAist asked LAHSA for an explanation of any changes to the main numbers since the briefing of officials.
“There were no significant differences in the data that was shared,” LAHSA’s deputy chief external relations officer Paul Rubenstein responded, as Bass stood nearby.
“The topline numbers were the same.”
Further reporting from LAist found that LAHSA’s top bullet point of numbers had been revised from a 2.5% drop in the city count to a 3.4% drop.
Chapman later told LAist that Rubenstein had been referring to the overall countywide point-in-time results and associated percent decrease, which stayed the same.
On Tuesday, LAHSA first informed public officials of the revisions via email, with the following message:
“You might see slight differences in the Council District, Supervisorial District, and SPA sheltered counts compared to last week’s draft. The data collected did not change, but we corrected some interim housing locations. This happened because our new inventory system initially misassigned some locations for multi/scattered-site programs, which required updates due to HUD’s rules for reporting these types of sites. We identified and accounted for this issue prior to the public release on July 14 by ensuring all programs were accurately assigned, using last year’s address for consistency when appropriate. We’ll refine this mapping for next year’s Housing Inventory Count to comply with HUD’s requirements while also addressing our need for precise local mapping of locations.”
LAHSA says its annual homeless count was conducted in accordance with HUD regulations and the official data released at Monday’s news conference met HUD’s standard.
HUD did not respond to LAist’s request for comment.
Count concerns
Several City Council members and their aides told LAist that slight revisions to the count sometimes happen after their offices are briefed but that LAHSA typically informs them of these changes.
Meanwhile, Councilmember John Lee is raising concerns about the sheltered counts provided in his district. Lee said he’s worked to bring 371 shelter beds online in his San Fernando Valley district and believes they are typically occupied. However, he says data shared with his office last week indicated just 78 of those beds were being used, while the rest sat empty.
“Based on district-specific PIT count data we have received from LAHSA, we have questions regarding the sheltered count: how ‘sheltered’ is defined and how the data is collected and verified,” said Roger Quintanilla, Lee’s communications director. “Our office continues to seek clarity from LAHSA in order to better understand how they arrived at these figures.”
Asked by LAist about Lee’s concerns, LAHSA officials did not provide an explanation but said they would follow up with Lee.
The agency said it will be releasing more information from the 2025 homeless count this week. That is expected to include breakdowns of the raw homeless count by council district, as well as demographic information about the region’s unhoused population.