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Los Angeles hosts the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population. In recent years, despite billions of dollars in city and county spending, LA’s once-pristine streets have become littered with tents, drugs and feces.
City leaders have made elaborate promises about managing the homeless problem, but few seem to have asked a simple question: Where, exactly, are these people coming from?
There is a reason for that. In 2020, the city-county Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) found that one-third of “unsheltered Angelenos” became homeless outside of Los Angeles County. In 2024, the nonprofit RAND Corp. reported that 41% of the street homeless surveyed across three LA neighborhoods — Hollywood, Venice and Skid Row — were “last housed” somewhere other than LA County.
Both reports cut against the narrative of left-wing politicians and activists, who insist that any claim that the out-of-town homeless are flooding LA is a “myth.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. He is the author of America's Cultural Revolution. Kenneth Schrupp is an investigative reporter at City Journal.
Based off a recent City Journal piece.