Los Angeles hosts the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population. In recent years, despite billions in city and county spending, L.A.’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 Corporation reported that 41 percent of the street homeless surveyed across three Los Angeles neighborhoods—Hollywood, Venice, and Skid Row—were “last housed” somewhere other than L.A. County.
Both reports cut against the narrative of left-wing politicians and activists, who insist that any claim that out-of-town homeless are flooding L.A. is a “myth.” In 2021, LAHSA stopped publishing previous-location data. In 2025, RAND removed the metric from the organization’s annual report and included it in a separate, lesser-read “annex.”
We asked LAHSA and RAND why they buried this data. LAHSA said it stopped publishing previous-location figures because of respondents’ “varying interpretations of the question.” RAND claimed that it moved the data to the annex “due to a need to save costs on publishing,” and confirmed that the data would remain there in the group’s upcoming report.
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If these groups wouldn’t publish or promote this information, we decided to get it ourselves. We spent two days recreating RAND’s 2024 study of L.A.’s homeless population, using a slightly larger sample size to ensure precision. We approached people on the streets of the same three neighborhoods—Hollywood, Venice, and Skid Row—and, after identifying ourselves, asked more than 200 homeless a simple question: “Where are you from, originally?”
The results were astounding: 64 percent of the L.A. street homeless said they were from outside the City of Los Angeles, and 53 percent said they were from outside Los Angeles County—a significant increase compared with the LAHSA and RAND studies. Nearly 40 percent told us they were from other states, mostly from states that voted for President Trump in 2024. Six percent told us that they were from other countries, including Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea.
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The post More Than Half of L.A.’s Street Homeless Are Not From L.A. appeared first on American Renaissance.
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