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2019 LA County Homeless Count Finds 12 Percent Increase In Homelessness

The results of the 2019 Los Angeles County homeless count were released Tuesday, revealing a 12 percent increase in the number of homeless individuals year-over-year, despite being in the second year since the passage of Measure H.

Santa Clarita is a part of Service Planning Area 2, which roughly encompasses the area from Castaic to Universal City vertically and from Westlake Village to Glendale laterally, and provides more relevant data than the county level, said Mike Foley, executive director for Bridge to Home.

“It’s going to be a while until we get the Santa Clarita breakout, so I’m honing in on Service Planning Area two data, which is showing a 4 percent increase in the overall homeless population, which, compared to the west side, which is at 19 percent, is a fairly modest increase,” said Foley.

The report released by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LASHA) cites the lack of affordable housing and stagnant wages as the primary drivers of the increase.

“The need for affordable housing clearly exists in Santa Clarita. We’re working to create more shelter beds and interim housing,” Foley said. “When you have a situation in which more and more people (are) being moved from shelters into permanent housing, and yet the overall number of homeless continues to rise, it indicates the system is working but it’s being overrun by the number of people falling into homelessness right now.”

While funds from Measure H have allowed LA County’s homeless services to double the number of people moving from homelessness into housing over the course of each of the first two years of the 10-year investment, these gains have been outpaced by the increases in overall homeless.

In the past year, 75,796 people were helped by the programs and services of LA’s homeless services system—and 80 percent of them were new to that system.

This year’s study found that 23 percent of the unsheltered people experiencing homelessness were homeless for the first time last year.

That amounts to more than 9,200 people, 53 percent of which cited economic hardship as the cause of their homelessness, the report said.

The increase in LA County’s homeless population was relatively low when compared to neighboring counties such as Ventura (+28 percent), Orange (+43 percent) and Kern (+50 percent), according to the report.

LASHA asserts that these numbers suggest the aggressive deployment of resources to combat homelessness limited the increase year-over-year.

Santa Clarita-specific results have not yet been released, but are expected to be available in the coming weeks, according to officials.

To read LASHA’s full report on their findings, as well as their sources, visit the website here.


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2019 LA County Homeless Count Finds 12 Percent Increase In Homelessness

2 comments

  1. Of all the people who are homeless in SCV , how many of them are from SCV? At the same time how many of our homeless people have traveled in some way or form into our valley or state because some people in our valley or state feel their doing Gods work but in the end your creating a monster by feeding that stray dog. One last question , how many of our homeless have had drug problems and that is the root to their problem and how they became homeless? We must reject the idea that every time an individual makes a poor life choice , it is society’s fault. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for their own actions

  2. I just last week was visiting Utah and visited the Topaz museum, a detention camp the housed thousand of Japenese that were victims of the preconcieved notion that they were all bad after Pearl Harbor (google it)
    Why can’t something be done like this for all homeless? It was an eyeopener to say the least, a light went off in my brain… currently I drive the schuttle for the Bridge To Home shelter 3 times a week and am trying to do my part and not criticiize the fact that they are all victims of bad choices, some if not most have mental and physical disabilities, they need all the help they can get, some of us are more fortunate, just saying…

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About Wyatt Smith

Wyatt was born and raised in Santa Clarita. After graduating from Hart High School in 2012, he continued his studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he earned a degree in applied statistics. After a year and a half working in the digital advertising industry, Wyatt left his previous field of work to pursue his interest in writing.