Los Angeles Confronts a Spike in Homelessness Amid Prosperity

LOS ANGELES — Construction cranes dot the sky from Century City to the Sunset Strip. Once-downtrodden blocks downtown and in Venice are bustling with restaurants, coffee shops, sparkling new condominiums, theaters and office construction. The unemployment rate has dropped to almost half its double-digit high of five years ago. Much of Los Angeles these days seems the portrait of prosperity.

But a sweeping census of the homeless population in Los Angeles County released last month came as a jolting rebuke to the charities and officials who have proclaimed a mission to end the region’s stubborn problem of people living on the streets. Their numbers spiked 12 percent in two years, cementing Los Angeles’s reputation of having the most intractable homeless problem in the nation. It is a place of unsettlingly stark class contrasts, on display every day with a staggering number of people living around the clock on the streets, without the extensive network of temporary overnight shelters provided in cities like New York City.

The report, by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, has set off a wave of concern and frustration among officials here and raised questions about the widespread gentrification that has transformed parts of Los Angeles. The urban transformation, while bringing new life and prosperity to formerly bleak streets, has helped fuel some of the highest housing costs in the country, while removing inexpensive rentals from the market.

The homeless census, based on a three-day survey by 5,500 volunteers in January, put the official homeless population for Los Angeles County, which includes the city of Los Angeles, at 44,359. The report confirms what is anecdotally obvious: People are sleeping on sidewalks up and down Sunset Boulevard, living in cars in South Los Angeles and huddling in the kind of tent cities once confined to Skid Row, which the report found had substantially grown.

New York City has a larger homeless population, but most of its homeless people live in shelters, not outdoors. “The sheer number of people living on the streets and out of doors makes L.A. the homeless capital of the nation,” said Jerry Jones, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. -  Read More at NYT

Los Angeles Confronts a Spike in Homelessness Amid Prosperity

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