More than 14,000 of LA's homeless have been moved inside since start of administration, Bass says
LOS ANGELES (CNS) -- More than 14,000 unhoused Angelenos have been moved inside in the first six months of Mayor Karen Bass' administration, her office announced Tuesday.
Alongside her homelessness and housing team, Bass made a presentation on the progress made thus far in the homelessness crisis, as she did in March.
The mayor said her team organized the presentation because Angelenos "want to see progress.''
"We want to talk about challenges we have. We want to talk about solutions and we want to talk about the way forward,'' Bass said. "We believe that the emergency continues, but we do see a way forward.''
In her first update in March, Bass announced that 4,000 homeless Angelenos were brought inside, but the officials said Tuesday that the actual number was 8,000. An additional 6,000 unhoused Angelenos have been brought inside to date, she added.
Va Lecia Adams Kellum, CEO of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, cited data challenges for the undercount in March, such as lag times and data entry that caused delays in figures being validated.
"For example, we have a system for collecting data about who was actually moving from tents in housing that was not what we needed it to be,'' Kellum said. "We actually underreported our numbers because we didn't have a full accounting of people who had been helped.''
Kellum said data have been reviewed and corrected giving a true sense of how many people moved from tents into motels, including A Bridge Home and tiny home villages.''
A total of 14,381 people were brought inside through various means, including 8,726 through LAHSA intakes, 1,323 via the mayor's Inside Safe initiative, 1,591 using emergency vouchers, 1,397 using other tenant-based voucher programs and 1,344 people who were housed in new permanent housing units.
The city of Los Angeles is estimated to have had 42,000 homeless before the latest announcement.
In the first budget proposed by Bass' administration, $1.3 billion of the $13 billion will go toward addressing homelessness.
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