You’ll Never Guess Who LA Blames For Its Constant Failures

The signs of failure are everywhere, but start here: Los Angeles has more homeless people this year. The annual count, conducted in January but amazingly enough not released until well after the June primary elections, shows a 7.9 percent increase in unsheltered homelessness in the City of Los Angeles, with a smaller increase in total homelessness, and also a smaller increase in countywide homelessness. With a couple thousand people dying on the street every year, the Los Angeles Times quickly zeroed in on the true victim of that metastasizing despair:

Karen Bass has suffered a setback. That poor woman. Stop hurting her, America.

The point-in-time count, an effort to tally up all the people sleeping on the street at a single moment, is certainly an undercount of total year-round homelessness. Look at this document from San Francisco as an example: They counted 8,323 people on the street in their 2024 point-in-time count, but estimated the total number of homeless people in the city throughout the year at closer to 20,000. (The dumbest politician in Southern California, Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, used this distinction to dismiss the growth in the homeless count as “esoteric.”)

The count itself verges on self-parody, as volunteers circulate through extremely dangerous places like Skid Row to ask the homeless their gender identity. Great news: Very few two-spirit people are sleeping on the sidewalk in Los Angeles.

If you ever find yourself counting the homeless in Los Angeles, remember to ask for pronouns.

California feeds homelessness like that Nicholas Cage character in Las Vegas feeding his alcoholism. Infamously, state auditors reviewing $24 billion in government spending on homelessness declared that they couldn’t really track where it had gone or what it had paid for.

In Los Angeles, special taxes feed the homeless industrial complex. The county referendum called Measure A created a permanent sales tax increase to fund homelessness programs, while a city referendum called Measure HHH created bond funding for transitional housing. That flood of funding goes to an army of non-profit corporations.

As the city-county joint powers agency called the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) says on their website, “Through LAHSA, funding, program design, outcomes assessment, and technical assistance are provided to more than 100 nonprofit partner agencies that assist people experiencing homelessness achieve independence and stability in permanent housing.”

Massive funding, “more than 100” non-governmental organizations, more homelessness.

Spending a fortune but growing the problem the money is supposed to solve, Los Angeles officials know who to blame.

Mean Donald Trump makes people sleep on the sidewalk in Los Angeles, obviously. From that same news story: “She said the administration cut federal housing assistance by 50% last year, stripping the city alone of $70 million.”

The failing homeless services authority LAHSA, meanwhile, spreads the blame to both Trump and Newsom, showing a bold willingness to engage in bipartisan deflection: “This news is disappointing, but not surprising: these results reflect a significant decline in state and federal funding for our region, not a local strategy failure.”

What they need, LAHSA announces, is more money. “To invest in solutions at the scale this issue demands, we need more sustained state and federal support,” the statement concludes.

That demand for more support hints at the unstated assumption that underlies the homelessness model in Los Angeles, and you can see it more clearly in a presentation on the importance of federal funding on the front page of LAHSA’s website.

Thousands of people in Los Angeles are being housed with federal funding, so a decline in federal funding will cause more homelessness. Houses come from the government. There’s no other source of housing. If the government doesn’t give people free homes, they become homeless. Officials in Los Angeles have no model for reducing homelessness but an endless, and endlessly growing, government giveaway. “To invest in solutions at the scale this issue demands, we need more sustained state and federal support.” The government has to give us more free houses, or Donald Trump has caused homelessness.

Coincidentally, “more than 100” non-profit corporations get paid in a single county as a result of this focus on free money.

Also this month, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is trending rapidly toward insolvency and facing a takeover by county education officials. The district has agreed to substantial pay increases for union employees while losing almost half of its enrollment (“746,831 students in 2002…to a projected 375,890 in 2026-2027”) so Donald Trump is to blame.

“Make no mistake – declines in LAUSD enrollment have been exacerbated by the fear and chaos created by the Trump administration,” the eternally shameless Karen Bass said.

Failure is spreading through Los Angeles, a city governed by fools and socialists and socialist fools. They need a way to shift the blame, and they aren’t going to be terribly creative about it.

Chris Bray is a senior correspondent at The Federalist and a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army. He has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at “Tell Me How This Ends,” here.