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Posted on 05/22/2026 6:12:24 AM PDT by Twotone
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.
Another reason might be that the massive migration of homeless people to Los Angeles violates progressive pieties—and these groups would rather suppress those data than face their implications. (In response to this accusation, LAHSA said it stopped publishing results for the previous-location question “solely due to the statistical uncertainty,” but noted that the “question is in the queue for revision and validation”; RAND again cited “scarce resources” and the need to “streamline the main report.”)
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. Infographic showing origins of LA's homeless population.
Several of these non-L.A. residents were candid, describing their migration to the city for its fair weather or generous services. In Hollywood, a young woman named Norika said that after being a foster child in New York, she served in the Marine Corps, and had just arrived in L.A. days before. Proudly pointing to a full set of clean, straight teeth, she said that she did not use drugs. Holding a plastic bottle of vodka, she said she was drinking to cope with the pain of living on the streets, where, she said, she has already been raped.
On Skid Row, we encountered a young man as he was about to administer intravenous drugs. He told us that he came to Los Angeles from a small town in upstate New York for sobriety treatment but had departed the facility due to concerns about the program director’s “shady” activities. He would not elaborate and returned to his drug preparation.
Later, we encountered an earnest-looking elderly black woman sitting primly on her suitcase outside of a Skid Row shelter. She told us that she had purchased her own Greyhound ticket from Washington, D.C. at a cost of $379. She seemed to be in shock.
For years, Los Angeles’s homelessness policy has been rooted in the idea that the condition is a housing problem. The city and county have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on “housing first” and “harm reduction” programming—in a nutshell, providing housing and drug paraphernalia instead of mandating treatment—while failing reliably to punish quality-of-life crimes, such as public camping, drug consumption, and petty theft.
The homeless respond to incentives. They flock to places where it is easy to camp, do drugs, and commit crimes, and where the government provides housing, benefits, and drug paraphernalia. That’s exactly what Los Angeles has done. As a result, there is a “magnet effect” that continuously attracts the homeless from around the world.
The implications of our survey are clear: just building housing won’t solve Los Angeles’s homelessness problem. The wrong kind of housing program might even make it worse. Giving more homeless people a permanent home, with no strings attached, simply inspires nonresidents to come here.
The real way to solve Los Angeles’s homelessness crisis is to reverse the polarity of the magnet: enforce drug and camping laws, mandate treatment, and insist on clean and orderly streets. The only alternative is lawlessness—the end result of an approach that has turned the City of Angels into an open-air homeless encampment.
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Half of LA isn’t from America. What’s the point here?
They are not homeless. They are tent dwellers
It’s like “don’t feed cats.”
Yeah, probably given a bus ticket straight to LA. The sheriff says some of them even come in by plane and ask where the homeless encampments are - probably given a ticket from their previous city.
They know in LA, they can live how they want, drugs are readily available, do-gooders are everywhere bringing in food and supplies and the cops won’t bother them.
They just need to be encamped somewhere else.
If you build a massive welfare industry, they will come. The joke used to be that New Hampshire didn’t have any homeless because their homeless program was to buy the homeless a bus ticket to Boston.
You can look at any city with a homeless problem and you’re going to find they aren’t from that city. My little city with a Dumocrat administration imports homeless from all the surrounding counties. Asheville NC is also a homeless hotspot and the majority of them are from far and wide. “If you build it, they will come” isn’t just about a baseball field of dreams.
Places provide bus tickets
Hmmm..... It’s almost as if the homeless themselves are telling the authorities where the mental institutions need to be reopened.
“If you build it, they will come” isn’t just about a baseball field of dreams.
Another pastor I know was given 1,000 per month to help people. he gave it away as fast as he could every month so he could say to the next “need” I don’t have any funds left. Constant calls and visits of “need”
Folks,
If you are going to help people you are going to have to invest your time and effort, not throw money at it. You change people through relationships. That is how God changes us.
Cities with “homeless-friendly” reputations draw in derelicts from all across the country. Lots of bums find their way via bus or some other means from cold areas or cities that don’t allow them to be squatters in public parks to places that are warm and/or liberal.
Out of towners are to blame for LA’s homeless crisis. Good one liberal Angelenos. That’s as lame an excuse as the one California libs are using to explain their state’s budget crisis, and that is they’re broke because they have to help fund the red states.
A good many Californians just don’t want to admit that their state government is corrupt. For starter is it really going to cost $231 billion to build a high speed train line from LA to SF? That’s the estimated price tag for its completion. A little bit higher than the estimated $33 billion when voters passed Prop 1-A in 2008 to fund it.
If that doesn’t reek of corruption I don’t know what else these Californians need to wake the hell up!
There is a “rehab industrial ccomplex” in Los Angeles that recruits addicts from other states. The rehabs put them on government programs until that money runs out and then dump them on the streets of LA.
This is similar to the other major fraud schemes being exposed except in this case there are actual patients and actual operating clinics. They have the surface appearance of being legit but they are not.
Out of towners are to blame for LA’s homeless crisis. Good one liberal Angelenos.
Los Angelenos all come from somewhere.
Very true, but the financial corruption from NGOs, flush with city, federal and state funds dealing with the crisis, is a very LA/California thing!
Exactly. It’s elementary economics: if you subsidize something, you’ll get more of it.
Yes, I’ve read that they target Indian Reservations in particular - lots of government $$ to be had there, especially for drug re-hab.
These shady organizations take in the Native Americans, transport them to whatever city - and when the money runs out, they are dumped on the streets in whatever city.
They try to operate in residential neighborhoods in California, infuriating neighbors who are forced to live next to “drug rehab centers” - what the operators then do is get their denizens labeled as “handicapped” to end any/all opposition.
It’s even worse than that when it comes to bum infestations in cities. If you tolerate something, you get more of it.
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