California Homeless Math
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From WSJ
California Gov. Gavin Newsom ....recently put a temporary freeze on $1 billion of state grants for city and county homelessness programs....the measures would have reduced homelessness statewide by 2% between 2020 and 2024
[California has] more than 116,000 residents sleeping on the street on any given night.
California has dedicated some $15 billion toward the issue since the start of the pandemic.
$15 billion / 116,000 = $129,310.34
2% x 116,000 = 2,320. $1 billion / 2,320 = $431,034.48
The actual growth in homelessness in the city and the county is much less than indicated in the report, based on a Times analysis and corrected figures provided by the homelessness agency. Agency officials concurred that homelessness grew about 5% in the city and less than half a percent across the county.
The figures are considered estimates because they are based on a street count supplemented with statistical extrapolations.
The 5.7% and 11% increases released by the agency during a May 3 news conference — and reported by The Times and several other news outlets — reflected a change in methodology that included a special count of homeless people under 25 in hard-to-find places.
Because a separate youth count was not included in 2015, it should have been subtracted from the 2016 count to make a valid comparison of the two years.
The revised year-over-year comparison doesn’t change the authority’s estimate for the total number of homeless people in 2016: 28,464 in the city and 46,874 countywide.
During the news conference, Lynn noted that the new youth count made up a large portion of the increase in the city, and one chart in the visual presentation showed an increase of only 2.7% if the youth count was excluded.
But the chart headline stated boldly, “City of Los Angeles saw an 11% increase in total homelessness,” without a clear disclaimer that it was not an apples-to-apples change.
No similar apples-to-apples calculation was included at all in the chart showing a 5.7% increase for the entire county. Lynn focused his comments on the brighter portions of the count — decreases of homeless veterans and families that he attributed to intensive efforts by the city and county.
For Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Lynn’s acknowledgement of the lower number for the city represents a validation, if only a partial one. On the day of the presentation, Garcetti’s staff released an analysis suggesting that, after adjusting for the youth count, the most reasonable year-over-year gain was about 3%.
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