LAHSA expects all census tracts to be counted by today’s final deadline.
Los Angeles – Today, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) announced it expects to conclude the Unsheltered and Youth Counts today for the 2025 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count. Today’s announcement marks the end of the counting period that started on February 18. Volunteers and staff from various cities completed 87% of the Los Angeles Continuum of Care census tracts on the first three nights of the Homeless Count. Special count teams counted the remaining census tracts and make-up tracts over the seven days following the volunteer portion of the Unsheltered Count.
“We concluded the volunteer portion of the 2025 Homeless Count with great success. Our community came together in a big way to help those in need. I thank all of our volunteers, city staff, and LAHSA staff who dedicated so many hours to ensure our unsheltered neighbors were counted,” said Paul Rubenstein, LAHSA’s Deputy Chief External Relations Officer.
The count of unsheltered persons centered on 5,465 registered volunteers heading into their communities to conduct a visual count of their unhoused neighbors and the tents, vehicles, RVs, and other makeshift shelters. In addition to the volunteer-based counts, several cities opted to have city employees conduct the Homeless Count instead of volunteers.
Out of the 3,193 census tracts for this year’s Homeless Count, the count teams completed 2,967 census tracts over the first three nights. LAHSA staff conducted make-up counts on the remaining 420 census tracts due to missing or incomplete data, including 17 census tracts located in dangerous areas like creeks or rivers. While the number of people who registered to count was down about 8% from 2024, the number of makeup tracts was less than the 2022 total of 480.
Mike Browning, president of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development and the leader of the Van Nuys deployment site, said, “With the leadership of the LAHSA Team, we were able to complete all of our census tracts. We are all in this together!”
Overall, volunteers and city employees counted 2,826 out of 3,233 census tracts. This year, no widespread outages or issues with the ESRI Quick Capture App were reported. LAHSA did receive reports of limited challenges across the three nights of the volunteer portion of the Count, including confirmation buttons being too small and miscommunication about volunteer check-ins. There were also sporadic technical issues, including some counts not loading into Deployment Site Coordinator dashboards, some census tract outlines not showing in the counting app, and some web browsers not showing all information to Deployment Site Coordinators. None of these technical issues affected the data collection process, and all were fixed in time for the second night (in some cases, volunteers used paper backup maps, in accordance with LAHSA’s contingency plan)..
In 2023, LAHSA implemented a quality assurance process to ensure the successful collection of count data in case of any potential technical difficulties, which included the following:
In 2025, the paper contingency maps were needed less than in any previous year.
The 2025 Youth Count will also conclude today. LAHSA’s partner, Youth People to the Front, who oversees the Youth Count, is reporting they are seeing fewer youth across all SPAs, which may be a symptom of diminished capacity from providers, increased canvass regions, and the skillset of surveyors.
The Housing Inventory Count occurred on February 19, and its validation process will run through March 19.
Finally, the Demographic Survey, which is conducted by LAHSA’s partners at the University of Southern California (USC), will continue until March 14. USC reported that it is on track to surpass the number of eligible surveys it received in 2024.
Once all counting is completed, LAHSA will turn over the data collected to its data partners at USC, and they will perform the statistical analysis to produce the annual estimate. LAHSA expects to release the results of the Homeless Count in late spring or early summer 2025.
While the Homeless Count is nearing conclusion, if any volunteer believes that the deployment site did not record the data they collected during their count, they should contact LAHSA immediately at homelesscount@lahsa.org so the agency can take appropriate steps to ensure all data are recorded.
About the Homeless Count
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires a biennial Point-in-Time Count of people experiencing homelessness. In 2016, LAHSA started hosting the Homeless Count annually to provide improved analysis regarding the trends of people experiencing homelessness. Government agencies, including LAHSA, use the data collected during the Homeless Count to develop strategies to end homelessness and determine where funding and resources can meet the greatest need. The Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count includes the Youth Count and the Housing Inventory Count.
HUD dictates the Point-in-Time Count’s methodology and timing to achieve nationwide consistency. LAHSA conducts the largest scale point-in-time count in the nation.