LA spent $300 million moving 5,800 homeless people off the streets, but nearly half of them are already back

A new report shows that nearly 40 percent of people helped by Mayor Karen Bass’s $300 million homeless program have returned to the streets. This is a major setback for a program that was built to get homeless people off the streets of Los Angeles.

Mayor Bass signed an executive order in December 2022 to launch the Inside Safe program. The program offers temporary housing, mostly in motel rooms, to people living on the streets. Each Inside Safe location is managed by a nonprofit, which provides case management, housing support, and meals.

According to The Los Angeles Times, the program has moved about 5,800 people into temporary housing, but data from December shows that 40 percent have gone back to the streets. Mayor Bass has acknowledged this, saying it is “critically important” to understand why people are leaving and what needs to be done to strengthen the temporary housing options, adding that decisions need to be “based in science.”

The Inside Safe program is making progress, but it faces deep structural problems that money alone cannot fix

Some participants have raised concerns about the program’s rules, such as the ban on guests. Inside Safe participant Jonathan Torres said the restriction feels “unfair,” explaining that in the “real world,” you are allowed to have visitors, and that is “part of keeping your sanity, you know?” Nonprofit leaders say these rules exist for safety reasons, but the tension is clear.

UCLA Law School professor emeritus Gary Blasi pointed to a bigger problem, there are simply not enough housing vouchers or low-cost apartments to give everyone in the program a permanent home. He said this makes the program “just not sustainable,” as money is going into expensive motels rather than long-term solutions.

It is the kind of systemic gap that reminds us how some well-known figures have had to pivot away from their original dreams when circumstances made their original path impossible to continue. Despite these challenges, Mayor Bass’s office points to broader progress.

Spokesperson Kolby Lee said that before Bass took office, there was no real strategy for dealing with homeless encampments. Now, Lee says, Inside Safe is driving an “almost 18 percent reduction in street homelessness,” and Mayor Bass is the first LA mayor in history to reverse these numbers for two years in a row.

Lee also noted that the city has seen its first recorded decline in homeless deaths, adding that anyone who has faced homelessness or addiction knows it is a journey that “far too often ends in tragedy,” but Los Angeles is “defying the national trend and making tangible progress that is saving lives, reuniting families, and making our neighborhoods safer.”

At the national level, two organizations, the National Alliance to End Homelessness and the Women’s Development Corporation, sued to block the Trump administration’s new rules for a 40-year-old federal housing program. They argued the administration threw the program “into chaos” by adding new conditions to grant funding and holding the funds, and the people they help, “hostage.”

A federal judge later ruled that the administration’s attempt to change these rules was unlawful. Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, called the ruling a “victory for people across this nation who have overcome homelessness and stabilized in HUD’s permanent housing programs,” adding that the ruling “reinforces a fundamental truth: that the work to end homelessness is not partisan, and never should be interfered with for political means.”

Homelessness has been one of the biggest social problems in the United States, but recent efforts do show some promising results. The New York Times reported in January this year that homelessness has dropped by “tens of thousands of people nationwide.” 

The numbers are encouraging for Los Angeles as well, despite the relapse. Homelessness in Los Angeles County has declined for the second year in a row, based on results from the 2025 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count.  72,308 people experiencing homelessness across the county, with 43,699 in the city of Los Angeles, a 4 percent drop countywide and a 3.4 percent decrease in the city compared to 2024.

The count, conducted from February 18 to 20, combines street tallies, shelter data, and surveys to estimate the homeless population across the region. In an unrelated but equally strange story making the rounds online, a TikToker who looks exactly like Kevin James and claims to be an elementary school teacher has gone viral, showing just how unpredictable the internet can be.