Los Angeles officials say homelessness is down for a second consecutive year, crediting programs to move people from encampments into housing for the city’s largest sustained decline in street homelessness in two decades.

But while City Hall points to progress, critics call the numbers misleading, and service providers, though encouraged by the decline, note that serious challenges remain.

The 2025 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, released Monday, found a 3.4% drop in the number of people experiencing homelessness in the city of Los Angeles, down to 43,699. Unsheltered homelessness in the city decreased 7.9% over the past year, while sheltered homelessness increased 4.7%.

Overall, street homelessness in the city has fallen 17.5% since Bass took office in December 2022 — the largest two-year decline since the annual count began in 2005, the Mayor’s Office said.

City leaders attribute the drop to the mayor’s Inside Safe initiative, expanded shelter beds and new housing construction.

Councilmember Nithya Raman, who chairs the Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, said Tuesday that she’s “cautiously optimistic” about the results.

“ I am cautiously optimistic when I see these results,” Raman said. “We clearly have a lot more work to do. But after years of increases in homelessness and in unsheltered homelessness, including multiple years of double digit increases, this two-year period of declines in homelessness and in unsheltered homelessness feels like a big change from what we saw before.”

Raman credited the progress to expanded shelter capacity, new housing, and the Inside Safe program, which she said offers shelter and services to entire encampments at once. “For me, encampment resolution works,” she said, adding that the city will need to keep investing in these approaches to sustain momentum.

But some of Raman’s colleagues on the City Council remain skeptical of the results.

Councilmember Monica Rodriguez described the latest count as “false celebration for mediocre results.”

“It’s really hard for me to have absolute confidence in what is being celebrated right now,” she said. “All I can say is that there’s still clearly a lot of work to be done. We must remain focused on developing solutions to homelessness that are far more cost effective than what’s currently being deployed.”

Councilmember John Lee also questioned the accuracy of the count, pointing to issues with how the data is validated and reported.

“It’s always encouraging to see signs of progress in the data, but every year — including this one — there are questions about how the Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count numbers are validated and ultimately reported,” Lee said in a statement. “When there’s this much at stake, accuracy matters and we can’t afford to make decisions based on data that may not reflect what’s actually happening on the ground.”

Lee cited his own district as an example, saying that most housing options in District 12 are usually at or near capacity at night, but the Point-In-Time count reported many beds as unoccupied on the night of the count, raising “serious concerns about the accuracy of the count.”

Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who’s also on the Housing and Homelessness Committee, said he takes LAHSA’s data “with a grain of salt” but welcomed the trend of people moving off the streets and staying housed. He warned that as budgets tighten “at all levels of government,” cities will need to find more creative ways to build different types of housing, saying the “ratio of funds spent to progress is not sustainable.”

Their concerns come as the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority, or LAHSA, the agency that conducts the annual count, faces broader questions about its credibility. Multiple audits—and even a federal judge—have questioned LAHSA’s financial oversight and its ability to deliver results in addressing homelessness.

Raman pushed back on those criticisms, acknowledging that the count is “imperfect” but defending its value as a year-to-year comparison.

“The reality is that the count is imperfect in the same way every year that we do it, and it is really meant to be a barometer of our progress,” she said. “If you were trying to use it to identify the exact number of homeless individuals in your neighborhood, it would not be the best way to go about that.  But it is useful as a comparative tool year after year.”

She also pointed to other evidence backing the reported decline.

“This year we had another piece of research that supported the findings of the count,” Raman said, citing a RAND study that tracked unsheltered homelessness in Venice, Skid Row and Hollywood and found a 15% reduction.

“We have multiple sources telling us that homelessness is going down and unsheltered homelessness is going down,” she said. “I think we have some measure of reassurance that the numbers are accurate, at least in their directionality.”

Service providers say they’re encouraged by the results and see signs that programs are working, crediting shifts toward low-barrier shelter, non-police crisis response and more culturally competent outreach. But they also said challenges remain — from funding risks to bureaucratic delays — and note the need for responsible spending while addressing the still-high number of people experiencing homelessness.

“When I see results like this, it gives me hope,” said Ken Craft, founder and CEO of Hope the Mission, a San Fernando Valley-based housing provider operating 33 interim housing facilities. He pointed to programs like the county’s Pathway Home and the city’s Inside Safe as important factors. “It says we’re doing something right and the investments are paying off.”

Craft added: “The big challenges that we always face is funding. If we had more funding, we could do more.”

Mark Hood, CEO of Union Rescue Mission, one of LA’s largest and oldest homelessness service providers, called the numbers good news but said red tape remains a barrier to moving people into housing faster.

“We’re going to have to remove some of the obstacles to success, because there’s just so many steps that you have to go through to work with the city or to work with LAHSA to get any favorable impact,” he said. “I think that’s the reason a lot of organizations like ours continue to focus on private funding, because we’re able to get people in without all that red tape.”

Tim Kornegay, Los Angeles Director of Operations at Urban Alchemy, a nonprofit that runs street outreach and crisis response programs, also highlighted the importance of the city’s new approach.

“What’s working is rethinking the traditional approach to how we deliver social services and meeting people where they’re at, both literally and emotionally. When those things come together, people are more likely to say yes to resources,” he said in an emailed response, citing investments in low-barrier shelters, non-police crisis response and culturally competent outreach.