By Jim Newton, CalMatters
This commentary was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass staked her political future on a promise: As a candidate in 2022, she vowed to make homelessness her top priority and to make dramatic reductions in the city’s population of unhoused people.
She won the campaign. To deliver on that promise, her first act as mayor was to sign Executive Directive 1, which was intended to streamline the construction of affordable housing and to signal the new administration’s urgency on the issue. She also rolled out Inside Safe, a program that breaks up homeless encampments and offers a safe alternative to those living inside them.
Three years later, as she enters the final year of her first term and embarks on her
campaign for re-election, Bass can point to real achievements in the homeless area, but she battles a difficult perception problem: What if the number of homeless people in Los Angeles is down but not enough so that most Angelenos feel the problem is being solved?
There is evidence of progress. According to the mayor’s office, Inside Safe has
conducted 117 operations since Bass launched it, and it has brought 5,496 people in from the streets. Of those, 1,321 have made their way to permanent housing. Others have found temporary shelter or, sadly, have returned to the streets.
How much progress?
Against a citywide homeless population of more than 40,000 people, those
numbers may seem incremental, but they are helping to reverse years of neglect. The number of unsheltered homeless people — the focus of Bass’s work — has declined by 17.5% since the mayor took office, according to the county’s annual count.
Austin Beutner, the former Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent who so far is Bass’s most serious challenger in the mayor’s race, questions the numbers and claims of progress.
(Disclosure: I worked as a senior editor and columnist for the L.A. Times when Beutner was its publisher in 2014-15.)
Beutner points to a recent study by the RAND Corp. that sounded skeptical about Los Angeles County’s annual homeless count, suggesting it may significantly underestimate the extent of the area’s unhoused population.
The RAND study pointed to a rise in the number of so-called “rough sleepers,” people who sleep on the street without even a tent or car which, it said, has caused the county’s annual homeless count to become increasingly inaccurate. That’s in part because rough sleepers are difficult to find and include in official tallies.
RAND attempted to check the county’s numbers by focusing on three areas — Venice, Hollywood and Skid Row — and comparing its count to the one produced by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Agency.
The results, according to RAND, suggest that LAHSA is missing large numbers of unsheltered people. But even the RAND report noted that the number of people without shelter in its study areas was falling, sometimes dramatically.
In 2024, RAND found, the number of people without housing in its study area dropped by 15%. In Hollywood, the decline was 49%.
That’s not enough to declare victory against the scourge of homelessness, but it’s
hardly the basis for declaring failure.
Complicating matters further are the relentless facts of politics and the strains they
put on any holder of the LA mayor’s office. No matter how much a mayor sets out to concentrate on a single issue, life intervenes, throwing up new challenges and
distractions.
In Bass’s case, the past year sent two big ones her way: the wildfires that destroyed
large swaths of the Pacific Palisades, within Bass’s area of responsibility, and Altadena, outside it. And then there was President Donald Trump’s decision to turn Los Angeles into the testing ground for his demonization of immigrants and militarization of American life.
A shifting focus
Either of those could have upended Bass’s focus on homelessness, and it’s true that news coverage of the mayor has largely moved off the issue that brought her to office.
As she enters her re-election campaign, critics are more likely to focus on her halting reply to the fires, while supporters point most eagerly to her dogged resistance to Trump.
In political terms, both issues may prove offsetting, as the fires highlighted what some regard as the mayor’s administrative weaknesses while the Trump assault reminded voters she has served as a bulwark against a deeply reviled president and his legion of not-very-bright minions.
As 2026 opens, the Palisades are rebuilding, and the troops dispatched by Trump to put down non-existent riots have returned to homes and bases.
Homelessness persists.
That then frames a central question of this mayor’s race: Has Bass done enough to
address the shameful reality of a city that boasts extravagant wealth and yet tens of thousands of its people sleep without shelter?
That, too, is politically complicated, in part because measuring the problem is only one
piece of its politics. It may not be enough for Bass to tell voters that they should be
happy with the city’s progress, because the annual count shows the problem slowly
ebbing or because RAND found huge progress in Hollywood.
What really matters is how most people come into contact with homelessness. In that sense, homelessness as a political issue resembles inflation. It does little good for a politician to tell voters that they should be happy with the economy if they’re not.
Joe Biden learned that the hard way, and Trump is busy learning it today. Every
time President Trump dismisses “affordability” as a “hoax” or a Democratic scheme, it backfires with voters who feel pressed by rising prices or stagnant wages.
Hence Trump’s march into the dark abyss of public disapproval.
Similarly, it’s not enough for Bass to insist that fewer people are homeless than were three years ago, if voters don’t sense that for themselves. If there’s an encampment on the corner, it hardly matters that there are 49% fewer unhoused men and women in Hollywood. Homelessness still feels present.
That may turn out to be this campaign’s wildcard. If voters feel that their own
neighborhoods are better, it will land as proof that Bass is making headway and
deserves four more years to complete the work she began with Executive Directive 1.
If not, Beutner or some other candidate may get the chance to finish what she started.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.