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The Los Angeles homeless crisis, the worst in the U.S., worsens each day out here on these L.A.

streets, as thousands of homeless people line the concrete pavement, all over the city.

People dying on the streets from sickness and poor health, or from fentanyl, meth and other drug overdoses with drug addicted homeless people like this woman out here strung out on fentanyl, suffering mercilessly on this skid Row street where L.A.

also has the worst homeless fentanyl crisis of any U.S.

city.

It's devastating.

You literally see homeless people dying out here every day.

When you walk these streets, you really get an idea of what's going on out here.

And just for the record, this is not even the skid Row area where there are thousands of homeless people each and every day.

This area here is several miles from downtown L.A.

and Skid Row.

This is the West L.A.

area.

It's the Sawtelle Poveda National Boulevard neighborhood.

And yet, despite all the overwhelming evidence of this worsening homeless crisis, all over the city, in July 2025, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and her office announced some good news.

Mayor Abbas's office writes lasting change.

Annual homeless count down two years in a row for first time ever in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority released the results of the 2025 annual Homeless Count showing for the first time.

A second consecutive year of decline in the number of people experiencing homelessness.

The 2025 count reports a 17.5% decrease in street homelessness, according to Mayor Bass and her office.

They go on to say these results follow Mayor Bass's unprecedented efforts to implement a comprehensive strategy that confronts street homelessness.

The status quo had been to leave people on the street until permanent housing was completed.

We chose to act and reject the broken status quo of leaving people on the street, and so housing was built.

They say these results aren't just data points.

They represent thousands of human beings and neighborhoods that are beginning to heal.

For some context, each year the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority or Los as its no.

That's what Mayor Bass is referring to.

They do a point in time homeless count and survey taken over three days with now.

As I just mentioned, city and county leaders saying there is a 17.5% decrease decrease in homelessness here in LA.

Is there though?

This is very curious to say the least, especially given the fact Los Angeles has the worst homeless crisis in the nation with more homeless people here in L.A.

than any other U.S.

city.

So how can the Los Angeles homeless population be decreasing when nationwide homelessness has increased nearly 20%?

We're about to find out if the new 2025 homeless numbers are accurate.

Are they misleading?

Are they dishonest?

Are they a fabrication?

You decide after this investigative report.

Yeah.

So the way the count works, there's two, two portions of it.

There's a sheltered count, which is supposed to be an exact count of people in shelter reported by the shelter operators.

And then there's the unsheltered count, which tends to get more attention.

And that's the people living on the streets without, fixed, you know, shelter.

And for the unsheltered count, that is the thousands of volunteers that fanned out across LA County to to do that and observe, observe people with their own eyes and tents and other, you know, makeshift shelter structures and, what, you know, what goes on in the in the process of this count is a certain portion of those observations are excluded from the final count.

Perhaps there's, believed to be an error in, in, what was being observed.

We found some, some, unexplained, throwing out of a lot of those numbers.

Nick Garda is an award winning investigative journalist.

Nick is the watchdog correspondent for LAist, a Los Angeles independent nonprofit news source.

Recently, Nick produced a series of investigative reports about the L.A.

homeless crisis.

He questions the loss of survey numbers.

We do know is that there was an area where it was supposed to be documented, what the reason was for excluding this data, that was frequently left blank.

We also know that the rate at which this data was being excluded or thrown out was much higher, specifically in the city of LA starting in the 2024 count.

And and that was the year we started to see this drop in the numbers.

It's certainly raised some questions, and the lack of documentation of the reasons why this information was being excluded, certainly leaves us without a paper trail to understand.

Whether it was done legitimately or not.

And then I'll add as well, there's a much more detailed survey that's done, accounts that are done throughout.

You know, multiple times a year by a pretty respected organization, Rand Corporation.

And these are in hotspots of homelessness, Skid row, Hollywood and Venice.

And what Rand, recently came out with is that, their numbers they were finding in these neighborhoods tracked fairly closely with not losses numbers in 2022 and 2023, when there were increases being reported.

But then in 2024, one loss reported this decrease.

That was the numbers loss I had for these neighborhoods that ran counts was significantly below the counts that Rand had.

And so Rand has raised concerns that there may have been a systemic undercount in 2024.

That's something we're going to continue to ask questions about at last, to seek answers about, what's working, what's not working, and our homeless services system.

The can has been kicked down the road for years.

These dollars have been spent and never got to the street.

You got three people dead in front of Midnight Mission.

Two on the other side did over there.

And now we got a new saying now down on, skid row.

Tell a laughable, I'll tell you anything to get your vote.

Dewey Terry is disgusted with L.A.

politicians.

Terry has worked with the homeless population for decades on the streets and shelters, missions, SROs, single room occupancy.

No one knows these streets like Terry.

He insists that L.A.

leaders are being dishonest about the loss of survey numbers.

This is how they don't smudge in the numbers.

They'll take them for 35 days, 45 days.

Money run out, voucher run out.

Back on the street.

Where are they going to go?

They're going to come back to me because we used to count.

I count tents from five in the morning.

Okay.

That means I go around it every street that's there and count every tent on there with that, with the people in there for four years before the city stopped us from doing it.

Okay.

We even counted the tune.

The city stopped us from counting those children in those women out there.

Why?

Because they didn't want to.

People to know.

See?

You know, you you got to understand something.

Cronyism is is so embedded in the city and the county that is so much money running through there.

The city is only there for political 32nd commercials.

I don't want those little kids to look at ads and say that nobody cares.

Right.

I still got people dying on the street right now.

I still get women just right every night.

And then you have an infection of fentanyl, and it looks like a zombie movie right next door to the police station in the city knows this.

The city got it.

Got a skid row coordinator that comes down.

They're supposed to look and see how everything is going on in this neglect.

You come in.

Is a man living in a box, and then you come to find him.

He's dead in a box.

Getting them died from.

I haven't seen all that.

I haven't seen a woman.

The suit of night, all the muscle off of her.

And she wanted to come back down.

That's what you need to know.

Have I seen Lahsa?

No mercy allows a male.

No.

You have to get people and take people where they need to go for the safety of the person.

When you took the oath for them for to be mayor or you took the oath to be governor, you said you would protect the safety of the people of Los Angeles, California, and they doing none of that.

There's no part of me that believes those numbers.

So I don't think there's anybody that that truly drives around Los Angeles that believes those numbers.

Elizabeth Mitchell is chief legal counsel for the L.A.

Alliance for Human Rights, and she's a partner with Omaha for Mitchell and King.

Mitchell and the Alliance sued the city and county over their failure to comprehensively deal with the homeless crisis, and for not honoring various settlement agreements to take the homeless off the streets.

Elizabeth believes that LA leaders are so mired in the billions of dollars shelled out to the various agencies that the politicians are now part of the problem.

Part of the homeless industrial complex.

Elizabeth says without a doubt, the new Los, a 2025 homeless count, is inaccurate due to court records from a lawsuit, whistleblower.

As part of this evidentiary hearing that I mentioned that in 2025, we had the former chief data officer, Emily von Henry, testify.

She was subpoenaed, had to testify under oath, and she testified there is no foundation for the data that law says putting together and putting out.

So Emily von Henry, I don't know her personally.

She was a whistleblower.

We found out about her, from an article that was written by Nick Gerda of Las and she was responsible for putting out for gathering the data and putting out the numbers that we see in the pit count in the mayor's Inside Safe program, and then also related to various reports relating to the settlement agreement that we're overseeing.

And, she one of the allegations that she made was that she and her team were being instructed to, fudge the numbers in a way to make Mayor Bass look good.

And she.

Then we called her into court, and she testified to that exact fact under oath, that there is no foundation.

There is no, quote, source of truth to the data that's being produced by Lahsa in the pit count and inside safe, and that people were being pressured to make the mayor look good.

So when I see these numbers that come out from the most recent pit count, I don't believe it.

There's no, quote source of truth to these numbers.

And so, you know, there's there's a whole bunch of people that have a lot of criticisms about the way these point count and point in time counts are done.

Right.

You have insufficient volunteers.

They skip entire areas.

They kind of have these equations.

In this particular case, in 2025, they were delaying releasing the numbers for several months.

I think some of the numbers got shifted from the raw data that was reported.

So there's a lot of like these in this year.

I don't want to say a fraud, but that's how we would say it, right?

We would say in dishes of fraud when things don't seem to be adding up.

In addition, we have a witness that says testifies under oath.

The former chief information officer says there's no source of truth to these numbers, and the city had every opportunity to call any witness.

It wanted to counter these statements and it never did.

Mayor Bass and Lahsa released all these new numbers on homelessness decreasing.

I think they said 17.5% over two years.

I can't believe that anyone that spent any time in the homeless space or down on Skid Row or in Venice or anywhere, actually believes that homelessness is down nearly 20% in Los Angeles.

It's just not true.

Tom Wolfe is a nationally renowned recovery advocate.

Tom is the founder of Pacific Alliance, an organization that fights for better drug policy.

And Tom is also the co-chair of the homeless committee for the Bay Area Council.

Tom says the new lawsuit homeless survey numbers are, in his words, a joke.

In Los Angeles last year, over 2200 people died on the streets.

Was that counted in their homeless decrease?

And we already know that for every one person that gets off the street for new people, enter into homelessness.

And in fact, it's the homeless and housing providers that use that specific data point to justify more funding for their programs.

So how can I would like to see actual details other than self-reported data, or other than someone driving around on the back of a pickup truck at 2:00 in the morning, counting people on their hands, how many homeless people that they see instead of actually getting out there in the community, going from ten to 10 to 10 to see how many families and children and people that have overdosed, etc., that are out there right now.

So when you start breaking down the data about why you're homeless, how did you become homeless?

Are you struggling with a substance use disorder?

Are you struggling with alcoholism?

Are you struggling with mental health?

Those are all questions that are posed to an individual experiencing homelessness, and they take their answer, however they give it and use it to report data that's then offered up as gospel by our politicians to say, hey, we're doing a great job reducing this so we're not asking the right questions.

It skews the data.

Most of the data self-reported.

So I really wouldn't put too much weight in the point in time count, and certainly not as much weight that Mayor Bass has put into it.

And the victory lap, frankly, that she took, a couple of months ago.

When you see this documentary, frankly craving for her to do that.

Because the numbers are not good.

If anything, homelessness is increased, not decreased.

I mean, no other city in the United States has a skid row, like L.A.

does.

There's nothing that comes close to the disaster.

It's the greatest disaster.

It's the greatest manmade disaster in the US is L.A.

skid row.

Reverend Andy Bales was a past commissioner of Lahsa, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

So he knows all too well what goes on in Lhasa.

Reverend bales was also president and CEO of LA's iconic union Rescue Mission.

His hero status changed over the years here in L.A., as he began speaking out and going public about the neglect and mismanagement on the part of city and county leaders where homelessness was concerned.

Reverend bales says the new Lahsa Homeless survey numbers are falsified.

There's no question that Los Angeles is the capital of homelessness, that Skid Row is the epicenter of homelessness in the United States.

And, for anyone to think that getting, the numbers down as a victory, it is not a victory.

You're saying that this count is accurate, but this count has never been accurate.

It's never been meant to be a count.

It's always been a guesstimate.

You haven't done any of the things that you would have needed to do to solve homelessness.

And in fact, homelessness has not decreased in any way.

And as you see from the public's reaction and the people that really care, the reaction is, no, you didn't you didn't lower the numbers.

There's still too many people struggling on the streets.

LA is still the capital of homelessness in the US.

And I would always say the barometer is the deaths per night.

The deaths per night have not decreased.

You haven't lowered the deaths per night of people dying from homelessness, complications of homelessness.

Then you have lowered the numbers.

You don't believe the numbers.

The Los a survey?

No.

I will believe the numbers when I see, zero deaths per night from complications of homelessness, then I think the translation will be that we have indeed begun to solve homelessness in L.A.. There was nothing.

Nothing we could source to prove the count was accurate.

I contacted la mayor Karen Bass, his office over email so the mayor could be a vital part of these news reports so her voice could be heard loudly and clearly.

Here is that email I sent to Mayor Bass and her office.

Take a read with me.

I'm continuing my homeless series, hoping to get an interview with Mayor Bass about the new law, some numbers and insights, a program, a positive interview, no other guests, a one on one half hour we can talk over the phone.

Whatever is most convenient for the mayor in your office, interview in person, at any location or over zoom.

Unfortunately, once again, I never heard back from Mayor Bass or her office.

Some three years of emails, three years of phone messages.

Despite desperately trying to talk to Mayor Bass about homelessness and three years later, still nothing.

No reply from the mayor or her team.

So I email California Governor Gavin Newsom and his office.

I wrote an email to them.

Here is that email in part which says I'm producing a report.

My investigation into the homeless crisis here in L.A.

and throughout the state, and the fentanyl epidemic overtaking the streets, particularly on skid row in LA, and why homelessness is worsening, according to the experts.

And what more can be done to help fix this situation?

Let me know if we can interview the governor in person or zoom, if more convenient.

I should say Governor Newsom's office was kind enough to email me back, which I greatly appreciate it, saying in part, thanks for reaching out.

Unfortunately, they write, we're not tracking any availability for these interviews.

Should anything change, however, we'll let you know.

Simply trying to have a conversation with the Governor and Mayor Bass.

No mudslinging, no gotcha journalism, just a one on one interview to try and find solutions to the worst homeless humanitarian crisis in the nation.

So certainly, I'm disappointed that L.A.

Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom are not part of this special report.

I hope to hear from them one day.

I am appreciative of the fact that L.A.

City Council President Marquis Harris Dawson agreed to be interviewed.

Recently.

I had a wide ranging interview with him about several LA issues, homelessness being one of them.

Here is what Marquis Harris Dawson had to say from that interview.

His answers are unedited.

Well, I think a couple things about that report.

I'll say, just to give you the context, one of the most disturbing things about the the report for the city of Los Angeles was homelessness had decreased everywhere except for Skid Row.

So if you're using Skid Row as a measure, you're right.

There hasn't been much movement in our neighborhoods and the places where we, frankly weren't accustomed to seeing homelessness.

You're seeing it go away more quickly there.

So I think you're right about that, that unevenness, I do think with as many problems as Lahsa has had, lots of study is peer reviewed first by USC, then by the Rand Corporation, as it has been every time.

And this is the challenge I put to people who question the numbers, who question the numbers when they were going up.

And to me, if if the methodology was wrong is wrong now, why wasn't it wrong when the numbers were increasing?

Because, you know, for my first eight years on the council, the number went except for one year when during Covid, when we didn't count the number one up every year, I never heard a single person question the methodology then.

Well, I think the methodology and it was and it was being done by Lahsa.

And I do give credit to Mayor Bass and to your counseling County folks.

They're trying desperately with the Inside Safe program and other programs.

And no question, you folks are taking homeless off the streets.

But the problem is, and I keep saying this in my stories, as soon as, let's say, ten people taken off the streets, 12 or back on the streets 2 or 3 weeks later.

And that is no joke.

In the West L.A.

area, there's a part of a 4 or 5 freeway in an encampment on the support of Sawtelle National and on Cotner.

That's right, that's right.

Yeah, it'll be gone soon.

However, even when they're gone, they're just the homeless folks relocate, just, you know, a few blocks away and they're still there.

Well, this is, I think, the problem.

Yeah.

This is the thing about inside safe.

I mean, you're right.

We for years have had clean up programs, care plus and other ones which just move.

Basically we tell people move so we can clean the sidewalk, go where you're going to go.

And we all know full well these people have got no place to go.

So they're going to be back either here or someplace very, very similar.

The great thing about inside safe, as expensive as it is, and it's a very expensive program, it does it if they're 12 people on the street, they house 11 of them.

And, you know, the one that refuses, you know, may turn up somewhere else.

But they house 11 of them on the spot and, and they're areas where, at least in my district, where I've done care.

Plus you're what you're describing happens.

We have eight people then, you know, three months later it's ten people know where we've done inside safe.

We may have 12 people and one person may come back and then that one person.

It's much easier to deal with that one person than it is to deal with the full on encampment.

And so we can see that it's that it's that it's working.

And that's why to me, the numbers are not a surprise.

Because I, I see when we're putting people in, into the motels and into temporary housing, the other concern about the numbers.

And I'll leave you with this, and then we'll get to our next issue.

I've been told that about six homeless people are dying on the street every day, large in the skid row area.

This is true.

You're mentioning Skid Row a moment ago.

Whether fentanyl overdose, meth overdose, drug overdose, health conditions.

So just by default, if six people are dying a day, well, there goes the loss account, because the diminishment in the number of people and maybe from folks who are dying.

Well, well, here I think we do lose people.

And those people obviously don't count if they're not with us anymore.

But just remember this again, from 2015 to 2023, we also had six people dying, except the number of homelessness would go up, which means that we were producing new homeless people to replace the ones who were housed and replace the ones who passed away.

It is a big victory for all of us that we don't replace the ones who've passed away with new homeless people, and we don't replace the people who've been out with new homeless people.

I mean, that's the the, the, the homelessness problem.

People like to talk about it in isolation, but it's connected to the housing problem.

Right?

Everybody starts off homeless, having been house somewhere, somehow, and then they're not.

The most common reason is economic.

The most likely demographic for new homelessness.

And this is what's scary is people over the age of 66.

That is scary.

That's scary.

And what that's and what what you find when you talk to people is somehow they lost their apartment, their rent control apartment.

And then on the new rental market they have no chart.

There's no change.

There's no way, there's no way.

And so they end up in the car and then they stay with friends, and then they develop a drug habit and then, you know, and then then they present on the street as someone who's addicted to whatever with the mental health condition, that takes a lot of work to deal with it.

I recently interviewed former Sheriff Alex Villanueva.

You certainly know.

Well, he believes in more of a sort of tough criminalization, and obviously, you know that.

But is there something to be said?

Possibly.

I mean, but with a kinder, gentler touch, so to speak.

But something has got to absent.

Absolutely.

There's that's the case.

I mean, look, the thing about homelessness is it happens to people, you know.

So and as you know, people are very, very different.

And so there's some things that are worked great for this set of people that weren't work at all for the next set of people that won't work at all for the next set of people.

So we need all of it.

And, you know, one of the things I get upset about is a lot of the pro criminalization people, the way they paid for no prisons was by defunding the what we're called halfway houses.

And halfway houses did exactly what you're describing.

You go hear their rules.

Sometimes they were religious, sometimes they were based on 12 step.

But you're on a program and there's strict discipline because there's an awful lot of us that respond well to that.

Well, we defunded all of those.

And so now what we do is we put you in a shelter, give you a cot and say, don't screw up right.

And for a lot of people, as you know, that's just not going to work.

That's going to fail more times than it's going to be successful.

And so I think we need all of it.

We need, you know, we need things for people who are active in drug use.

We need people.

I mean, it's one of the most tragic things that we see.

And as wealthy as we are, people come up to us and to our workers and say, you know, I've been on drugs, I've been on the run.

I'm ready to get clean.

And we tell them, we'll get back to you in 3 or 4 days with the bed.

There's got to be a better answer.

Got to be a better way than that.

And drugs are not new.

Drugs are not limited to race.

They're not limited to class and not limited to to, political ideology.

Addiction is a disease that we just refuse to treat.

The council president is trying to find that a better answer.

La mayor Karen Bass is also trying to find that better answer as well.

And Council President Harris Dawson is correct.

Drug addiction is a disease that's not properly being treated.

Neither is mental illness here in the U.S., which is also greatly to blame for the homeless situation, the psychosis, the schizophrenia, all the myriad of other mental health elements that go untreated.

We have a broken health care system.

It's in disrepair and that must be fixed somehow.

Good luck with that.

We have a housing problem.

Not enough housing rents are too high for too many.

We have a domestic violence problem where young, victimized women are forced to take to these streets out here, they've got nowhere else to go.

Often we have a VA problem where our hero homeless vets.

Some of them, yeah, they sadly have to take to these streets as well.

Sure, people must take personal responsibility.

They must not allow themselves to be out here, however easier for some people than others.

Unfortunately, that's just how this thing works.

So we've got all work together to find a solution and not politicize the homeless crisis.

Everyone must collaborate.

We're going to continue to keep people honest as we try and find solutions to the homeless tragedy out here.

Now, for more information about our program, just click on KLCS.org and then click Contact Us.

Send us your questions, your comments, your story ideas so we can hear from you or contact me at DavidNazarNews on X or on YouTube or just go to DavidNazarNews.com.

Contact me there.

You know, I'll get back with you and be sure to catch our program here on PBS or catch us on the PBS app.

Thanks so much for joining us.