More ‘rough sleepers’ on Hollywood streets as the city removes tents, bringing new challenges
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- As Los Angeles clears encampments in Hollywood, tents are disappearing but more people are sleeping directly on sidewalks, exposing deep vulnerabilities, including for a pregnant newcomer and her ailing mother.
- Concerned that official counts miss many “rough sleepers” and vehicle dwellers, Hollywood 4WRD deployed dozens of volunteers for a parallel census designed to capture more accurate, street-level data.
- A final Rand study finds homelessness stabilizing in Hollywood but shifting outdoors: 52% now sleep without shelter, complicating Mayor Karen Bass’ tent-focused Inside Safe strategy and straining outreach teams.
The two women, mother and daughter, sat on a mattress covering half the sidewalk on the shady side of Western Avenue, still shivering in the morning chill.
As volunteer Joan Howard approached, her assigned mission was to tally the two women and keep moving. She had a census tract to cover on foot before 9 a.m.
Howard was participating in a novel homeless count conducted by the nonprofit Hollywood 4WRD. About 60 volunteers with clipboards spread out over Hollywood on Tuesday morning to count every tent, makeshift shelter, lived-in vehicle and obviously homeless person. Their job was to observe and record, not engage.
But in that moment, a conflicting instinct kicked in. Howard, a longtime volunteer outreach worker for the organization Food on Foot, dropped to her knees, took the daughter’s hand and listened to their story.
After their rental in North Carolina was condemned, the daughter said, they came with her husband and brother to Los Angeles to live with a relative, only to be rebuffed. The daughter, who is pregnant, and mother, suffering severe ankle swelling, both needed medical attention but had no idea how to get help. Their wallets were stolen, leaving them without identification.
For the sake of the count, Howard had to move on. But the women’s crisis gave a stark example of why Hollywood 4WRD wants to gather its own information to supplement the official homeless count.
Keeping track of how many like them are sleeping outdoors without so much as a tent or vehicle to shelter them has become a major concern for the organization. As the city’s cleaning and removal programs have reduced prominent encampments on Hollywood’s streets, the number of people sleeping rough is on the rise.
“The transformation in Hollywood is profound,” said Louis Abramson, lead author of a Rand Corp. project that is the model for the Hollywood count.
Since 2021, Rand’s LA LEADS project has surveyed homelessness in Hollywood, Venice and Skid Row every two months, drawing insights that aren’t apparent in the once-a-year countywide survey conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.
Rand’s funding is now running out, potentially leaving Hollywood organizations without the fine-grained information they’ve been getting from Rand.
“We were providing them with data they thought was valuable that they want to replicate on their own using the best practices we could bestow on them,” Abramson said.
In its final report released Thursday, Rand found that homelessness has leveled off in Hollywood after a steep decline in 2024, but that the way those remaining live has continued to change.
It found that 52% were “rough sleepers,” 38% sheltered in vehicles and only 9% had tents.
The total of 650 people was down 300 from the count of 2024, with 400 fewer tents but 90 more sleeping rough or in vehicles.
A previous LA LEADS report found more people in Hollywood than the official count and concluded that LAHSA was missing many of the rough sleepers.
The change has implications for homeless policy.
“The shift away from tent-dwelling towards rough sleeping will impede strategies to resolve unsheltered homelessness,” the new report said.
Encampment resolution programs, such as Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe that offered shelter to tent dwellers, will have fewer to serve.
People sleeping in vehicles and on random sidewalks are harder for caseworkers to find and serve.
Service providers will face more stress and “outreach teams will become less efficient as clients become more geographically diffuse and harder to find,” it said.
As a volunteer on the LAHSA count in January, Hollywood 4WRD Executive Director Brittney Weissman had her own concerns, especially about the people sleeping in vehicles.
Many cars are stuffed with belongings, but does that mean they’re actually lived in?
Weissman’s three-member team struggled with the question.
“We were confused or unclear,” she said. “We made a group decision to count a vehicle or not.”
She thought they may have been too conservative, leading to an undercount. She wondered about how other teams handled it.
“There is likely to be a level of inconsistency,” she thought.
The experience led Weissman to organize Hollywood 4WRD’s own count.
As an organization that coordinates for about 50 homeless services agencies, it would use the data to help them adjust their outreach and engagement strategies.
“We want to create data for ourselves to inform our efforts as a collective in Holllywood,” Weissman said.
Tuesday’s count involved volunteers from 12 organizations. Abramson, who besides his work at Rand is board chair of SELAH, a Hollywood and Northeast L.A. homeless coalition, is using Rand’s methodology to produce estimates from the raw tallies.
To limit measurement error, the two-person teams were instructed to make decisions independently, so that each of Hollywood’s 30 census tracts would, in effect, be counted twice. The two tallies are then compared for consistency. Any large discrepancies will be resolved by recounting the tract.
A preliminary analysis shows the estimates tracking with LA LEADS’ January survey with a slight uptick in tents from 60 to 74, Weissman said.
Final results will be announced Wednesday.
Howard, who has been doing outreach on Hollywood’s streets for two decades, doubted that everyone got counted that day. In her experience, many people pack their tents in hiding places and lock their cars early in the morning to go somewhere for breakfast or to a job.
Even cars parked on the street that look pristine can be someone’s shelter, she said.
“If I could come around midnight, then I could really figure it out,” she said.
But that wasn’t her primary concern. Howard wasn’t cut out to tally the two North Carolina women and move on.
“I didn’t leave them, I promise you,” she said in a phone interview the next day. “I went back.”
She told them about the Hub at the Hollywood Adventist Church where they could go for food, showers and help from caseworkers.
She also invited them her organization, Food on Foot where every other Sunday, UCLA provides medical and social services along with a meal.
“It would be absolutely wonderful if they could go and get some help because they need it,” she said.
