Deep in the data sheets published last month with the 2026 homeless count was a surprising statistic about change in Skid Row.According to the records, the downtown Los Angeles district’s homeless population swelled last year by more than 800 people, an increase of 24%. Those numbers accounted for more than half of the city’s troubling 3.4% increase, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which conducts the count.The reality was much less alarming. Most of that growth was attributed to 614 more people occupying shelter beds than the year before. Those beds existed. But they weren’t new. In fact, they had been occupied for decades.For reasons loosely tied to relations between church and state, they’ve been included some years in the annual count but left out in other years, one of many erratic variables that make precise and reliable quantification of the city’s homelesness problem all but impossible.Because of the many variables, it’s impossible to say exactly how the city’s trend line would have changed if the beds were counted correctly each year.A rough calculation suggests that last year’s cityide overall homelessness number would have still have been an increase, but by a more modest rate of just under 1.9%, not 3.4%.The effect would have been the opposite in prior years, rendering two successive decreases in citywide homelessness marginally less impressive. A 5.5% decrease over two years would be shaved to 4.1%.L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, whose record on homelessness is a key issue in her bid for reelection, said LAHSA officials did not tell her office about the discrepancies before the numbers were released. “Absolutely not,” she said when asked Monday. She added that she has never viewed the homeless count as a precise tool for assessing the crisis.“This is why I would very much like to have a count done by the city, where we can control how it is done,” she said.City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who represents Skid Row, referred questions to the homeless services authority.Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, a frequent critic of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, said the issues with the Skid Row numbers only bolster her case for pulling the city’s funding out of LAHSA and forming a new city homelessness agency.“We’re constantly searching in the dark,” she said, “which is why I’ve always fought to separate the city from this broken system.” In response to The Times questions, LAHSA said final figures for the sheltered count reflect changes across the system and “singling out any one factor in a vacuum to explain overall shifts can be inaccurate and misleading.”“An accurate analysis of why numbers went up or down must look at how numerous changes interact as a whole rather than examining individual variables separately,” it said in an email.At the center of the recurring glitch is Union Rescue Mission, a privately funded, faith-based organization that has provided shelter and services on Skid Row for 135 years. Its scripture-heavy programs stress sobriety and transition to self-sufficiency. It has remained independent from the largely taxpayer-funded homeless service system that adheres to the housing-first model that prioritizes permanent housing without preconditions.With an open-door policy, the mission has been a refuge for as many a 1,000 people, at one point putting up hundreds of cots nightly in its chapel to accommodate women from the street. After a 2020 outbreak of COVID-19, the shelter restructured its bed plan and currently houses up to 800 people nightly. It also maintains a shelter for families in South Los Angeles and a women’s sanctuary in Sylmar.Part of its independence means that the mission does not participate in the Homeless Management Information System, a database maintained by LAHSA to track homeless people engaged with the system. That system is a key component of the homeless count. While volunteers scour the county to visibly count tents, vehicles and other improvised shelters, LAHSA polls shelters through the information system to tally those indoors.LAHSA director of communications Ahmad Chapman said the agency attempts to gather information from interim housing programs that do not use the system.“Unfortunately, not every non-HMIS shelter decides to send their data and participate,” he said in an email.In Union Rescue Mission’s case, it sent its information in 2022 but declined to send it in 2023 and did not respond to the request in 2024 and 2025, Chapman said.The mission said in an email that staff turnover was responsible for the requests not getting through. A new emergency services director appointed in 2025 is now working closely with LAHSA, it said.Chapman said LAHSA repeated the mission’s 2022 data in 2023 but left it out the following two years. In its email response, LAHSA said 40 shelter projects that did not use the information system were counted in 2026, “adding about 1,221 individuals in beds that were not accounted for in 2025 due to non-reporting by service providers who were not required to share their data. At the same time, the system lost motel vouchers in 2026 that had previously sheltered roughly 1,000 people in 2025.”Union Rescue Mission’s posture in the system changed in 2025 when Bass broke down the church-state divide by offering it a contract to house people taken off the street through her Inside Safe program. The mission placed Inside Safe enrollees in a tent structure it had erected several years earlier on a parking lot behind its building on San Pedro Street. They have access to the mission’s dining, recreation and health facilities but are not required to participate in religious activities, President and Chief Executive Mark Hood said in an interview.This year, its 638 beds became part of a jigsaw puzzle of new beds and vacancies that added up to Skid Row’s increase of 614 sheltered residents. According to the 2026 count, Skid Row’s unsheltered population also grew, by 207.
