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Four years ago, outreach workers in Hollywood knew where to find their unsheltered clients. Most lived in clusters of tents that workers could visit week after week, delivering services and building trust to help ultimately move people inside. The encampments were ugly signposts of Los Angeles’ homelessness crisis, but they were also a kind of roadmap out of it.
That map is disappearing. What will replace it is a question that the city has not yet asked, let alone answered.
Using professional field staff — not volunteers, like the annual county-wide homelessness count — Rand LA has been taking a census of unsheltered people in Hollywood, Skid Row and Venice every two months since September 2021. The organization tracks not just how many people live on the streets, but how they live: in tents, in vehicles or sleeping rough with no protection overhead.
After those four years, our neighborhoods now host half as many tents. But they also have 20% more people living in their vehicles and sleeping rough.
That means today’s unsheltered population is now 14% smaller overall, but needier, more mobile and harder to engage than before. It is time to think about what comes next.
L.A.’s urban tent encampments are a relatively recent phenomenon. Targeting them for housing interventions — as the city’s Inside Safe program has done since 2022 — makes sense. The encampments create easy-to-find, densely concentrated areas of unhoused people, making outreach more efficient. And the social bonds formed among the unhoused people living in these encampments can be leveraged to help folks get inside and stay inside.
These factors made Inside Safe, and a focus on prioritizing tent dwellers for relocation to interim housing, a sensible policy. And it worked. Since the program’s launch, the number of tents in Hollywood has fallen from roughly 250 to only about 30 — a drop of almost 90%. Venice has seen similar declines. Skid Row remains the last zone in our research area that is thick with encampments.
But there were always some people that this approach didn’t reach or appeal to — people living isolated in vehicles or without any dwelling at all — and now they make up the majority of those still living on the street (at least outside of Skid Row). There’s no route to continued progress on homelessness if we don’t find new strategies to supplement today’s encampment resolutions.
Why won’t the city’s Inside Safe playbook work for these populations? Let’s start with rough sleepers, who now represent a plurality of unsheltered people at roughly 40% to 45%.
Rough sleepers have the highest needs of anyone on L.A.’s streets. Across four years of surveys, rough sleepers scored worse than tent dwellers in 14 of 20 indicators, including physical health, mental health, substance use and experiences with the justice system. In some cases rough sleepers have been physically exposed to the elements and socially isolated for years. Setting aside their needs, rough sleepers simply have no fixed location where outreach workers can contact them regularly. Most also lack cellphones or the documents needed to be placed in housing.
Vehicle dwellers, while also mobile, present different challenges. First, they possess an asset in their vehicles that they may not be able to keep due to parking limits at housing facilities. Second, nearly 20% of vehicle dwellers have jobs, and 54% report looking for work. In those cases, a vehicle can be more integral to their journey out of homelessness than a bed in interim housing — especially a congregate shelter that may present serious risks to personal safety. Programs pitching little more than a roof over vehicle-dwellers heads may not appeal to them.
So how does the city continue to make practical progress in reducing the number of Angelenos who are unsheltered?
One option is to pivot: Instead of bringing help to people, we must bring people to centralized service hubs. At the very least, that would be more efficient. Outreach workers would then spend less time searching for individuals and more time informing unsheltered people about neighborhood centers and transporting them to those nearby locations. To work, those centers — few of which even exist now — need to offer same-day housing matching, low-barrier behavioral health treatment, on-site documentation clinics and access to basic cellphones.
For vehicle dwellers, the toolkit might look slightly different: scaled safe parking programs and employment supports paired with rapid rehousing initiatives. In all cases, service hubs need to provide comfortable space, bathrooms, showers and laundry for the unhoused.
Hollywood, Skid Row and Venice are not the whole city, but they are areas of concentrated homelessness and intensive interventions. They are where trends surface first, and their trend away from tent encampments towards rough sleeping and vehicle dwelling is clear. Strategies that succeeded in reducing that form of homelessness will not get us the rest of the way.
Louis Abramson is an adjunct physical scientist at Rand and lead author of the LA LEADS study. He also chairs the board of the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
- The article argues that while unsheltered homelessness has declined in key Los Angeles neighborhoods, the remaining population is smaller but more vulnerable, more mobile and increasingly composed of rough sleepers and vehicle dwellers, making outreach and engagement significantly harder[2][5][7].
- The column contends that tent-focused policies such as Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe program were initially sensible because encampments concentrated people in predictable locations and allowed outreach teams to build trust and move entire groups into housing efficiently[3][7][9].
- The piece suggests that this encampment strategy has now reached its limits, since tents have fallen sharply in Hollywood and Venice while rough sleeping and vehicle dwelling have risen, leaving a majority of people outside traditional tent clusters and less connected to services[1][5][9].
- The article argues that rough sleepers now represent the single largest subgroup of unsheltered people in the study area, with consistently worse indicators of physical and mental health, substance use and justice-system involvement than those living in tents or vehicles[2][10].
- The column contends that rough sleepers are especially hard to serve because they lack fixed locations, cellphones and critical documents, complicating repeated contact and the bureaucratic steps needed to place people into housing[2][5].
- The piece suggests that vehicle dwellers face distinct challenges: many rely on their cars or RVs as essential assets for work or job-seeking, and may view congregate shelter as unsafe or as a threat to losing their vehicles, making offers of “just a roof” less attractive than targeted supports that preserve mobility and employment prospects[5][7].
- The article argues that Los Angeles should pivot from relying primarily on encampment-based outreach to building centralized neighborhood service hubs where unsheltered residents can be transported to receive same-day housing matching, low-barrier behavioral health care, help with identification and benefits, and basic cellphones[2][5][7].
- The column contends that for vehicle dwellers the city’s toolkit at these hubs should emphasize scaled safe-parking programs, employment assistance and rapid rehousing, paired with amenities such as bathrooms, showers and laundry that acknowledge people’s dignity and practical needs while they exit homelessness[5][7].
- The piece suggests that trends in Hollywood, Venice and Skid Row—sharp declines in tents in the first two areas but continuing growth and concentration of encampments in Skid Row—demonstrate that the tent-focused “first act” has been effective yet incomplete, and that a deliberate “next act” tailored to rough sleepers and vehicle dwellers is necessary to sustain progress[1][2][9].
Different views on the topic
- In contrast, some state and local officials highlight recent declines in homelessness across California as evidence that existing strategies—expanding interim and permanent housing, speeding placements through coordinated systems and increasing street outreach—are working and should be scaled rather than fundamentally reworked[4][6].
- The governor’s office frames encampment-focused efforts and the creation of new shelter and supportive services as a central success, arguing that clearing camps and rapidly moving people into safe, structured environments has produced one of the largest drops in unsheltered homelessness in the state in 15 years and should remain a primary focus of policy[6][4].
- Interviews with Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority leadership portray Inside Safe and related interim housing initiatives as transformative, contending that enhanced medical and mental health support, along with ambitious housing goals, are already improving outcomes and require sustained investment more than a shift toward new service-hub models[8][7].
- Some experts and advocates quoted in broader homelessness coverage emphasize structural drivers such as high rents, limited deeply affordable units and time-limited subsidies, suggesting that the core solution lies in expanding permanent affordable housing and strengthening tenant protections rather than building additional centralized service centers or programmatic layers[4][8][10].
- Other critics focus on enforcement tools like Los Angeles’ anti-camping ordinance and encampment cleanups, arguing in news reports that these measures can scatter people, push them into rough sleeping or into new neighborhoods, and erode trust between unhoused residents and service providers, and therefore call for curbing criminalization while expanding voluntary, low-barrier housing options[7][1][3].
- At the same time, civic and business voices concerned with public safety and street conditions express support in local coverage for continued encampment removals and stricter management of visible street homelessness, prioritizing reductions in tents and sidewalk dwellings even as researchers warn that these efforts may leave a more dispersed and harder-to-reach unsheltered population behind[1][3][9].
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