Clearing Tents Is Pushing Los Angeles Homeless Onto Bare Pavement

The counting happens after dark. On weekday nights between nine and midnight, RAND survey teams walk fixed routes through Hollywood, Skid Row and Venice, tallying what they pass: a tent here, a van with fogged windows there, and, increasingly, a person asleep on the concrete with nothing over them at all. They have done this on 115 separate nights over four years, varying where they start and which way they turn so the numbers stay honest. By January 2026, when the project wrapped, the Los Angeles homeless people on the bare pavement had become the largest group of all.

That is the unsettling core of the final report from LA LEADS, the Los Angeles Longitudinal Enumeration and Demographic Survey, released in May. The total number of unsheltered people across these three neighbourhoods barely moved between December 2024 and January 2026. What changed was everything about how those people were living.

Rough sleeping, the term for living with no tent, no vehicle, no makeshift structure of any kind, climbed by a fifth in 2025 and hit its highest level in the study’s four years. Tent dwelling, meanwhile, fell by nearly a quarter in the same period and has roughly halved since 2021. On paper, fewer tents looks like progress. The catch is where the people from those tents seem to be going.

“The total count held steady in 2025, but the makeup of the population continued to shift substantially,” says Louis Abramson, the study’s lead author and an adjunct researcher at RAND. More people, he notes, are now sleeping completely unsheltered, more spread out, and with fewer ties to the services that drove the previous year’s gains.

Why would emptying tents leave more people with nothing? The survey added a pointed question in 2025: had you lost your dwelling in the past year? Among rough sleepers, almost half said yes. And of those, 46 per cent said their shelter had been towed or confiscated by government officials or service providers. The implication is uncomfortable but hard to dodge. A correlation the researchers had flagged before, tents falling as rough sleeping rises, now looks less like coincidence and more like cause.

A Population That No Longer Fits the Plan

Los Angeles built its flagship response, Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe programme, around tents. The strategy works by offering interim housing to people in encampments and then clearing the site. When tents dominated the streets, it had plenty of targets, and it delivered the only durable declines the study ever recorded, near-total clearances in Venice in 2023 and Hollywood in 2024.

But you can only resolve an encampment if there is an encampment to resolve. By the end of the study, tent dwelling in Hollywood had fallen to the least common way of living rough, behind both vehicles and bare-pavement sleeping. Venice told a similar story, with vans and cars now the dominant mode. Some 87 per cent of the tents left in the entire study area were crammed into Skid Row, up from 60 per cent four years earlier.

This is the bind. Housing every remaining tent dweller in Hollywood and Venice, all 150 or so of them, would shift the combined unsheltered population there by maybe 10 per cent, leaving more than 1,200 people who need something else entirely. The tool that produced the headline-grabbing wins has, in two of three neighbourhoods, almost nothing left to grip.

Harder to Find, Harder to Help

The people now filling the streets are, by the study’s measures, in worse shape. Pooling four years of survey responses, the team found that rough sleepers scored worse than tent dwellers on 14 of 20 indicators spanning physical health, mental health, substance use, length of homelessness and contact with the justice system; against vehicle dwellers, they fared worse on 16 of 20. “The continued increase in rough sleeping from 2024 to 2025 is concerning because our data show that this population can be harder to engage and often has greater clinical needs,” says Sarah Hunter, a co-author and senior behavioural scientist at RAND. The strategies built for tents, she adds, may simply no longer fit.

There is a tactical problem too. A person in a known encampment is, in a grim sense, easy to locate; an outreach worker can come back tomorrow. Someone sleeping rough drifts, and may carry no phone and no identity documents, of which fewer than half the surveyed population had either. Across all three neighbourhoods formal employment sat between 3 and 9 per cent and median monthly incomes ran from roughly $200 to $378. As the population scatters, the work of reaching it gets slower and less certain.

Skid Row remains the exception, and the puzzle. It is the only area where tents are still common, the only one with a continuously growing population, and the only place where losing your dwelling was strongly linked to getting a housing offer; residents there who lost shelter were nearly five times more likely to be offered something. That sounds encouraging until you read it the other way: the offers appear to be reactive, triggered by enforcement rather than reaching people first. And since everyone surveyed was, by definition, still on the street, whatever was offered had not kept them housed. An LA Times analysis cited in the report found roughly 40 per cent of Inside Safe participants back outside by December 2025.

What the four years really document is a population remaking itself beneath a flat headline number. “After four years of conducting this count, the unsheltered population today looks different from the population these strategies were built to serve,” Abramson says. The next chapter, he suggests, is less about clearing what can be seen than about rethinking how to engage people, bring them indoors, and hold onto them once they are there.

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