While the San Gabriel Valley saw an overall 24% increase in homelessness in 2019, some cities and communities in the region saw dramatic increases while others saw declines.
The 2019 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, conducted Jan. 22-24, found homelessness had increased 12% across Los Angeles County, excluding Pasadena and Long Beach, which conduct their own independent counts.
In the San Gabriel Valley, last year’s count count showed 3,605 people homeless in the area, while this year’s found 4,479.
Azusa saw a 123% increase in its homeless population, from 144 in 2018 to 321 in 2019. The 177-person increase, by number, was the largest of all San Gabriel Valley cities.
“Homelessness continues to be a big challenge for us, and I’m sure it’s the same countywide — a challenge that is not going to be solved overnight and will certainly require a tremendous amount of resources,” Azusa City Manager Sergio Gonzalez said in an email.
While Azusa has a plan in place to help establish outreach protocols, more resources will soon become available as a housing navigator and part-time homeless services coordinator take up residency in the city, Gonzalez said.
After Azusa, City of Industry saw the second largest increase — from 68 to 173, representing a 154% increase. Irwindale and Covina saw similar increases — 89 and 83 people, respectively — while unincorporated Avocado Heights saw an increase of 74 people.
Meanwhile, some cities that saw significant increases in their homeless populations in previous years, such as El Monte and West Covina, counted fewer homeless individuals in 2019. El Monte’s homeless population decreased by 3.5%, and West Covina’s decreased by 44%.
“We know we have made progress, but our work is not done until the number of homeless in our community is reduced to zero,” West Covina Mayor Lloyd Johnson said in a statement. “We will continue to advocate for the city’s share of Measure H funding, and continue to work collaboratively with our neighboring cities and organizations to balance the needs of our homeless neighbors and public safety for West Covina.”
Measure H, passed by voters in 2017, raised the sales tax in Los Angeles County by .25% to raise money to address homelessness.
One question on the minds of residents and experts alike is whether a one-night-per-year count yields accurate numbers applicable beyond that one moment in time — and whether important policy and funding decisions should be made based on those numbers.
The answer to both questions is no, said Jacob Maguire, co-director of Community Solutions’ Built for Zero effort to eliminate homelessness in cities across the country by using real-time data to optimize housing resources and tracking progress against monthly goals.
In both cases, data must be collected much more often — monthly if not weekly — for it to be reliable and useful for determining how best to deploy resources and craft solutions, Maguire said.
“You’re never going to solve a dynamic problem with static data,” Maguire said. “I don’t know why we’ve settled for this giant illusion that gathering data once a year on homelessness is the best we can do.
“To anyone who thinks they can solve the problem that way, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.”
What releasing data once a year does accomplish, Maguire said, is create a culture of blame.
“We created a culture where the only purpose of this data is to blame people when the numbers go up and celebrate them when they go down, even if they didn’t do anything to make it go down.”
While some of the fluctuations can be attributed to direct action taken — like West Covina hiring a part-time case worker — others can be attributed to the movement of homeless people across the region, said Anne Miskey, CEO of Union Station Homeless Services, the lead homeless services provider in the San Gabriel Valley.
“People tend to move around a little bit within the area. They’re not coming from outside the area, which is always the myth that’s out there,” Miskey said. “Some areas are seeing decreases, most are seeing increases, but overall what we’re seeing is more people becoming homeless because of increasing rents, an overall lack of housing and static incomes.”
Maguire’s concern is that in a few years, if the Measure H funding hasn’t solved homelessness in the county, people will deem the problem unsolvable and divest all funding from efforts to solve it.
“People will resign themselves to the intractability of the problem when the real issue was that they didn’t take the time to make sure they understood the problem before taking action,” Maguire said. “Without a system that can guide you reliably on a regular basis, you’re just throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping it’ll stick, but nine times out of 10, it doesn’t stick.”