Delayed Homeless Count Blamed On Scheduling Difficulties Among Political Representatives

The Santa Monica Daily Press reports today that the results of the county-wide homeless count have not been released because of scheduling problems with county and city political representatives. Here's the PDF article.

The actual count was performed one year ago. Preliminary numbers were released last summer. Those numbers revealed that there are 91,000 homeless people in the County of Los Angeles. The count was performed by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

LAHSA spokesman is quoted in the article, “As we came close to Thanksgiving it became difficult to coordinate the release of the report between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, so we pushed it to the beginning of the year.”

The final results should publish numbers on a local city level.

The article goes on to quote a Santa Monica resident, “We understood this homeless count would be an unbiased analytical performance, and the fact it’s taken a year for these numbers to be released makes me question the results of the survey. We should get the raw numbers first, and the politicians should interpret them later.”