Rodger at 8763 Wonderland and ‘Brady Westwater’ at LAVoice.org are arguing over the oft-repeated stat that 10,000 people sleep on the streets of LA every night. This factoid just surfaced again in Steve Lopez’s pieces on Skid Row (“Roughly 10,000 people flop on skid row streets each night …”)

‘Westwater’ says

It is time we, the citizens of this city, do something about the LA Times’ inability to get even the most basic facts about our city correct.

I therefore challenge Steve Lopez to spend one night with me on Skid Row. … We will also personally count the number of people sleeping on the streets of Skid Row. … If we find anything near 10,000 people sleeping there, I will remove my blog www.lacowboy.blogspot.com from the web, issue a formal apology to the LA Times and never say another word about the LA Times, ever.

If we do not find anything near 10,000 people sleeping on the streets of Skid Row, Steve Lopez and the LA Times will issue a written apology, Steve Lopez will immediately return home to Philadelphia and he will never write another word about Los Angeles.

Rodger replied:

…the numbers are feasible. According to the Institute For The Study of Homelessness and Poverty at the Weingart Center, approximately 80,000 people are homeless each night in Los Angeles County. You know that if there were 80,000 homeless in shelters every night we would all know about it because the charitable organizations running the shelters would be screaming and pleading for financial aid.

The alternative is that the 80,000 figure is wrong. In a series of posts this summer we laid out our reasons for suspecting that the 80,000 is a significant overcount. Those posts are

June 16: LA Times: County Homeless Population Tops Two Kazillion, No Further Reporting Required
June 27: Time To Pay For The Questionable L.A. County Homeless Count
July 25: Did the L.A. Homeless Authority Overcount The Homeless? Another Motive Is Revealed …

Our reasons were

• The definition of ‘homeless’ includes working poor living in motels. They may be ‘homeless’ but they are not the people Lopez writes about.

• the 80,000 figure means that one out of every 100 LA County residents is homeless. That is way out of line with comparable counts such as San Diego (one in 305).

• A major, unexplained jump since the last count (chronically homeless reportedly increased from 7,500 to 35,000). Using San Diego as a check, we’d expect to find about 13,500.

• Why would the count be so high? Look at its provenance: the homeless census is from the LA Homeless Services Authority, whose funding is driven by … the # of homeless they count. Indeed, several weeks after the count was publicized, LA City vowed to increase LAHSA funding by $25m and county supervisors were making noises about following suit.

• LA City controller Laura Chick revealed in July that the LAHSA had a serious cash flow problem, which would only increase the pressure to boost the numbers.

Ignoring the problems with the 80,000 figure, Lopez’s 10,000 figure is surely too high.

First, let’s get the countywide and Skid Row counts straightened out. Even accepting the 80,000 countywide homeless, about 10% are estimated to be “chronically homeless” — 8,000 across the entire county. Let’s say that 25% — a huge concentration — are on Skid Row. That’s 2,000 — far more believable than the 10,000 figure so blithely vetted by the LA Times.

Indeed, the Executive Director of the LAHSA said in testimony to the US House of Representatives in 2004 that “approximately 10,000 homeless and at-risk people live in this 40 square block area.” We can’t find what percent are estimated to be at-risk versus homeless (50%? 75%?), but whatever the answer, it is something less than 10,000 — likely a lot less.

Our object isn’t to deny that a homeless problem exists, but to show that it is misunderstood, misreported, and likely exaggerated by parties with agendas to push.

The region’s largest paper — the one player that is not supposed to have an agenda — failed to question the most basic fact in Lopez’s story — the size of the problem. Repeating this in a front page story is how ‘facts’ like “10,000 on the street on Skid Row” or “80,000 homeless countywide” get stuck into the public discourse. That may dramatize a major front page series — but at what cost to the LAT’s credibility?

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Update: see Don Garza’s comment below for excellent detail. Martini Republic also has their doubts about the 10,000 figure.

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LA Times opinion columnists seem to have a low standard for the use of facts in their columns. Michael Hiltzik wrote on 9/12 of the “detention of nameless thousands of supposed terrorists at Guantanamo Bay …” The problem? Only 750 total have ever been detained there — 505 as of 8/31 plus 245 released. This figure is not disputed by human rights groups.

Technorati Tags: homeless, LA Times, LAT, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Times, steve lopez

This entry was posted on Monday, October 17th, 2005 at 12:44 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Los Angeles Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.