> The latest official homeless count found 44,000 people living in county streets in a three-day period in January, a 12% increase in two years
This means that the number of homeless is up from 39,285 (44,000/1.12) to 44,000 in 2 years. That's an average increase of about 196 per month. So out of the 13,000 falling homeless each month, another 12,804 pull themselves out of it. That's a much more sensible number.
I absolutely think this is a problem that needs attention, but it's not at "the number of homeless is increasing by 13k each month" levels.
That does only take the possibility of "pulling themselves out of it" into regard as possibility to get out of the statistics. I can think of several other ways to get out of the statistics: E.g. Dying, moving into an other area ...
I accept, that the numbers are not complete and somehow misleading, but simple conclusions are too!
That would still mean that a single country, albeit the largest one turns 1.56% of it's population into homeless each year.
Looking at statistics for California as a whole there's no room to account for those homeless people so it doesn't look like they are being dumped beyond the county lines.
So either they all died which would greatly skew the population statistics in the US as a whole, moved out of California (which doesn't seem to be the case since homelessness in adjutant states didn't sky rocket) or the truth is more closer to what was stated than to yours.
(I would concede that perhaps that they might be in Mexico if you really want to explore this further)
Also 9 million residents received "public assistance"? Even if it's over 8 years it's still a huge number considering that the LA county has a population of about 10M, so unless going to school, voting, going to a hospital or being borne counts as "public assistance" I would really like to see exactly how they got to that number since the immigration statistics for that country cannot account for a transfer of so many residents to have 9M requiring actual "public assistance" over any reasonable period of time yet alone 8 years...
It's not like the entire 9 million residents were on public assistance for the entire 8 years. People come and go, most public assistance programs are time-limited.
Yes I've addressed that but still 9M people out of 10M over 8 years is a huge part of the population even when accounting for natural population changes and migration patterns.
With ballpark numbers on migration[1] and natural population growth it would mean that approximately 70% of the current LA county population today would've used "public assistance" given the 9M figure.
This is why the definition of "public assistance" is very important since all the statistics and the numbers in that article don't pass a simple smell test.
This means that the number of homeless is up from 39,285 (44,000/1.12) to 44,000 in 2 years. That's an average increase of about 196 per month. So out of the 13,000 falling homeless each month, another 12,804 pull themselves out of it. That's a much more sensible number.
I absolutely think this is a problem that needs attention, but it's not at "the number of homeless is increasing by 13k each month" levels.