Volunteer registration is now open for the 2025 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count to be held in January by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

The 2025 Homeless Count will take place on the evenings of Jan. 21-23. Volunteers can register at the new Homeless Count website, count.lahsa.org.

“Last year’s Homeless Count marked the first decrease in street homelessness that Los Angeles has seen in years,” said Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority CEO Dr. Va Lecia Adams Kellum. “As we gear up for this year’s count, community support is crucial. We need thousands of volunteers to join us in counting our unhoused neighbors so we can better understand where they are, the services they need most, and what it will take to bring them home.”

Conducted annually, the Homeless Count typically involves thousands of volunteers spread across the 4,000 square miles of Los Angeles County in late January to conduct the Unsheltered Count.

Traveling in small groups, volunteers tally the number of unsheltered individuals, tents, vehicles and makeshift shelters they see in their assigned census tracts.

The Unsheltered Count will begin on Tuesday, Jan. 21, in the San Fernando Valley/Santa Clarita Valley and metro Los Angeles. Volunteers in the San Gabriel Valley and East Los Angeles will count on Wednesday, Jan. 22.

Finally, the Count will wrap up Thursday, Jan. 23, in the Antelope Valley, West and South Los Angeles and the South Bay/Harbor region.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires a biennial point-in-time count of people experiencing homelessness. In 2016, LAHSA started conducting the Homeless Count annually to provide consistent data and improved analysis of people experiencing homelessness. Government agencies, including LAHSA, use the data collected during the Homeless Count as one of the reference points when developing strategies to end homelessness and determining where funding and resources will have the most impact.

The Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count consists of three elements: the Unsheltered Count (which includes the Youth Count), the Sheltered Count and the Demographic Survey.

LAHSA depends on thousands of volunteers to conduct the Unsheltered Count throughout the Los Angeles Continuum of Care, which includes all of L.A. County except Pasadena, Glendale and Long Beach.

In 2024, the Homeless Count found drops in homelessness at both the county and city levels. Los Angeles County’s Point-in-Time estimate declined by 0.27% to 75,312, while the city of Los Angeles’ Point-in-Time estimate declined by 2.2% to 45,252. Most notably, the estimate for unsheltered homelessness in the City of Los Angeles declined by 10.4%, while Los Angeles County saw a 5.1% decrease.

The 2024 Homeless Count data suggests that unprecedented coordination among LAHSA and all levels of government on the homelessness crisis is reducing unsheltered homelessness. The 2024 Shelter Count found that the number of people in interim housing increased 12.7% in the county and 17.7% in the city.

The annual Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count also includes the Youth Count and the Housing Inventory Count. LAHSA will conduct the Youth Count from Jan. 22=31 and the Housing Inventory Count on Jan. 22.

For more imformation visit www.lahsa.org/homeless-count/.