Nardello & Co., the court-appointed monitor of the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights settlement, filed its first report in federal court on Wednesday, summarizing site visits to dozens of shelters and permanent housing projects. One 225-unit building had 83 vacancies with move-ins paused for remediation after a guest tried to steal copper wire from the water system, and a county master-leased project had 102 occupants in 169 beds, which its manager attributed to water damage, elevator outages and copper theft. The report said agencies rely on "numerous databases, self-reported information, manual data transfers, and decentralized reporting practices," and that staff at more than half the sites visited declined to answer questions or allow access.
Judge Carter named Nardello & Co. in May 2026 to monitor the 2022 settlement, which requires the city to create thousands of shelter and housing beds; he denied a receivership motion in 2025.
HUD's Office of Inspector General announced two audits projecting more than $2.7 billion in improper payments annually across HUD's two largest rental assistance programs. The OIG attributed $1.291 billion to the Multifamily Project-Based Rental Assistance program, citing incorrect rent calculations, missing eligibility documentation, and inadequate oversight by performance-based contract administrators, and $1.430 billion to the Public and Indian Housing Tenant-Based Rental Assistance program (Housing Choice Vouchers), citing inaccurate income calculations, outdated documentation, improper utility allowance determinations, and insufficient HUD monitoring of public housing agencies.
The OIG said both programs have gone nine consecutive years without HUD producing the improper payment estimates required under the Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019.
Multnomah County's Homeless Services Department said it will revise its by-name list so that about 3,500 fewer people are counted as currently homeless, lowering the May figure of 18,000 by nearly 20%. Deputy director Anna Plumb called it "a data clean-up" that does not mean those people were housed; the largest change shortens the inactivity window before someone drops off the list from 90–180 days to 60–90 days, on the advice of the consultant Community Solutions. The county said the new method will be applied retroactively to January 2024 and take effect in the next month or so.
The by-name list launched in April 2025; program manager Lori Kelley said the shorter inactivity window accounts for most of the reduction.
The 2026 homeless count recorded 671 RVs in the 400 square miles of unincorporated Antelope Valley desert, down from 1,432 the year before, a drop that accounted for three-fourths of a 21% countywide decrease in RVs. Pearblossom Town Council president Christopher Minsal, who led the local canvass teams, and council member Jose Centeno said the numbers are wrong and that RV arrivals have not slowed; tract-level tallies in Littlerock/Pearblossom swung from 4 to 349 to 253 over three years. LAHSA did not dispute the miscount assessment and defended its method for counting the area in a statement.
The L.A. City Council on August 26 called for a review of the 2026 point-in-time count, which showed a 1.2% countywide increase in homelessness.
The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously August 26 to request a review of LAHSA's 2026 point-in-time homeless count, citing accuracy concerns. The count showed homelessness in District 8 increased 128% from 2025 to 2026, and in one census tract covering the West Park Terrace neighborhood the number of unhoused people observed went from fewer than 20 in recent years to 277 in 2026.
The Los Angeles Times reported August 11 that an accounting error caused nearly half of the increase in the city's 2026 homeless count.
CalMatters compiled preliminary results from January 2026 point-in-time counts and reported that of the 28 counties or continuums of care releasing data, more than half showed declines — San Joaquin County down nearly a third from 2024, Alameda County down 13%, San Francisco down 4% — while Los Angeles County reported a 1% increase and Sacramento County a 13% increase. Officials credited state-funded shelter beds and housing, while advocates said stepped-up encampment enforcement scatters people and makes them harder to count. A RAND study of Skid Row, Hollywood, and Venice found unsheltered homelessness unchanged from December 2024 to January 2026, with tent-dwelling down 23% and rough sleeping up 20%.
HUD's official 2025 count was 181,934 homeless Californians, a nearly 3% drop from 2024; the official statewide 2026 compilation is months away.
An OPB/ProPublica investigation reported that Oregon has given affordable housing developers $1.4 billion while the cost of developing each apartment has nearly doubled to $540,000, and that a state public-records exemption keeps itemized project financial details secret. The reporting said dozens of projects are lined up for an additional $850 million in future state funding, and that California and Washington publish comparable financial records.
Researchers found California was spending $300 million a year in development fees on subsidized housing, enough to have financed another 1,250 apartments annually.
Washington Policy Center researcher Eric Zimmerman said the widely cited statistic that Seattle's Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program produced a 58% reduction in arrests misstates the original University of Washington evaluation, and called for an audit. LEAD founder Lisa Daugaard said the finding of "58% reduced odds of arrest compared to a robust control group" reflects a meaningful reduction in recidivism, and the University of Washington said it had used "likelihood" in place of "odds," said those instances have been corrected where found, and said it advised the LEAD team to correct its reporting.
LEAD launched in Seattle in 2011 and has been replicated in jurisdictions across the country.
The Times reported that Skid Row shelter beds at the Union Rescue Mission — counted in some years and omitted in others because the shelter does not use LAHSA's data system — accounted for most of a reported 614-person rise in Skid Row's sheltered population, inflating the city's 2026 count increase. The paper's calculation put the citywide increase at just under 1.9% rather than the reported 3.4%. Mayor Bass said LAHSA did not tell her office about the discrepancies before release; LAHSA said singling out one factor "can be inaccurate and misleading."
LAHSA reported the city's 2026 count as 45,194 people, a 3.4% increase, on July 23.