A timeline of homelessness in Los Angeles

Los Angeles experienced its first wide-scale homelessness during two periods of national upheaval — the Great Depression and the housing crunch after World War II. In both cases, the crises abated. In the 1970s, though, economic events and public policy decisions conspired to drive people onto the streets again — and, ever since, Los Angeles has suffered chronic homelessness, with more unsheltered people than any other city in the United States.

Going back to the 1800s, the city keeps “tramps,” “hobos,” “vagrants” and “winos” off the streets by locking them up in jail or sending them to work at the county “poor farm.” In 1896, the city builds a new jail with double the capacity of the old one. Read about how policing has contributed to homelessness.

The Los Angeles County Farm, founded in 1880s, was a “poor farm” and medical facility.

(Los Angeles Times)

Peter Davis, right, who weighed 524 pounds as a youth, was apprehended on a vagrancy charge in November 1935 and taken to Lincoln Heights jail. His cellmate was a man who weighed 105 pounds.

(Los Angeles Times)

The population of Los Angeles quintuples in two decades. In the first months of 1921, more than 25,000 building permits are issued.

Assembly line workers put the first chassis on line at the Ford plant in Long Beach on April 21, 1930.

(Los Angeles Times)

The area on the eastern side of downtown Los Angeles whose cheap residential hotels, bars, liquor stores and missions made it a magnet for transients becomes widely known as Skid Row.

Men enjoy Thanksgiving dinner at the Midnight Mission in Los Angeles on Nov. 28, 1935.

(Los Angeles Times)

A homeless census in 48 of California’s 58 counties finds 101,174 homeless people in a state with a population of 5.7 million. (In 2022, the state had 171,521 homeless people — far more than in 1933, but not per capita, when you consider that the overall population now is about seven times larger.)

Homeless men and women sit on beds outdoors in the 1940s. Police officers are shown in the background.

(Los Angeles Times)

Men and one woman wait to register with the Los Angeles County Bureau of Employment Stabilization, which was hiring day laborers for construction projects around the county in 1933.

(Los Angeles Times)

It is estimated that 162,000 families in Los Angeles, including 50,000 veterans, are living in tents, garages, vehicles and other substandard accommodations, according to a 2021 report by UCLA’s Luskin Center for History and Policy. Read about how housing policies exacerbated homelessness in Los Angeles:

A woman prepares a meal on an open cookstove while a child plays and others struggle uphill with water in April 1948. The homeless family of seven had been ordered to leave the hillside, where they established a tent and hoped to build a home.

(Los Angeles Times)

More than a half-million dwelling units are built from 1940 to 1950 in the L.A. metro area, most of them after the war. More than 850,000 more are built during the 1950s. The construction boom, fueled by the GI Bill, quickly ends the epidemic in homelessness.

The interchange where the Santa Monica Freeway is being built across the path of the San Diego Freeway begins to take shape in December 1963.

(Los Angeles Times)

Authorities had pushed out most of the 1,800 families who lived in the Mexican American neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine to build a public housing project called Elysian Park Heights to house 17,000 people. But at the height of anti-communist hysteria, real estate interests, seeing their profits threatened by public housing, launch a successful campaign against it, financing opposition groups that call it “socialist housing.” The project is scratched, and Mayor Norris Poulson promises that no new ones will be approved.

A bulldozer razes the Arechiga family home in Chavez Ravine on May 8, 1959. Homes were removed to make way for Dodger Stadium.

(Los Angeles Times)

After having their homes destroyed by bulldozers on May 13, 1959, Chavez Ravine residents lived in a trailer.

(Los Angeles Times)

Some 15,000 single-room occupancy units are demolished in Skid Row and 7,000 low-income Victorian homes are razed on Bunker Hill as civic leaders move to modernize downtown.

Bunker Hill’s Angels Flight railway is exposed from the south as buildings are razed on Nov. 19, 1962.

(Art Rogers / Los Angeles Times)

The act decrees, among other things, that authorities can take people into custody only for 72-hour psychiatric holds, ending long-term commitments in the state’s 10 psychiatric hospitals. But with few community clinics for patients to seek treatment, many end up on the street. Read more.

A mental patient at Camarillo State Hospital on Feb. 20, 1940.

(Los Angeles Times)

The average price of a house in Los Angeles hits $100,000, four times what it was in 1970 (about $380,000 in today’s dollars, or less than 40% of what the average home costs now).

New single-family houses march toward the mountains off Pigeon Pass Road in the northern section of Moreno Valley on Aug. 23, 1987.

(Robert Gabriel / Los Angeles Times)

The county estimates that there are 30,000 homeless people on the streets, including 10,000 in Skid Row. By 1984, the Department of Housing and Urban Development finds that L.A.’s homeless numbers surpass New York’s. Read how cuts in social services contributed to the homeless crisis:

Citizens Action League members carry signs and a mock coffin on a street in Pacific Palisades on June 28, 1981.

(Rick Meyer / Los Angeles Times)

As crack cocaine tears through neighborhoods, legislators respond by passing shockingly stiff mandatory prison terms for the drug, even as more affluent cocaine users face far lighter sentences on the rare occasions when they are arrested. Crack users and other felons leave prison for Skid Row with criminal records that rob them of the ability to make a living, qualify for welfare or subsidized housing, contributing to the area’s sudden transformation into a strongly Black enclave.

Three homeless men live under the 7th Street Bridge on Oct. 11, 1992.

(Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

A person smokes crack on San Julian Street in Los Angeles in October 2005.

(Los Angeles Times)

A man tries to keep warm by starting a paper fire on a street in downtown Los Angeles in 1996.

(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

A homeless woman is arrested by a police officer for sleeping on a sidewalk during an early morning sweep of Towne Avenue in Skid Row in 2003.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rules in April 2006 that in the absence of sufficient shelter beds, arrests for resting or sleeping on the sidewalks constitute “cruel and unusual punishment.” Almost immediately, tents mushroom on the streets of L.A.

Eric Monte, right, sleeps as the lights come on at 5 a.m. at the Salvation Army’s homeless shelter in Bell.

(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

The 9th Circuit’s Lavan vs. City of Los Angeles ruling bars property owners from calling in garbage trucks to dispose of people’s belongings in Skid Row.

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City workers bulldoze an encampment to remove temporary housing in the alley behind Union Rescue Mission where 135 homeless people had been living. in downtown Los Angeles on September 12, 1991.  (Thomas Kelsey/Los Angeles Times)

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Bulldozer plows through makeshift shelters during clearing of park at 6th and Gladys in Los Angeles, Calif., January 7, 1987.  (Ken Lubas/Los Angeles Times)

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A Cal-trans workers bulldozes a homeless camp site just off the Hollywood freeway at the Glendale Blvd. Exit, where bushes were removed to prevent additional squatters.  (Carol Cheetham/Los Angeles Times)

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LOS ANGELES, CA - NOVEMBER 01: Members of the clean-up crew dismantled tents located on the Veterans Row homeless encampment along San Vicente Blvd just outside the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs campus on Monday morning. A variety of organizations with the support of LA County Sheriff officers helped homeless veterans pack up to leave their encampment and move onto the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs campus located behind a fence of their San Vicente Blvd camp on Monday morning. The encampment, adjacent to the historic VA campus has become a focal point for homelessness in the city, with mayoral candidates making visits over the last year. Veteran Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough, who visited the encampment in October, said that the roughly 40 veterans from Veterans Row would be housed by November. VA campus San Vicente Blvd on Monday, Nov. 1, 2021 in Los Angeles, CA. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times).  (Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)

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Highland Park, CA - February 24: Cesar Augusto and his girlfriend watch as Los Angeles Recreation and Parks employees work to remove a small community of people who have setup shacks and other shelters along the lip of the concrete Arroyo Seco wash on Monday, Feb. 24, 2025 in Highland Park, CA. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)  (Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)

Overdose deaths among people experiencing homelessness in L.A. County increase 515% from 2016 to 2022, as fentanyl flooded the illegal drug market. By 2023, fentanyl would be detected in 70% of such deaths.

A man, right, feels the effects after smoking fentanyl as two other men smoke it themselves in the Metro subway station at MacArthur Park in 2023.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

The average single-family home hits $563,721 in April 2015. Ten years later, it is $1,060,048, according to Zillow.

Orchard Hills in Irvine on Feb. 15, 2025.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that cities cannot enforce anti-camping ordinances if there are not enough shelter beds available to the homeless, in effect becoming the law in most of the West when the U.S. Supreme Court declines to take the case in 2019.

After a backlash against encampments in many Western cities, the Supreme Court rules in City of Grants Pass vs. Johnson that local governments’ use of civil and criminal penalties for illegally camping on public land does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment of homeless people.

A homeless woman stands outside her tent in an encampment along Figueroa Street underneath the 10 Freeway overpass in downtown L.A. on July 6, 2023.

(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

Employees with Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe program and the Los Angeles Sanitation Bureau clean up homeless encampments along Hollywood Boulevard and Gower Street in Hollywood on Aug. 15, 2024.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)