A recently approved Los Angeles County sales tax increase played a key role in getting nearly 7,500 people who were homeless permanently housed over the last year, county officials said Friday.
The last fiscal year that began July 1, 2017, was the first year that Measure H revenue was used to pay for programs serving people who are homeless. Those funds went toward permanently housing 7,448 people and temporarily housing roughly 13,500 people, according to the county Homeless Initiative’s latest quarterly report.
The report did not give a comparison to previous years, but officials said services that increased over the past year have yielded results, with County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl calling it a “great start.”
“When voters approved Measure H, they trusted us to deliver tangible results,” she said. “These first-year numbers are very encouraging.”
Measure H raised the sales tax by a quarter cent for 10 years. It has a five-year goal of permanently housing 45,000 people, and preventing another 30,000 from becoming homeless.
Homeless Initiative director Phil Ansell said the numbers represent “meaningful progress” toward those goals.
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The Measure H sales tax hike, approved in March 2017, did not kick in until last October, several months into this past fiscal year. County officials do not have final figures Friday on how much revenue came in, but the projection was that $266 million would come in.
The tax has been projected to raise about $355 million per year. County officials recently estimated that $402 million in revenue, part of it left over from the previous year, was budgeted in the second fiscal year, which started last month.
The quarterly progress update is the tenth one released since the county adopted 51 strategies to tackle homelessness back in 2016.
The latest 2018 count found that more than 52,000 people throughout Los Angeles are homeless on any given night. While that figure is still significantly higher than roughly 39,000 people counted as homeless in 2013, this year’s count showed a 4 percent decrease in the countywide homeless population from last year.
Updated to say that part of this year’s $402 million in revenues comes from the previous year.
