Homeless progress slips in California

While point-in-time counts are notoriously unrepresentative of America’s homeless problem, they’re pretty damning just the same.

According to its recently released annual homeless assessment, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development says California actually lost ground last year in its attempt to get people off the streets. The state witnessed a 4.5 percent uptick in its homeless population and, overall, accounts for 22 percent of the nation’s homeless citizens.

The California Homeless Youth Project spotlighted the young people caught up in this national shame in its own breakdown. 2013 represented the first year communities like Sacramento were required to identify 18-to-24-year-olds during their one-night counts. The data submitted tallied more than 61,500 such youth, with the biggest concentrations in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Jose.

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