The number seems shocking. Even impossible. The total homeless in LA County from the January 2017 official count only came to 57,000. But the number is real and actually understates the total, as it does not include UCLA, USC, or the Claremont colleges.

The LA County Board of Supervisors approved the recommendations of the 50 member Measure H Revenue Planning Group for the first three years of income from the sales tax increase for the homeless, which passed in last March’s election. The quarter-cent sales tax increase is expected to generate $259 million in its first year and as much as $1 billion in the first three years. The money is to be divvied up between six basic strategies to contain homelessness, adopted by the county in February 2016.

Los Angeles has the least affordable housing in the United States. It is short some 500,000 units of housing for its population. Rising population, which pushes up land, materials, and labors costs, has made affordable housing in California a mostly unprofitable investment. Cities throughout the state have found themselves facing chronic and deepening housing shortages, with increasingly unaffordable rents. The response has been to look to government subsidies to try to fill the gap.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) announced the results of its January 2017 countywide homeless count May 31. Since January 2016 there were now 13,940 more homeless people in LA County and 5,725 in the city, increases of 23% and 20%. There are now 57,794 homeless in the county, of which 42,966 are unsheltered, living on the streets. For the city it is 34,189, with 25,237 unsheltered.

Median rents in Los Angeles increased 32% between 2000 and 2017, according to a May 2017 report by the Public Policy Institute of California. Over the same period, household income decreased by 3% when adjusted for inflation. The real estate website Trulia reports that in Spring 2017 the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles was $2,600. A UC Berkeley study by the Urban Analytics Lab found a slightly lower figure, at $2,499. In large parts of Los Angeles this is more than the total annual median household income. In the Adams-Normandie section of South Los Angeles, median household income is $29,000 a year, or $2,417 a month; in Watts it is $25,000, or $2,083 a month.