In January and February, 24 people from 15 organizations, calling themselves the Los Angeles Central Providers Collaborative, conducted an audit of toilets available to the homeless in Downtown’s 50-block Skid Row. Their shocking findings became headline news when they released their 64-page report, “No Place to Go,” in late June. For a nighttime unsheltered population they listed at 1,777, they found only 9 working public toilets, all of them at a single location: the Midnight Mission shelter, 601 S. San Pedro Street. This is eight blocks from the northeast and northwest corners of Skid Row and 9 blocks from the southeast border. A long walk at night. The number of estimated users was taken from the 2016 homeless count, and is today more than 2,000.

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.