The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority has released a statement calling for the word “homeless” to be done away with, claiming the word is “othering” and “dehumanizing.” 

The authority seeks to replace the word with more politically correct terms, such as “people who live outside,” “people who are unhoused,” and “people experiencing homelessness,” to “emphasize personhood over housing status.” 

https://twitter.com/LAHomeless/status/1561825419879280640 

The move to drop the word “homeless” was mocked online, with one user writing, “Exploding homeless population but it’s ok because we now call them 'people living outside'.” 

Attempts to alter language do little to fix the root cause of homelessness, as the population of homeless people, which often comes hand in hand with crime, mental illness, and drug dependence continues to skyrocket across the country. 

According to numbers from the L.A. Homeless Service Authority gathered in 2020, prior to the pandemic, the homeless population increased by 12.7% over the previous year, while the city of Los Angeles' homeless population jumped by 14.2%, as reported by Fox 11. 

Figures from January 2020 more than 580,000 people were homeless in the U.S. on a given night, with nearly half of them sleeping outside, in vehicles, or in abandoned buildings. 

In San Francisco, nearly 1% of the city’s population of 875,000 are homeless, with Mayor London Breed declaring a state of emergency in the Tenderloin district last December, bluntly describing the area as “nasty,” full of “feces and urine,” and at the reign of criminals.