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The grim stats from around California have piled up in recent weeks:

In Alameda County, the number of homeless residents jumped 43 percent over the past two years. In Orange County, that number was 42 percent. Kern County volunteers surveying the region’s homeless population found a 50 percent increase over 2018. San Francisco notched a 17 percent increase since 2017.

And on Tuesday, Los Angeles officials released the results of their most recent count: Homelessness was up by 12 percent over last year in the county and up 16 percent in the City of Los Angeles.

That puts L.A. County’s homeless population at 58,936 and the city’s at 36,300.

And yet, communities around the state have been funneling more money into services for the homeless, like L.A.’s Measure H sales tax, which is adding about $355 million each year to the arsenal.

[Read about why some are rethinking homelessness in the Bay Area as a regional issue.]

So why are more people living in squalid conditions on the streets or in cars? Advocates for the homeless say it’s upsetting, but no surprise.

“Our housing crisis is our homeless crisis,” Elise Buik, president and chief executive of the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, told me. “And we’ve got to get people to understand that.”

She said that people struggling with mental illness or substance abuse issues and who are living in encampments are often the most visible, but it is a myth that people experiencing homelessness decline help or prefer to live outdoors — one that contributes to misconceptions about the effectiveness of often costly services.

Peter Lynn, executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, emphasized that the Measure H money has significantly increased the number of people the region’s service providers have been able to help.

According to the authority’s data, outreach workers engaged with 34,110 people over the year, which was triple the number before Measure H.

And almost 1,400 permanent supportive housing units built with money from Measure HHH, a $1.2 billion bond, are set to open in the 2019-20 fiscal year.

“I do feel like the first honest year to assess will be to freeze frame from now to next year,” Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles told me late last week.

Ultimately, though, he said housing affordability was the biggest factor driving homelessness.

An Angeleno would need to earn $47.52 an hour just to afford the median monthly rent, according to L.A.H.S.A. figures.

[Read more about why the state has a housing crisis.]

Although there’s broad acknowledgment — from Gov. Gavin Newsom on down — that part of the solution is millions more homes, legislative fixes that would spur housing construction have proven knotty, to say the least.

Senate Bill 50, which was effectively killed for the year, would have allowed for denser development in many areas, including some neighborhoods of single-family homes.

Mr. Garcetti said that bill was “definitely a bad stick for us.”

The bill would threaten neighborhood character, he said. And L.A., he noted, builds more than its proportional share of housing compared with the rest of the county.

Though Mr. Garcetti says he’s in favor of measures that would force other cities that aren’t allowing new construction to add to their housing supplies, he’s been focused on legislation that would slow skyrocketing rents.

“This is the No. 1 issue in every city in California,” he said.

Here’s what else we’re following

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• Representative Adam Schiff said the Russian government would probably try to influence the 2020 presidential election through faked videos. A convincing, controversial fake video, he said, would be “hugely disruptive and hugely influential.” [The New York Times]

• Judges, including Josephine L. Staton of District Court for the Central District of California, grilled both sides in a closely watched lawsuit in which young people sued over what they say is a constitutional right to be protected from climate change. [The New York Times]

• President Trump vowed to move forward with tariffs on Mexican imports next week. [The New York Times]

• San Francisco became the first major city in the country to shut down its juvenile hall. The move shifts away from incarcerating children. [The San Francisco Chronicle]

• California sued Purdue Pharma this week, accusing the company of helping to ignite the nation’s opioid crisis. That means almost every state is taking legal action against the OxyContin maker. [CNBC]

• Chevron’s Richmond refinery had 17 flaring incidents in the first five months of the year, almost double the total for all of 2018, which itself was the most in 12 years. Air quality experts say that’s not good. [KQED]

• YouTube’s artificial-intelligence-driven recommendation system is apparently pointing pedophiles to content featuring children. [The New York Times]

• And artificial intelligence is quietly determining whom to cast in big movies and how much money they’ll make. [The Verge]

Michelin’s California Guide catches heat

• California now has 90 Michelin-starred restaurants. But none of L.A.’s got a coveted third star. [The New York Times]

• That’s not sitting well with L.A. diners: Bill Addison, a Los Angeles Times food critic, “reviewed” the L.A. portion of the new California Michelin guide: “well-intentioned but condescending.” [The Los Angeles Times]

• And Hillary Dixler Canavan wrote for Eater that the new guide felt weighted in an old direction: toward “tasting menu restaurants run, predominantly, by male chefs.” [Eater]

And Finally …

When the Warriors and the Raptors square off tonight for Game 3 of the N.B.A. finals, Brandon Armstrong and Maxim Peranidze will be ready to spin it into Instagram comedy gold, my colleague Sopan Deb reported.

The pair post videos of themselves impersonating the tics of famous basketball players.

In one of them, Peranidze, a Los Angeles native, parodies the lengths to which Stephen Curry goes to get open off the ball. At one point, he runs out of the gym.

Warriors Coach Steve Kerr liked it — or, at least, he saw it and cracked on Twitter, “Oh yea, we run that play a lot. We call it ‘fist side.’”

California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: [email protected]. Were you forwarded this email? Sign up for California Today here.

Jill Cowan grew up in Orange County, went to school at U.C. Berkeley and has reported all over the state, including the Bay Area, Bakersfield and Los Angeles — but she always wants to see more. Follow along here or on Twitter, @jillcowan.

California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.

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