Massive crowd shows up for LAHSA housing event

New at 5, take a look at a clear display of the homeless crisis in Los Angeles. Misinformation on social media sent hundreds of people in need to a housing event in the Westlake neighborhood. Fox 11's Nick Garcia breaks it down. We're at the Mayfair Hotel off of 7th and Whitmer and you can see the crowd has dispersed quite a bit but they remain here trying to get inside. LAPD also on scene here just for crowd control just to maintain that and they've also closed some lanes of 7th here for much of the afternoon. Here's what happened though. A lot of confusion. Take a look at how large the crowd was earlier today. Sky Fox overhead. Now LA SA says this event was designed to connect unhoused residents already enrolled in the city's housing now. There was some misinformation, inaccurate information circulated on social media that led to a lot more people showing up here. At least one Facebook post advertising this as an opportunity for more. than just the folks enrolled in that program, and that's why we saw hundreds here. LA SA says they were expecting 300 people here, and they know that hundreds more than that ultimately showed up. Very large crowd, they worked on getting people who were not enrolled in the program in touch with some resources. We spoke with the program director from LA SA, take a listen to what she had to say. Today, this is originally intended to be a pretty closed group for a specific program called the City Alliance TLS program. I think the turnout really shows that we have thousands and thousands of people in L.A. that are really in need of housing and will show up when it's available. Certainly working much later than they originally planned, and ultimately they were only able to allow the people into the hotel who were already part. And they're hoping they'll be able to connect many more. I know that they brought at least one bus here to try connecting people with other resources throughout the city. In the Westlake District, I'm Nick Garcia, Fox 11 News.