Number of older adults who are homeless surges in LA

At the age of 67, Andrea Colucci started her transition as a transgender woman. Her insurer wouldn't pay her surgeon's bills, so she put them on her credit cards.

Then the camper truck she planned to live in crashed. A hospital put her out on the sidewalk in a paper gown.

Now 70, Colucci lives in a white van with no license plates, a sagging tire and a broken window. Growing up in the staid San Gabriel Valley, "playing the role of a man" was tough, she said, but added that the stigma of homelessness is worse.

"The homeless, they've been beaten up, they've got nothing, no hope," she said one hot afternoon, sitting in the cluttered van's open doorway.

Colucci is part of a cohort of L.A.'s homeless