A new homelessness strategy is sweeping California

Maybe the way out of California’s homelessness crisis is to prevent it in the first place,  rather than focusing only on people who have already lost their housing. 

That’s the thinking behind a program in Santa Clara County — and others like it around the state — that has gained traction and will soon test its strategy beyond California. 

These prevention programs have found that with a payment of several thousand dollars, aid organizations can head off someone’s homelessness. That both prevents the trauma that comes with losing a home, and saves the state or local government the potentially tens of thousands of dollars it takes to help someone after they become homeless. 

The Santa Clara County program by nonprofit Destination: Home recently inspired the launch of 10 more pilot projects throughout the country, marking the first large-scale, multi-state test of this strategy. If it works in those test counties, advocates will push for a nationwide program. 

Meanwhile, a bill introduced this year in California would require the state to come up with a broad homelessness prevention strategy. 

“The single most obvious answer to homelessness is to not let it happen in the first place,” said Jennifer Loving, CEO of Destination: Home.

Focusing on prevention marks a significant shift in thinking. Traditionally, cities, counties and the state reserve their resources for helping the people in most dire need — those currently living on the street — get back on their feet. The problem with that strategy is that for every one person they move into housing, multiple other people fall into homelessness. That leaves cities spinning their wheels without meaningfully lessening the problem. 

But prevention has its own challenges: The aid is most effective when it goes to people imminently at risk of losing their housing, and determining exactly who that is can be tricky. Several Bay Area communities use a questionnaire to evaluate how likely someone is to wind up homeless unless they get help. A Los Angeles County program uses artificial intelligence. 

“The risk is you give out a lot of precious resources to people who otherwise would be able to prevent homelessness on their own, and that takes away from things like emergency shelters or transitional shelters or permanent supportive housing,” said Jim Sullivan, director of the University of Notre Dame’s Lab for Economic Opportunities. His team evaluated Santa Clara County’s prevention program and found that people who received prevention funds were 78% less likely to become homeless than people in similar situations who got no funds. 

Even among the people who didn’t get prevention funds, the overall rate of homelessness in these studies tends to be small (in Santa Clara County, 4.1% of people who didn’t get help became homeless, compared to 0.9% who did get help). That’s because, despite the very visible humanitarian crisis on the streets of California, statistically speaking, homelessness is still extremely rare, said Janey Rountree, executive director of the California Policy Lab at UCLA, which helped develop a similar program in Los Angeles County. The vast majority of people are able to keep a roof over their head by getting help from family or friends.