SACRAMENTO, Calif. (CN) — California's efforts to combat homelessness haven’t been properly tracked and evaluated, the California state auditor said in a Tuesday report, adding that he lacks data for a complete review.
According to auditor Grant Parks, over 180,000 people in California were homeless last year — a 53% increase over the previous 10 years. Together, nine state agencies have spent billions of dollars over five years to run some 30 programs addressing homelessness.
The Interagency Council on Homelessness develops, coordinates and evaluates those agencies. The auditor found that the council hasn’t consistently tracked and evaluated the efforts to end homelessness.
Parks' review of the council's programs stemmed from a request by the Joint Legislative Audit Committee. A separate report examined San Jose and San Diego’s homelessness spending.
The auditor found in February 2021 that faulty coordination in California’s homelessness programs hurt its efforts, prompting the Legislature to require the council to evaluate and report about its state-funded programs. It did that in a 2023 report, which covered fiscal years 2018 through 2021.
However, Parks wrote, the council "has not continued to track and report on this information since that time.”
“Further, it has not aligned its action plan for addressing homelessness with its statutory goals, nor has it ensured that it collects accurate, complete, and comparable financial and outcome information from homelessness programs,” Parks wrote.
Nor has the council made plans to make a similar assessment, the auditor wrote. It hasn’t created a method for getting the necessary information and hasn’t ensured any information in the state’s data system is accurate. That means, unless the council corrects these issues, California will continue to lack proper data it can tap to make fully informed policy decisions on homelessness.
As part of its review, the state auditor examined five state-funded programs. Two of them are likely cost-effective, the auditor found, but no opinion was given on the remaining three, as the state lacked necessary data.
The two programs the auditor found as likely cost-effective are Homekey and the CalWORKs housing support program.
Both programs have similar aims. Homekey refurbishes buildings, turning them into housing for the unhoused. The cost is hundreds of thousands of dollars less than the price of constructing new buildings.
The average cost of a housing unit in Homekey’s first round of funding was $144,000. The average cost of building new, affordable housing in 2019 was between $380,000 to $570,000.
CalWORKs is a program that provides financial aid and services to qualified families. Its housing support program, which helps those near or experiencing homelessness, has cost California less than it would have if the families had become or stayed unhoused.
The average annual cost to house a family in the program was $12,000 to $22,000. That’s compared to some $30,000 to $50,000 estimated to house one homeless person.
“However, we were unable to fully assess the other three programs we reviewed — the state rental assistance program, the encampment resolution funding program, and the homeless housing, assistance and prevention grant program — because the state has not collected sufficient data on the programs’ outcomes,” Parks wrote. “In the absence of this information, the state cannot determine whether these programs represent the best use of its funds.”
Together, those three programs received over $9.4 billion since 2020.
The auditor recommends that the Legislature change state law and impose mandatory reporting for the council, having it provide the costs and outcomes of homelessness programs. Lawmakers also should make the council create guidance dictating uniformity of data and how it should be presented.
According to the auditor, the council agreed with those recommendations and pointed to action it intends to take to follow them.
A representative for the council couldn’t be reached for comment.
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