7 Taken from CalMatters investigation for homeless shelters

Throughout California, temporary homeless shelters have become the basis of taxpayers funded efforts to get people out of the street.

Ours New investigation He found that shelters instead became housing purgatory. They are often a mess – dangerous, chaotic and ultimately ineffective in finding people, durable housing.

Shelters are usually beyond the limits of anyone but staff and residents. To find out what was happening inside, we received earlier unlawful data on state results, reviewed thousands of police calls and incident reports and interviewed over 80 residents and shelter staff.

Here are seven key findings from our investigation:

1. Local and civil servants rely large in the shelters.

Large, two -storey group shelters lined with beds have long been the answer to the default of homelessness in big cities. Now employees in all types of cities, suburbs and rural areas are engaged in emergency beds to help clear the streets of tents after the Supreme Court Grants pass a decision He gave the cities more power to forbid to sleep outside.

No government agency is tracking the total amount of money spent on homeless shelters, but public records show that state and local agencies have spent about $ 1 billion on 2018 shelters.

This more than doubled the number of emergency beds for shelters in California from about 27,000 to 61,000.

Once in a shelter, residents are assumed to be related to services and ultimately a permanent home. Many are struggling to enter. There are still three times more homeless people, as there are shelter beds in California.

2. The shelters are more deadly than prisons.

The annual percentages of the shelter’s death tripled between 2018 and the mid -2024. A total of 2,007 people were killed, according to data obtained from the California Council for Intervertebral An Interverterium. This is almost twice as much Deaths such as prisons in California are observed during the same period.

Catherine Moore moved to Anaheim shelter after cleaning in the prison area and found the two experiences ominously similar. She said in a continuing class action that she found drugs on the shelter floor, cleans bloody toilets, avoids cockroaches and was sexually harassed by staff.

“The shelter is a voluntary prison,” she said. “The only difference is that there are more standards and you have more rights as a person in prison. That’s awful, isn’t it? “

3. Inside shelters, chaos often breaks down.

Black mold. Bed bugs. Domestic violence. Sexual crimes.

We have analyzed thousands of reports on police talks and shelter incident reports. They catalog the flood of shelter problems.

For example, in Los Angeles, court records show that a leading non -profit purpose has hired a man convicted of attempted murder to work on security at a shelter, where he committed three sexual crimes in one day.

For five years of work in shelters in the San Diego area, Holly Helling has seen all this. Her clients have experienced everything from hate crimes to electric fires to moldy food, leaving her wondering why shelters are at least not inspected and appreciated as restaurants.

But when she had to escape violence in her own home, Herring decided to avoid shelters like those who work completely.

“I know it is more fascinated and more out of place for me to sleep in my car than in a shelter,” she said.

4. Less than 1 in 4 people who pass through the shelters move to a permanent home.

Contracts often call for non -profit shelter operators to find a home for between 30% and 70% of the people who come through their doors.

We have received and analyzed the state data on the effectiveness of the shelter and found that they are far behind in the country.

We also came across a complicating wrinkle; There is a difference in the shelter world in the shelter on how to calculate their main success.

Many shelters and the state measure it as follows: to the people who leave your program every year, how many do they find permanent housing? This excludes all people who still live in the temporary shelter. Using this mathematics, less than 1 in 4 people, about 22%, find a home.

Housing experts and some civil servants prefer to measure it in another way: how many people who enter through the shelter doors find a home? This method does not allow the shelters to exclude their current residents. It is said that this is a more accurate measurement, as the goal is to quickly remove people from the temporary shelter and the shelters are too often become actually housing.

If you use this equation, the picture is even more dark. Shelters find homes for only about 10% of their inhabitants – a figure that has declined in recent years.

No matter what mathematics you use, housing experts say that the state has reached a point of tip: continue to pour resources into shelters with dubious results or rethink the whole system.

5. The scandals struck the fast -growing shelter operators.

Oklland -based Bay Area public services Revenue raised by 1000% for a decade to $ 98 million in 2023. At the same time, it has encountered a long list of charges against employees in a shelter funded by taxpayers, including fraud and inappropriate customer relationships. La’s A special service for groups They brought $ 170 million in 2023, a nine -digit jump from 2017, while making complaints and court cases for violence and sexual disorders.

Larry Haines, CEO of Orange -based operator of the Mercy House shelter in the Orange County, said the problems exceed the budgets. Shelters are often used as a willingness for an “absolutely broken” healthcare system, he said, leaving many of the facilities essentially working with psychiatric wards on low low -paid budgets.

“I have to ask, kindly and with respect as I can,” Well, what the hell do you think it will happen? “Said Haines.

6. Local and state supervision fails.

While the state sends local authorities hundreds of millions of dollars for shelters, this is not small to guarantee accountability. Almost all California cities and counties have ignored a state law that requires them to document and address hazardous conditions of shelter, Found are calmS

Meanwhile, local agencies who directly pay and monitor the shelter performers often fail to track Regarding dangerous conditions, unused beds or missed housing goals, according to audits and complaints.

“Don’t work and never,” says Dennis Skrahne, a homelessness expert who lived undercover in shelter and have studied their evolution For several decades. “This is part of what makes such a bad experience – that you must be in these terrible survival facilities.”

7. Experts say there are several potential solutions.

Culhane is one of the increasing number of experts who advocate for government agencies to redirect money from short -term shelter and services to promising decisions at an early stage as direct rental aid.

And even the unwavering shelter critics agree that cities need some of the facilities as they play a decisive role for vulnerable people.

“These shelters are a rescue line,” says Chris Hering, Assistant Professor of UCLA Sociology, who spent more than 90 days in San Francisco shelters as part of his research. “There are many elderly people there who would not survive in a second.”

He believes that local and civil servants should be more focused on changes that could take more people out of the street, such as more specialized sober life opportunities, smaller and less chaotic shelters or better housing Consultations.

“The political role is mainly to clear the streets,” he said. “What I’m really worried about is more funding to get into a shelter with very little attention to the things that would end homelessness.”

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