California is fighting homelessness in the dark

By Kyle Nelson, especially for CalMatters

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Gov. Gavin Newsom recently announced that the state will be distributing $145.4 million to eight California regions in an effort to end unemployment. This is the sixth round of homeless assistance and prevention grants since 2019. The state Legislature has allocated $5 billion to the program to fund shelter beds, social services, rental assistance and subsidies.

Rent assistance is a key part of homelessness prevention for good reason – emigration for failure to pay rent leads to homelessness across the state, due to high housing costs.

One-third of the state’s homeless adults were long-term tenants who were evictedmany for the first time, a recent study by the UC-San Francisco Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative found. Actually an eviction order increases the likelihood of becoming homeless by more than 300%, compared to those who were not evicted, and these effects can persist for years after displacement.

Last year 13% of low-income households in California — more than 800,000 tenants — reported facing eviction. If California is going to address its homelessness crisis, it needs to fully understand this phenomenon.

Unfortunately, policymakers responsible for curbing evictions and reducing homelessness are all too often working in the dark. They lack critical information about eviction cases in the state.

When a landlord files an eviction notice, courts typically record and report that information to the California Judicial Council, the policy-making body for the 58 counties’ superior court systems.

But not all eviction papers lead to evictions, and there is no standard for reporting what happens after the papers are served. The Judicial Council does not mandate the reporting of legal outcomes, so counties have taken different approaches to documenting and making this information available to the public.

And the counties with the highest number of evictions — Los Angeles, Riverside, Sacramento and San Diego — don’t count the results at all.

Eviction court results are different and in many ways more important than filing papers.

Innings represents the number of evictions started, while the results show what actually happened during the court process—whether a tenant lost their home, settled with their landlord, or had their case dismissed, for example. The results provide a much more detailed picture of who evictions hurt, where they happen most, and what drives them.

Without a complete picture of why evictions are happening across the state, it’s difficult to craft effective policy solutions to keep people housed. And politicians who cannot tell the difference between eviction requests and actual evictions risk misdirecting the state’s limited resources.

In recent years, legislators have tried to solve this problem. A bill introduced in 2023 would have standardized reporting across the state, but Newsom vetoed it, citing budget concerns. Two years later, a similar bill died in the state Senate Appropriations Committee.

The governor and legislature are making it difficult for jurisdictions to understand one of the root causes of homelessness by blocking access to eviction data.

But help may be on the way. In February, state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo sponsored Senate Bill 1160which would require California’s superior district courts to provide the Judicial Council with information on eviction cases — called unlawful detainer cases — aggregated by zip code, each month.

If passed, this bill would go a long way toward helping California adopt data-driven policies to prevent homelessness.

Relevant data is not limited to eviction applications and results. Local municipalities should develop comprehensive rent registries and dashboards that report data on rental harassment and occupancy complaints and other issues that advocates say are closely related to evictions.

The more Californians know about what’s driving housing insecurity in the state, the better new policy solutions can prevent it.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.