California cannot treat homeless spending as an action

By Tangella Babbitt, especially for CalMatters

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California spends billions on homelessness prevention without the management infrastructure to know if it’s working. I witnessed this failure first hand.

I remember when a mother in Sacramento County was facing eviction and was trying to find help before she and her children lost their home. For two months, she called 211 and the county’s Department of Human Services looking for answers. Each system directed her to the other. Back and forth, week after week, no one could tell her what help was actually available or who owned the process.

I was on the other end of the phone.

For over 11 years, I worked as a human services specialist for the county, helping administer CalFresh, CalWORKs and Medi-Cal benefits. I’ve seen California’s safety net from the inside. What highlighted recent CalMatters coverage it’s not just a data problem – it’s a management failure.

This mother I tried to help was not “falling through the cracks.” The cracks were built into the system itself. Agencies operate in silos, each assuming the other has the answer. Meanwhile, the person in crisis remains stuck in the middle.

A UC San Francisco study found that one-third of unhoused adults in California were long-term renters who had been evicted, many for the first time. An eviction order increases the likelihood of unemployment by more than 300%.

We understand the path to homelessness. What California still lacks is a coordinated system designed to cut it off before families lose their homes.

Thanks to my work, I see the problem clearly: California is funding multiple rounds of homelessness prevention programs without requiring measurable results tied to continued investment.

When it comes to project management, no responsible organization would continue to approve phase after phase of funding without evidence that previous phases have delivered results. Yet California has doled out billions through the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention Program while failing to build consistent statewide accountability measures.

The California Interagency Council on Homelessness is intended to serve as an oversight layer. In 2021, it was ordered to collect data on the statewide homelessness program. He finished a report, after that they largely disappeared from public viewas a scathing state audit found three years ago.

This is not effective management. This is a type of management.

California has focused heavily on outcomes, such as dollars distributed, shelter beds funded, and services started. But results are not results. The real question is whether people remained housed six or 12 months later. Too often the state has labeled the activity as a success.

Frontline workers did not create this problem. The failure occurred upstream in the design of the system itself.

Senate Bill 1160which would require county courts to report eviction results by zip code is an important step and must pass. But data alone will not solve a management design problem.

California should require reporting of measurable outcomes as a condition of continued homelessness prevention funding. The Interagency Council must function as an active oversight body with real powers and accountability. Most importantly, the state must treat the person in crisis as a unit of measure, not just the dollar handed out.

At one point the mother stopped calling. I don’t know if she kept her apartment, went into a shelter, or became homeless. The system does not require anyone to track the response.

This is the real cost of working without accountability.

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