New homelessness strategy sweeps California

from Marissa KendallCalMatters

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Perhaps the way out of California’s homelessness crisis is to prevent it in the first place instead of focusing only on the people who have already lost their homes.

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 outside of California.

These prevention programs have found that with a payment of a few thousand dollars, humanitarian organizations can prevent someone from becoming homeless. This both prevents the trauma that comes with losing a home and saves the state or local government potentially tens of thousands of dollars needed to help someone after they become homeless.

Santa Clara County’s program from the nonprofit organization Destination: Home recently inspired the launch of 10 more pilot projects across the country, marking the first large-scale test of this strategy in multiple states. If it works in these test counties, advocates will push for a national program.

Meanwhile, account enacted this year in California, would require the state to come up with a broad strategy to prevent homelessness.

“The single most obvious answer to homelessness is to prevent it from happening 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 have reserved resources to help the people in greatest need — those currently living on the streets — get back on their feet. The problem with this strategy is that for every one person they house, many others become homeless. This leaves cities spinning without significantly reducing the problem.

But prevention has its challenges: Aid is most effective when it targets people who are immediately at risk of losing their home, and determining exactly who that is can be difficult. Several Bay Area communities use a questionnaire to assess how likely someone is to become homeless unless they get help. Los Angeles County Program uses artificial intelligence.

“The risk is that you’re giving a lot of valuable resources to people who might otherwise be able to prevent homelessness on their own, and that takes away things like emergency shelters or transitional shelters or permanent supportive housing,” said Jim Sullivan, director of the University of Notre Dame’s Economic Opportunity Lab. His team evaluated Santa Clara County’s prevention program and found that people who received prevention funds were 78 percent less likely to become homeless than people in similar situations who did not receive funds.

Even among people who did not receive prevention funds, the overall rate of homelessness in these studies was generally small (in Santa Clara County, 4.1% of people who did not receive assistance became homeless, compared to 0.9% who received assistance). That’s because despite the highly visible humanitarian crisis on California’s streets, 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. Most people manage to keep a roof over their heads by getting help from family or friends.

How homelessness prevention works

Destination: Home helped launch Santa Clara County’s first homelessness prevention program in 2017. At the time, there wasn’t much help for people on the brink of homelessness. Families facing looming evictions have been told to call once they actually find themselves on the street.

With a $1 million budget provided through donations, the program helped 200 households in its first year. In the years that followed, the nonprofit saw results — and support from county officials. The program now has an annual budget of $30 million (most of which is publicly funded) and serves 2,500 households annually.

The program seems to be making a breakthrough. Before it existed, for every homeless person who was housed, three others lost their homes. Now, for every one person housed, the math works out to 1.7 people losing their homes, according to Destination: Home.

People who apply for the program learn about it in a variety of ways, including through food banks and other service providers, by word of mouth and through outreach workers in eviction court. They then fill out a questionnaire designed to assess how likely they are to become homeless. A number of factors can put them at greater risk: if they have experienced domestic violence, if they have been homeless before, or if they have a disability, for example. If they check enough risk factors, they qualify for help.

Last year, people accepted into the program received an average of about $6,500 (including if they returned multiple times for assistance), most of which went directly to rent, security deposits and other housing costs. Participants can use the money to address any problem that threatens their housing, including fixing their car so they can get to work, paying for a hotel while they’re between apartments, covering medical expenses or paying off credit card debt if a large monthly payment is hurting their ability to pay rent.

Participants can return for help multiple times if they need it, and many do.

“We’re providing temporary assistance to people who are facing long-term, systemic problems, and we don’t expect that coming out with us for a few months will suddenly increase the supply of affordable housing or living-wage jobs,” said Erin Stanton, director of family assistance at Sacred Heart Community Service, which is coordinating the assistance.

Now, Destination: Home is expanding its prevention model to 10 new locations across the country, including San Mateo County in California, as well as Miami-Dade County, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; Austin-Travis County, Texas; communities in Alaska and numerous tribal communities in Minnesota. The idea is to see if the model can be successful outside of Santa Clara County and see how it can be modified depending on the community it serves. The needs of an economically depressed or addiction-ridden community will be different than those of a rapidly gentrifying area, for example.

Destination: Home, which has raised nearly $80 million for the effort from private donors, gives each community $500,000 to plan its own homelessness prevention program, modeled after Santa Clara County, and then at least $5 million to implement the program over three years. The first programs are expected to launch this fall.

The University of Notre Dame will evaluate the programs to see if they work. If they do, Destination: Home plans to push for a national prevention strategy.

San Mateo County agreed to be a test community because it’s an “exciting opportunity,” said Amy Davidson, director of the county’s Center on Homelessness. The county already runs an emergency financial assistance program, but it doesn’t screen participants to determine who is most likely to end up on the street. With the help of Destination: Home, the county will launch a second program that more specifically targets people at risk of homelessness.

“It seemed like a really great learning experience for us to try to learn what worked really well and what we haven’t done but might consider doing,” Davidson said.

Lower homelessness rates

Five other Bay Area communities, including San Francisco and Oakland, have already done so similar prevention programswho together have served more than 30,000 people. They are supported by All Home and Bay Area Community Services, which helped fund the programs and developed a standardized online form that assesses each applicant’s risk of homelessness. A sixth program in Marin County will launch later this year.

There were participants in San Francisco 40% less likely to become homeless compared to those in similar circumstances who did not receive assistance. Between March 2023 and February 2025, fewer than 5% of program participants became homeless within a year of receiving prevention funds, compared to 8% of similarly situated people who did not receive funds.

In Los Angeles County, the people helped by the Department of Homelessness Prevention were 71% less likely to later end up in a homeless shelter or use street services. As in Santa Clara County, overall homelessness rates are still low: Less than 2 percent of people enrolled in the program became homeless and used services on the street or a shelter within 18 months, compared to just over 6 percent of people in similar circumstances but not enrolled in the program.

Los Angeles County’s tool is unique because uses AI for prediction who will most likely end up homeless. Participants do not apply to the program. If the AI ​​model selects them, program staff cold call them and invite them to participate.

The district is still testing the program, and a detailed analysis is expected next year. Meanwhile, local leaders supported him. The county recently poured additional Measure A funding into the program and launched a new youth-focused prevention program.

Building on the momentum generated by those efforts, a bill introduced this year would require the state to create a statewide homelessness prevention strategy by July 2027. The state expects a budget deficit this year and 1924 Assembly Bill does not come with financing. But supporters say it’s still a step forward.

“Now that we have proven models from the Bay Area and Los Angeles, we believe it’s time for the state to do more to articulate goals and strategies for having a prevention program, with the hope that in the future, if there’s more of a budget surplus, those strategies can get better funding,” said Irene Farnsworth, director of regional homelessness prevention for All Home, which co-sponsored the bill from Assemblyman Jesse GabrielDemocrat from Encino.

“They Won’t Leave You Hanging”

Desiree Campusano knows how to hustle. She broke up with relatives when she couldn’t afford rent and worked multiple jobs at the same time. But in 2021, something unexpected happened: she became an emergency foster parent for two of her young relatives. She felt like she was failing.

That’s when she found the Santa Clara County Homelessness Prevention Program. It helped keep her afloat as she moved into her own apartment in Milpitas, changed jobs and suddenly became the sole parent of two children.

She asked for help twice this year, once receiving her full rent of $1,575 and once receiving $1,000 to help her cope. The next year, her rent went up, and she asked for help every time she couldn’t pay in full — like when the kids got sick with COVID and couldn’t go to daycare, so she had to take time off work and not get paid. She received help four times this year.

“I’ll be fine for a month or two, and then I’ll need it again,” Campusano said.

In 2023 her rent went up again and she had to move out. She went to stay with her godfather in Hollister, but that meant a grueling commute to San Jose for work every day. Then, in early 2025, Campusano moved into a subsidized apartment in San Jose. The county’s homelessness prevention program helped her secure the apartment by paying her first and last month’s rent.

That continued support was a game-changer for Campusano, who finally felt like she was back on her feet. She now teaches sociology and Mexican-American history at San Jose City College.

“They won’t leave you hanging,” she said. “They’ll make sure you feel stable.”

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