Data: California spends $42k/yr/homeless person. That's more than double what is considered poverty-level income
Image by Breezy Baldwin
A state audit found that California invested a staggering $24 billion over the past five fiscal years to address homelessness. That's about $42k per homeless person/year. And yet the homelessness crisis has worsened. Fiscally responsible pols ask: is our Housing First strategy all wrong? KTLA reports.
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, an estimated 181,000 people experienced homelessness in California in 2023 — an increase of 63,000 over the past ten years.
In the 2021-22 fiscal year, when the homeless population was estimated to be 172,000, California spent $7.2 billion, which equated to nearly $42,000 per homeless individual.
The spending includes housing and rental assistance, physical and mental health outreach, case management, and funds to purchase motels and other types of temporary housing.
In 2022, Newsom threatened to withhold $1 billion in funds from cities and counties, criticizing their homelessness plans as inadequate. This summer, he directed local governments to clear encampments or risk losing out on state funding next year.
“I want to see results,” Newsom told reporters at a media event in Los Angeles. “I don’t want to read about them. I don’t want to see the data. I want to see it.”
In a scathing report released in April, the state auditor said the California Interagency Council on Homelessness (Cal IHC) has done a poor job accounting for homeless spending and tracking results.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass has touted isolated success stories of removing encampments from the streets in areas including downtown L.A. and Hollywood. She expanded a directive to use publicly owned land to build more housing faster and remove RV encampments.
A city website that tracks results says “more than 21,000 people” have been moved indoors since December 2022, and more than 5,000 have found permanent housing.
As with statewide homeless programs and grants, however, critics question if the money is truly producing results.
“Angelenos, unfortunately, are paying four times from their taxes at the federal level … to the state level, to the county level and city [on homelessness], L.A. City Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez recently told KTLA 5 News. “We have to have an honest conversation about which areas are failing to produce the results for their constituencies. No one is trying to point fingers. We all represent the same people, and we have an obligation to make sure that we solve this crisis.”
Around 19% of interviewed homeless people said they had become homeless after incarceration in prison or a prolonged jail stay, 49% from a housing situation where they didn’t have their name on a lease or
mortgage, and 32% from a housing situation where they had their name on a lease or mortgage.
In the six months before becoming homeless, their median household income was just $960 per month, the UCSF researchers found.
Read the whole thing here.
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