☆ SJ homelessness audit discourse reveals need for targeted, relevant metrics, say local fiscal watchdogs
Pat Waite of Citizens for Fiscal Responsibility (CFR) responds to State and Doan/Batra homelessness audit proposals with a call for an independent, non partisan, metrics-based committee untethered from past mistakes. An Opp Now exclusive.
“Measure what matters” is the essential message delivered by the recent state audit dinging San Jose efforts at addressing our homelessness crisis. It found that our city lacks established methods of tracking and reporting the spending of millions of dollars of homelessness funding and does not evaluate the effectiveness of the programs it funds. This is not new news.
Councilmembers Doan and Batra have called for an audit of San Jose’s homeless efforts, despite the fact that previous audits have had little or no effect on the outcomes. In Performance Measure Review: Documenting Methodologies can Ensure More Consistent and Accurate Reporting (February 2015) San Jose’s City Auditor identified issues in the Housing Department’s measurement and management systems.
A later extensive review (Audit of the City’s Homeless Assistance Programs: More Coordination and Better Monitoring Can Help Improve the Effectiveness of Programs, November 2018) noted that spending on homelessness transcends City departments, needs improved performance management, and suffers from “limited aggregated program-level data by which to evaluate the effectiveness” of homeless assistance programs.
Furthermore, the Housing Department was severely behind in executing monitoring visits of grant recipients, having completed only 16 of 81 planned visits. Finally, the auditor’s 2020 “Preliminary Review of the Allocation Process and Monitoring of COVID-19 Related Housing Grants” memo noted that “staff have not yet been able to conduct on-site monitoring to validate grantee performance” for COVID relief funds.
San Jose suffers not from a lack of metrics, but from a lack of appropriate metrics. The one overriding metric that matters, the number of unhoused residents, has remained at stubbornly unacceptable levels despite an open spigot of funding. The city measures activities addressing homelessness: dollars spent, number of unhoused residents assisted, affordable housing units built, and rental subsidies disbursed, to name a few.
What the city doesn’t measure effectively is why individuals are unhoused and what solutions are effective in getting individuals housed permanently. As the City Auditor pointed out in 2018 “without this information, evaluating long-term viability and reviewing program effectiveness is difficult, if not impossible.”
We have years of proof that taking an “all of the above” approach to solving the problem does not work. Audits haven’t changed the situation. It is time for the mayor to appoint a small committee of subject matter experts, independent of today’s failed efforts, to define the solutions. They must determine specific reasons for homelessness and identify specific remedies for each cause.
Finally, efforts to facilitate and accelerate homebuilding of any sort; affordable, market rate or luxury; must be made so that our supply of housing can rapidly expand. An overall lack of housing is the root cause of the problem and homelessness will persist until that is addressed.
--Pat Waite, Citizens for Fiscal Responsibility
More on CFR can be found here.
Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity
Opp Now enthusiastically welcomes smart, thoughtful, fair-minded, well-written comments from our readers. But be advised: we have zero interest in posting rants, ad hominems, poorly-argued screeds, transparently partisan yack, or the hateful name-calling often seen on other local websites. So if you've got a great idea that will add to the conversation, please send it in. If you're trolling or shilling for a candidate or initiative, forget it.