Read more: What's Keeping Us From Fixing the Homelessness Crisis
The decline appears to have been driven by a mix of policies, according to organizations that work closely with the state government to address the crisis: prevention programs, supportive housing and mental health services, and more aggressive encampment cleanup operations.
The trend in California is part of a broader nationwide decrease in homelessness, with Illinois (44%), Hawaii (41%), Florida (11%), and New York (8%) seeing some of the largest declines.
“I was at work, looking at the ring that I got. I was flipping it around, and then I just took it off,” she says in a phone interview from Oakland. “I said to myself, ‘I can't do this. I'm more than this.’”
During the day, she worked as a Lyft driver and a security guard, but still wasn’t able to find an apartment because of her low credit score. At times, she relied on credit cards to buy food for her children. Many shelters refused to accept her because of concerns over the spread of COVID-19, so she rented a storage unit to change her clothes every day and make sure her car stayed clean for her passengers.
“I'm just very grateful to God that I survived it, because I know for a fact that there are a lot of people who would not have survived what I've gone through,” she said.
Asked what is driving the change in California, many nonprofit organizations credited homeless prevention programs across the state. Like Ballard-DeBose, many people experiencing homelessness spend years trying to find stable housing, and social workers say the most cost-effective approach is to stop people from being evicted in the first place.
About a third of the state’s population experiencing homelessness were long-term leaseholders who had been evicted, according to a study from University of California, San Francisco.
Last month, Governor Newsom distributed more than $760 million to all 42 California regions to end homelessness, a sizable portion of which is dedicated to rental subsidies and relief programs. This is the sixth round the governor has kept Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention grants funded since 2019, with the seventh round totaling $500 million planned for the coming budget year. In major cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco, eligible applicants can receive thousands of dollars in financial assistance on unpaid rent, mortgage, and sometimes future rent.
Supportive housing with additional services
A second strategy adopted by California has focused on moving people into housing while pairing that housing with services intended to help them remain stably housed. More than 64,000 people in California are chronically homeless, with 71% of them living without a shelter, according to the latest HUD report.
Anat Leonard-Wookey, vice president of programming and services at LifeMoves, a San Francisco-based housing nonprofit, said internal data showed that people experiencing homelessness who went through six or more sessions of behavioral therapy were twice as likely to move into permanent housing and to see an increase in income.
Over the past five years, California has spent more than $3.8 billion on Project Homekey, a program that converts used motels and other buildings into interim and permanent supportive housing, according to analysis done by local outlet CalMatters. The idea was born shortly after the outbreak of COVID-19, when the state scrambled to house thousands of people living outdoors to curb the spread of the virus.
But even as California has expanded programs aimed at helping people stay housed, Maceri said the state’s broader housing shortage continues to limit progress.
The consequences of encampment enforcement
A third policy pushed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to address the crisis has been stricter enforcement against encampments on the streets. Following the 2024 Supreme Court ruling that gave local and state governments greater power to criminalize sleeping and camping in public spaces, Newsom unveiled a model ordinance designed to require people living in public spaces to relocate or face arrest.
Officials have argued that encampment enforcement is necessary to address public safety and sanitation concerns. But the problem with this approach, advocates say, is that not only do the operations themselves fail to solve homelessness, but they can also undermine outreach programs that might otherwise persuade people to move into interim housing.
Encampment sweeps can also sever the relationship between residents experiencing homelessness and outreach workers, particularly because many people living outside lack identification, phones, or other reliable ways to stay in touch. That disruption can matter, she said, because there is a 25% increase in people accepting shelter when outreach staff visit them twice or offer additional services.
“They're not being aggressive. They're not breaking any laws. They're just trying to survive. That tends to be a very large, invisible number of people experiencing homelessness,” Maceri said.
On Tuesday, HUD announced a plan to redistribute billions of dollars in homeless aid, putting people in interim and permanent housing programs at risk of becoming homelessness again. The new plan would shift 90% of the $4 billion federal funding meant to support permanent housing to other programs that require people experiencing homelessness to meet certain criteria, such as work requirements or substance-use treatment requirements, in order to receive care.
For Leonard-Wookey, the debate over federal funding and “Housing First” underscores the risk of designing homelessness policy around ideology rather than the people it is meant to serve. Ultimately, she said, any policy should be centered on the people struggling to find a home and the providers trying to help them.
“There is no one-size-fits-all approach… Policies can easily have unintended consequences, and so to really be aware of whose voices and experiences are shaping those policies would be very, very powerful.”
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