{"id":251275,"date":"2026-04-04T07:11:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T07:11:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/251275\/"},"modified":"2026-04-04T07:11:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T07:11:07","slug":"a-new-homelessness-strategy-is-sweeping-california-state-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/251275\/","title":{"rendered":"A new homelessness strategy is sweeping California | State"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maybe the way out of\u00a0California\u2019s homelessness\u00a0<\/a>crisis is to prevent it in the first place,\u00a0 rather than focusing only on people who have already lost their housing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the thinking behind a program in Santa Clara County \u2014 and others like it around the state \u2014 that has gained traction and will soon test its strategy beyond California.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These prevention programs have found that with a payment of several thousand dollars, aid organizations can head off someone\u2019s homelessness. That both prevents the trauma that comes with losing a home, and saves the state or local government the potentially tens of thousands of dollars it takes to help someone after they become homeless.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Santa Clara County program by nonprofit Destination: Home recently inspired the launch of\u00a010 more pilot projects<\/a>\u00a0throughout the country, marking the first large-scale, multi-state test of this strategy. If it works in those test counties, advocates will push for a nationwide program.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile,\u00a0a bill<\/a>\u00a0introduced this year in California would require the state to come up with a broad homelessness prevention strategy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe single most obvious answer to homelessness is to not let it happen in the first place,\u201d said Jennifer Loving, CEO of Destination: Home.<\/p>\n

Focusing on prevention marks a significant shift in thinking. Traditionally, cities, counties and the state reserve their resources for helping the people in most dire need \u2014 those currently living on the street \u2014 get back on their feet. The problem with that strategy is that for every one person they move into housing, multiple other people fall into homelessness. That leaves cities spinning their wheels without meaningfully lessening the problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But prevention has its own challenges: The aid is most effective when it goes to people imminently at risk of losing their housing, and determining exactly who that is can be tricky. Several Bay Area communities use a questionnaire to evaluate how likely someone is to wind up homeless unless they get help. A Los Angeles County program\u00a0uses artificial intelligence<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe risk is you give out a lot of precious resources to people who otherwise would be able to prevent homelessness on their own, and that takes away from things like emergency shelters or transitional shelters or permanent supportive housing,\u201d said Jim Sullivan, director of the University of Notre Dame\u2019s Lab for Economic Opportunities. His team evaluated Santa Clara County\u2019s prevention program and found that people who received prevention funds were 78% less likely to become homeless than people in similar situations who got no funds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even among the people who didn\u2019t get prevention funds, the overall rate of homelessness in these studies tends to be small (in Santa Clara County, 4.1% of people who didn\u2019t get help became homeless, compared to 0.9% who did get help). That\u2019s because, despite the very visible humanitarian crisis on the streets of California, 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. The vast majority of people are able to keep a roof over their head by getting help from family or friends.<\/p>\n

How homelessness prevention works<\/p>\n

Destination: Home helped launch Santa Clara County\u2019s first homelessness prevention program in 2017. At the time, there wasn\u2019t much help available for people on the brink of homelessness. Families staring down looming evictions were told to call back once they actually ended up on the street.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With a budget of $1 million secured through donations, the program helped 200 households that first year. Over the following years, the nonprofit got results \u2014 and buy-in from county officials. Now, the program has an annual budget of $30 million (most of which is publicly funded) and serves 2,500 households per year.<\/p>\n

The program appears to be making a dent. Prior to its existence, for every homeless person who got housing, another three lost their homes. Now, for every one person housed, the math works out to 1.7 people losing their homes, according to Destination: Home.<\/p>\n

People who apply to the program hear about it in different ways, including through food banks and other service providers, by word of mouth and through outreach workers in eviction court. Then they fill out a questionnaire designed to assess how likely they are to become homeless. Multiple factors could put them at greater risk: if they have experienced domestic violence, have been homeless before or are disabled, for example. If they check off enough risk factors, they qualify for aid.<\/p>\n

Over the past year, people accepted into the program received an average of about $6,500 (including if they returned multiple times for help), most of which went directly to rent, security deposits and other housing expenses. Participants can use the money to address whatever problem is threatening their housing, including fixing their car so they can get to work, paying for a hotel while they are between apartments, covering medical expenses or paying down a credit card debt if the large monthly payment is hurting their ability to pay rent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Participants can come back for help multiple times if they need, and many do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re providing temporary assistance to folks that are facing long-term, systemic problems, and we don\u2019t expect that hanging out with us for a few months is all of a sudden going to increase the supply of affordable housing or living-wage jobs,\u201d said Erin Stanton, director of family assistance at Sacred Heart Community Service, which coordinates the aid.<\/p>\n

Now, Destination: Home is expanding its prevention model to 10 new places 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 multiple tribal communities in Minnesota. The idea is to see if the model can be successful outside of Santa Clara County and to see how it might be tweaked depending on the community it is serving. The needs in an economically depressed community, or one saturated by addiction, will be different from those in a rapidly gentrying area, for example.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Destination: Home, which raised nearly $80 million for this effort from private donors, is giving each community $500,000 to plan their own homelessness prevention program modeled after Santa Clara County\u2019s, and then at least $5 million to run the program for three years. The first programs are expected to launch this fall.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The University of Notre Dame will evaluate the programs to see if they work. If they do, Destination: Home plans to push for a nationwide prevention strategy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

San Mateo County signed on to be a test community because it\u2019s an \u201cexciting opportunity,\u201d said Amy Davidson, director of the county\u2019s Center on Homelessness. The county already runs an emergency financial assistance program, but it doesn\u2019t screen participants to determine who is most likely to end up on the street. With Destination: Home\u2019s help, the county will launch a second program that more specifically targets people at risk of homelessness.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seemed like a really great learning experience for us to try to learn what works really well, and what haven\u2019t we done that we could consider doing,\u201d Davidson said.<\/p>\n

Lower rates of homelessness<\/p>\n

Five other Bay Area communities, including San Francisco and Oakland, already have\u00a0similar prevention programs<\/a>, which together have served more than 30,000 people. They\u2019re supported by the organizations All Home and Bay Area Community Services, which helped fund the programs and developed a standardized online form that evaluates each applicant\u2019s risk of homelessness. A sixth program in Marin County is set to launch later this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In San Francisco, participants were\u00a040% less likely<\/a>\u00a0to end up homeless than those in similar circumstances who didn\u2019t get help. Between March 2023 and February 2025, less than 5% of program participants became homeless within a year of receiving prevention funds, compared with 8% of similarly situated people who didn\u2019t receive funds.<\/p>\n

In Los Angeles County, people helped by the Homelessness Prevention Unit were\u00a071% less likely<\/a>\u00a0to later end up in a homeless shelter or use street outreach services. As in Santa Clara County, the overall rates of homelessness are still small: Less than 2% of people enrolled in the program became homeless and used street or shelter services within 18 months, compared to a little more than 6% of people in similar circumstances but not enrolled in the program.<\/p>\n

Los Angeles County\u2019s tool is unique because it\u00a0uses AI to predict<\/a>\u00a0who is most likely to become homeless. Participants don\u2019t apply to the program. If the AI model picks them out, program staff cold-call them and invite them to participate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The county is still testing the program, and a detailed analysis is expected next year. In the meantime, local leaders have thrown their support behind it. The county recently poured additional Measure A funding into the program, and is launching a new prevention program focused on young people.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Feeding off the momentum generated by these efforts, a bill introduced this year would require the state to establish a statewide homelessness prevention strategy by July 2027. The state is expecting a budget deficit this year, and\u00a0Assembly Bill 1924<\/a>\u00a0doesn\u2019t come with funding. But supporters say it\u2019s still a step forward.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow that we have proven models from the Bay Area and LA, we believe that it\u2019s time for the state to be doing more to articulate goals and strategies for having a prevention program, with the hope that in the future if there\u2019s more budget surplus those strategies could get better funding,\u201d said Irene Farnsworth, director of regional homelessness prevention for All Home, which is co-sponsoring the bill by\u00a0Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel<\/a>, a Democrat from Encino.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018They won\u2019t just leave you hanging\u2019<\/p>\n

Desir\u00e9 Campusano knows how to hustle. She\u2019s crashed with relatives when she couldn\u2019t afford rent and worked multiple jobs at once. But in 2021, something unexpected happened: She became an emergency foster parent to two of her young relatives. She felt herself foundering.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when she found Santa Clara County\u2019s homelessness prevention program. It helped her stay afloat as she navigated moving into her own apartment in Milpitas, changing jobs and suddenly becoming a single guardian to two children.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She asked for help twice that year, once receiving her full rent payment of $1,575, and once receiving $1,000 to help her get by. The next year, her rent increased and she asked for help each time she couldn\u2019t quite make the payment \u2014 for example when the kids got COVID and couldn\u2019t go to day care, so she had to miss work and not get paid. She got help four times that year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d be fine for a month or two, and then I\u2019d need it again,\u201d Campusano said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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, at the start of 2025, Campusano moved into a subsidized apartment in San Jose. The county\u2019s homelessness prevention program helped her secure the apartment by paying her first and last month\u2019s rent.<\/p>\n

That ongoing support was a gamechanger for Campusano, who finally feels like she\u2019s back on her feet. She\u2019s now teaching sociology and Mexican-American history at San Jose City College.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey won\u2019t just leave you hanging,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019ll make sure you feel stable.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Maybe the way out of\u00a0California\u2019s homelessness\u00a0crisis is to prevent it in the first place,\u00a0 rather than focusing only…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":251276,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[380,1493,4273,13,4459,88,90,89,732],"class_list":{"0":"post-251275","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-jose","8":"tag-affordable-housing","9":"tag-homelessness","10":"tag-jesse-gabriel","11":"tag-politics","12":"tag-san-francisco-bay-area","13":"tag-san-jose","14":"tag-san-jose-headlines","15":"tag-san-jose-news","16":"tag-social-issues"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/251276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}