How California Can End the Homelessness Crisis

A new report from California YIMBY

December 06, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Click here to read California YIMBY’s new report, Housing Abundance as a Condition for Ending Homelessness: Lessons From Houston, Texas.

I came to housing policy by way of California’s homelessness crisis. Before moving out West, I had lived in high-cost cities—New York and D.C.—for my entire adult life. Both those cities have more than their fair share of homelessness; not coincidentally, the rent was and remains too damn high in both of them. But neither of them prepared me for what I saw when I moved to Oakland.

California’s homelessness crisis is on another level, and it’s getting worse. Adding up all the state’s 2022 point-in-time counts—surveys which count how many people are homeless in a given jurisdiction on a particular night out of the year—gives us almost 175,000 people without permanent housing, including nearly 117,000 unsheltered people. And for reasons I won’t get into here, we know that the PIT estimates are actually a significant undercount of how many Californians experience homelessness over the course of a year. We don’t know the real number, but we can safely assume it’s a lot bigger.

Homelessness in California: Causes and Policy Considerations | Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR)

Over the past couple of years, the state has poured $14 billion—an unprecedented sum—into programs intended to get people housed. Many of those programs follow the general “Housing First” principle, which says that service providers should prioritize getting unhoused people into permanent housing. The money has done some good, but it hasn’t reversed the overall upward trend.

Why has California made so little progress against homelessness, even with billions of dollars dedicated to the fight? To answer this question, I decided to look at a region that has achieved a lot more while spending a lot less: the city of Houston and surrounding Harris County in Texas. The Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County and its partners have cut homelessness by more than half over the past decade alone. California and its constituent cities can learn from their example.

California YIMBY’s latest report is my attempt to chart a path out of the homelessness crisis for California. But I think much of what I’ve found applies to virtually any expensive city in the United States wrestling with homelessness. I hope you’ll give it a read.

By way of a tl;dr, I’ve also written a piece for The Nation summarizing the report and its major findings. Here’s a preview:

Houston’s liberal land use policies and rapid housing construction have kept prices much lower than in much of California, even as the city’s population has grown significantly faster. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Houston, for example, is about one-third the median rent in San Francisco.

This has several implications for Houston’s homeless services system. The first is that it has kept homelessness from getting so bad that the Coalition for the Homeless can’t keep up. As a substantial body of research has demonstrated, housing unaffordability is the primary driver of homelessness, and because Houston is cheaper than San Francisco, low-income residents are less likely to fall into homelessness. In contrast, in San Francisco, residents become homeless at four times the rate that the city can place them back into housing.

Again you can read the full piece here.

Lastly, check out this short video that California YIMBY produced to accompany the report:

My report is California YIMBY’s first major publication on homelessness, but it won’t be the last. As I said up top, the homelessness crisis is what brought me into housing policy in the first place. I’m going to keep fighting that fight in any way I can, so stay tuned for more.

In the meantime, please do read the report and/or the Nation piece. Feel free to reach out with questions or comments. I’m also going to be doing a lot of briefings on the report, so let me know if you represent an organization that would like to hear me present my findings and answer your questions. Thanks all.