Multiple Orange County leaders and activists are saying it’s time to reexamine how the county is tackling homelessness as there’s been little to no improvement over the past seven years, despite $1 billion being spent.
Those calls for reform and more oversight of homeless programs come just weeks ahead of the county’s annual budget hearings, which will shape where over $9 billion in funding goes.
Activists say Orange County should focus on building permanent supportive housing instead of heavily concentrating on homeless shelters if they want to see people exit homelessness.
“It’s incredibly cost effective to provide people with what they want anyway – just dignified, safe housing in your own apartment with supportive services,” said ACLU senior policy analyst Eve Garrow in an interview with Voice of OC.
“There’s no cost argument and there’s no policy argument for investing in shelters rather than housing.”
The lack of hard data points like the results and effectiveness of homeless programs isn’t local to just Orange County.
In an April 9 report released by California Auditor Grant Parks’s office, state auditors found the state government has also failed to accurately track how cost-effective its homelessness programs are.
“More than 180,000 Californians experienced homelessness in 2023—a 53 percent increase from 2013,” auditors wrote, adding that “(California Interagency Council on Homelessness) Has Not Consistently Tracked and Evaluated the State’s Efforts to End Homelessness.”
The report noted that programs like Project Homekey, a state-funded program for cities and counties to buy motels and turn them into homes for homeless people with onsite support like mental health and medical services, have proven effective and cheap.
In OC, motel conversions are taking place in Stanton, Anaheim, Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach to house homeless people and veterans.
View Project Homekey sites in OC here.
But the report also noted that many of the state’s other expensive projects lack clear results.
Paul Leon, CEO for National Healthcare and Housing Advisors and a longtime activist in Orange County, said projects that offer wraparound services and housing are the key to getting people permanently off the street.
“Once you have them in actual housing, then they can actually do better,” Leon said. “Other states are starting to do the same thing, put them in a smaller shelter, do all the wraparound services and move them back into housing.”
Homelessness Grows in Orange County
Orange County saw an increase from 4,792 homeless people in 2017 to 6,050 by 2023, according to data filed with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
In both years, just under half the homeless population was in either emergency shelters or transitional housing, with an increase from 46% in 2017 to 49% in 2023.
A Voice of OC investigation recently found that many of the county’s shelters struggle to get more than one in five of their visitors – 20% – off the streets and into some form of housing.
[Read: Is Orange County’s Homeless Shelter System Broken?]
County and city leaders continue insisting that affordable housing is the answer to reversing the homelessness crisis, but those developments aren’t moving fast enough to keep up with demand.
Just over 10% of all housing built in Orange County over the last five years qualifies as either low income or very low income housing, according to the California Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Over half of Orange County’s affordable housing construction in the past five years has come in just three cities – Irvine, Santa Ana and Anaheim.
That means a family of four has to make $114,800 to be considered low income and less than $71,000 to be considered very low income, according to the Housing and Community Development Department.
There’s smaller investments from Fullerton and Garden Grove, leaving most cities in the county with less than 100 affordable housing units apiece built over the last five years.
Altogether, those units from the past five years represent less than half a percent of all the housing in Orange County.
That lack of housing has led to what county leaders describe as a “bottleneck,” trapping many of the county’s homeless in shelters they admit aren’t doing a good job at getting people off the street.
“There isn’t enough housing being developed to transition people out,” said county Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento at the board’s April 9 meeting, acknowledging that while shelters helped move people into housing, “placements are not as high as we’d like to see them.”
What’s Being Done to Curb the Crisis?
That affordable housing construction came as the county spent around $478 million on housing and housing assistance programs over the past seven years according to data from the county CEO’s office, including programs like rent vouchers and permanent supportive housing.
Most of that funding came from state and federal programs administered by the county, rather than the county’s own budget.
Cesar Covarrubias – executive director of the affordable housing nonprofit advocacy group, the Kennedy Commission – said county officials need to increase housing development and said their best option would be to issue a bond and start pitching in more money from the general fund.
Covarrubias pointed to Santa Clara County, which issued a $950 million bond with the approval of voters in 2016 and since then has built over 5,100 new affordable apartments across 10 cities as of last December.
By comparison, the Orange County Housing Trust Fund has completed 1,340 permanent supportive housing and affordable housing units since its inception in 2018, with another 895 units under construction or closing on their construction loan.
That means Santa Clara County has completed nearly four times as much housing construction, and Covarrubias said with similar funding, Orange County can do even more by retrofitting older buildings to serve as affordable housing.
“There hasn’t been a large commitment to really produce affordable housing or permanent supportive housing at a scale that could address the issue,” Covarrubias said. “It’ll produce housing opportunities at a scale that will have an impact on the issue.”
Garrow, the ACLU policy analyst, said that while experts and activists have been pointing out the need for more permanent supportive housing for years, most local agencies haven’t built much of it.
She also cited a 2017 study by United Way and UC Irvine, which put the annual costs of homelessness in the 2014-15 fiscal year alone at nearly $300 million for local governments in Orange County.
The study found that it’s cheaper to house homeless residents in permanent supportive housing rather than shelters, noting it could cost local government agencies 40% less each year, or an average of around $34,000 less per person in 2014-2015, the time period they reviewed.
Over the past seven years, county leaders sent over $300 million toward shelters and temporary housing, their second largest investment on homelessness following housing and housing assistance programs.
The total spending on healthcare, assistance programs, outreach and other services amounted to less than 20% of the $1 billion spent to help end homelessness in Orange County.
What Does the Future Look Like?
One of the loudest voices calling for change on the homeless front is State Senator Janet Nguyen, who has made calling for a review of the county’s past homeless spending a cornerstone of her campaign for county supervisor.
Nguyen, who was an OC supervisor before becoming a state senator, said it’s time for county officials to look past nonprofits.
“With all due respect to the nonprofits, and they do a phenomenal job, but we’re not here to keep them afloat,” Nguyen said in an interview with the OC Register’s editorial board. “We’re here to solve problems.”
Nguyen did not respond to requests for comment on this article, and has not posted any specific plans to tackle homelessness on her campaign website.
County Supervisors Doug Chaffee and Vicente Sarmiento have also both launched pilot programs with their discretionary funds aimed at offering rental assistance and keeping people off the street to begin with, saying that’s the area the county needs to start investing more in.
“The long term answer is prevention, to keep people in the home they already have,” Chaffee said at the board of supervisor’s April 9 meeting. “I think that’s the emphasis we need to go forward on, is more prevention.”
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @NBiesiada.
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