Orange County Grand Jurors found the county has spent over $1 billion to address homelessness, yet not much has changed.
Now, grand jurors are calling on OC Supervisors and other top officials to overhaul their efforts to get people off the streets – echoing a 2022 OC Grand Jury report.
[Read: Grand Jury: OC Falls Short on Housing and Shelter for Homeless People and Former Foster Youth]
“Despite its efforts and substantial resources, Orange County’s current strategy for decreasing homelessness has been largely unsuccessful,” jurors wrote in a report published late last month.
It’s a problem county leaders have quietly admitted isn’t going away, changing the name of their Commission to End Homelessness to the Commission to Address Homelessness earlier this year.
In a report on June 26, jurors encouraged county leaders to pivot away from reactive measures like homeless shelters and clearing out homeless encampments to preventative measures that stop people from becoming homeless in the first place, such as identifying people on the edge of homelessness and offering them support or building more affordable housing.
“While prevention strategies … are more cost effective in the long run, the County’s current system remains mostly reactive,” jurors wrote. “Orange County should prioritize prevention of homelessness rather than primarily reactive measures.”
Orange County Supervisors have discussed launching more prevention measures for years, with both Supervisors Chairman Doug Chaffee and Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento launching their own pilot programs for rental assistance in their districts, but a countywide program has not materialized.
[Read: Should Orange County Take a New Approach to Curbing Homelessness?]
Chaffee said he wants to see a similar program roll out countywide, but doesn’t know how it will be possible to fund it without taking away funding from existing programs like shelters – a move he says he is not willing to make.
“I’m not advocating we stop what we’re doing on the street and shelters and all that stuff … it’s really finding additional money,” Chaffee said in a Monday interview. “I think we’ve got to do it. It’s just a question of when do we do it.”
Chaffee said his program helped over 400 people stay out of homelessness, but noted they’re still trying to follow up with participants to see if they stayed off the street once the program ended.
Sarmiento issued a statement on Monday highlighting how the report backed up the benefits of prevention.
“Prevention works, and it costs less,” Sarmiento said. “Unfortunately, we continue to underinvest in the very strategies that stop homelessness before it begins.”
When asked why supervisors didn’t allocate more money to prevention in their new budget approved last month, Chaffee pointed out how the state’s shift to the Behavioral Health Services Act approved by the voters via Prop 1 last year means the county will be losing much of the money it had for preventative programs.
[Read: How Will California’s Prop. 1 Impact Orange County’s Mental Health Funding?]
“We’re a little anxious over the money we will have,” Chaffee said.
Supervisor Janet Nguyen said the county needs to shift to more prevention efforts, calling their current programs a “revolving door,” but would not push for spending the county’s discretionary dollars on any programs, saying they need to wait on the federal and state governments.
“If the county put the money in just for housing, we don’t have funding for prevention, or transportation. We have to all come together,” Nguyen said.
She also said she’s looking to cut contractors and programs that aren’t working, encouraging county leaders to end programs that don’t work.
“We can’t continue to fund shelters and programs that don’t work,” Nguyen said. “We are wasting taxpayer’s money and not getting the job done.
Grand jurors highlighted a big bonus to keeping people in their homes through these programs: low costs.
“The Grand Jury found that it is ultimately less costly and more effective to keep people in their current homes than to try to get them back into housing after they have experienced the instability, trauma, and danger of being without a home,” jurors wrote.
While grand jury members weren’t able to “definitively establish” an annual cost for preventative measures, they highlighted how options like rapid rehousing programs and bridge housing all cost from around $9,000 to $22,000 a year.
It’s not the first time county leaders have been told that.
In 2017, a report from the nonprofit United Way OC and UC Irvine found the same thing, highlighting how once people are off the street the cost for aiding them drops dramatically.
“Whatever the service or housing category, the costs of homelessness declines when the homeless are housed,” the study’s authors wrote. “We estimate a cost savings of approximately $42 million per year if all Orange County chronically homeless were placed into permanent supportive housing.”
The grand jury also pointed to a 2024 study by United Way OC that found the average cost to county taxpayers for a chronically homeless person was over $100,000 per year. The cost to put them in permanent supportive housing for that same amount of time sits at around $51,000.
But it’s unclear where that money can come from, with county supervisors repeatedly warning they’re working on a tight budget while also granting themselves roughly $50,000 annual raises.
[Read: Orange County Supervisors Now Make More Than California’s Governor]
Cesar Covarrubias, head of the nonprofit Kennedy Commission, said the report also highlights the need for more affordable housing in the county.
“We believe that the County strategy needs to prioritize affordable housing and create an OC local housing bond to develop affordable housing,” Covarrubias said in a Monday text.
County supervisors have long praised the development of affordable housing, but highlight the cost and time for projects to come online as the reason there’s still so little of it throughout the county.
Chaffee noted while housing helps, it can’t be the only piece of the puzzle.
“We can work curing the issues that keep people from becoming homeless in the first place,” Chaffee said. “You’re not going to do that simply by working on the back end all the time. You can’t build housing fast enough, and I’m not sure that’s always a solution.”
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org.