A Closer Look at the Impact of California on the 2017 National Homeless Count Results

-California Experienced a Significant Increase in Homelessness
While the Rest of the Country Collectively Experienced a Decrease- 

-Approximately Half of State’s Continuums of Care Counted More Persons Homeless in 2017- 

Half of the 42 Continuums of Care* (CoCs) in California counted more persons homeless in 2017 when compared to the number of persons counted as homeless in 2016, as detailed in Table 1 below. 

The table includes numbers reported to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as a requirement by HUD for CoCs to receive annual Continuum of Care Program funding, which amounted to around $2 billion dollars for recent years.  

What is also noteworthy concerns the California counties of Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Riverside, Santa Clara, and Alameda, which are six of the 22 most populated counties in the United States. Each of them are a HUD designated countywide continuum of care. Each one reported an increase in 2017 when compared to their 2016 numbers. Five of them report an increase of 10% or more and one, San Diego County, reported an increase of 5.6% as noted in Table 1. 

Thus, California experienced a weighty increase in homelessness in 2017 while the rest of the country collectively experienced a decrease similar to annual national decreases for each year during this decade. To learn more see The Impact of California on the 2017 Homeless Count Results, which includes state-by-state results. 

What Next? 

There are several new regulatory and financial resources that have been initiated to increase the number of affordable housing and permanent supportive housing units in California, which will be the focus of upcoming briefs and reports.  

A few of the new regulatory and financial resources are:

• Senate Bill 2: Building Homes and Jobs Act which establishes permanent, ongoing sources of funding dedicated to affordable housing development;
• No Place Like Home Initiative for the construction and rehabilitation of permanent supportive housing for homeless individuals with mental illness;
• Assembly Bill 1505 authorizes “the legislative body of any county or city to adopt ordinances to require, as a condition of development of residential rental units, that the development include a certain percentage of residential rental units affordable to, and occupied by, moderate-income, lower income, very low income, or extremely low income households or by persons and families of low or moderate income.” 

Table 1. Comparison of the total number of persons counted as homeless in 2016 and 2017 by California Continuums of Care. 

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See which states experienced increases and decreases in persons counted as homeless between 2016 and 2017: Nationwide 2017 Homeless Count Numbers Broken Down by Region in U.S. 

 For more information regarding the results of the 2017 homeless count and next steps, see  

• 2017 Point-in-Time Estimates Show Significant Geographical Variations in Our Progress Toward Ending Homelessness, Matthew Doherty, Executive Director, United States Interagency Council on Homeless.  

• 2017 AHAR: Part 1 – PIT Estimates of Homelessness in the U.S, which is a report published by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which “outlines the key findings of the 2017 Point-In-Time (PIT) count and Housing Inventory Count (HIC) conducted in January 2017. Specifically, this report provides 2017 national, state, and CoC-level PIT and HIC estimates of homelessness, as well as estimates of chronically homeless persons, homeless veterans, and homeless children and youth.”