Quick Take
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Monday that he was making additional money available for California counties and cities to address homelessness, with a caveat: You must be successful in solving the problem.
The state government announced Tuesday it was making nearly $800 million in homelessness funding available for local jurisdictions, news California Gov. Gavin Newsom coupled with a stern warning: Cities and counties that fail to meaningfully decrease unsheltered homelessness and encampments will see their funding stripped away.
And now, the public can follow along in the governor’s push toward hyper-accountability. With the announcement of new funding, Newsom also unveiled a new online dashboard that shows whether each of California’s 58 counties is spending state dollars correctly and making good on housing, homelessness and behavioral health commitments.
The State of California Accountability dashboard offers the public, for the first time, an easy-to-use tool to track their community’s progress. The initial composition shows how many housing units the county has built, its number of year-round homeless shelter beds, year-over-year homelessness numbers, and how much money a county has received, and spent, from the state government.
During a virtual news conference Monday afternoon, Newsom said the state government had become too lax on homeless encampments, as well as ensuring its dollars were having a tangible impact in each city and county that received them.
“We’ve offered unprecedented support, and now we need to see unprecedented results,” Newsom said. “If we don’t, we’re not going to continue to fund excuses, we’re not going to continue to fund failure.”
“No one in our nation should be without a place to call home,” he said. “As we continue to support our communities in addressing homelessness, we expect fast results, not excuses. While we are pleased by the progress many communities have made to address the homelessness crisis, there is more work to do.”
According to the state dashboard, Santa Cruz County — which includes both the unincorporated county and its four cities — has seen a year-over-year increase in two critical performance indicators: overall homelessness increased in 2024 by 2.5% to 1,850, and, more importantly according to Newsom, its unsheltered homeless population jumped 4.5% to 1,485.
Since 2019, the county has received more than $24 million from the state’s Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention fund, but still has $8.3 million in unspent dollars. The county and the city of Santa Cruz have received a combined $6.4 million in encampment resolution dollars, but there is no indication on the dashboard of how well those dollars were used.
The dashboard also offers some highlights: In the 18 months between January 2023 and June 2024, state homelessness dollars resulted in 460 homeless people in Santa Cruz County getting housed, and more than 1,660 people have been connected to services.
Newsom said during the news conference emphasized that in his budget proposal for the 2025-26 fiscal year, he has not yet included any additional funding for homelessness programs — the $760 million now available comes from the current, 2024-25 fiscal year budget.
“I’m not inclined to fund another dollar of taxpayer money unless we have clawback provisions, unless we see results,” Newsom said.
Evan Morrison, executive director of People First of Santa Cruz County, a homeless services organization that runs the city’s largest homeless shelter at the National Guard armory, said the statistics on the dashboard are a good start, but that it could use more insights.
“A statewide scoreboard is a good thing, but in homeless services, I don’t think we have the data to make the scoreboard useful,” he said of its current iteration.
Morrison said that there are a number of telling data points that would provide a better and more nuanced picture of each county’s progress.
“I’d want to add a ratio of services to people that are homeless, wait times to get into programs, and success rates broken down by program,” he said. “The industry is a long way off from this, but ideally, it would also include which methods are being used in these programs, and which see more success.”
Max Chun contributed to this report.
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