SI

How can we reduce homelessness in California by 90% by 2035?

How Can We Reduce Homelessness in California by 90% by 2035?

Ecosystem Health Snapshot

  • 29 interventions mapped across 8 sub-inquiries × 4 strategies
  • 18 key organizations with 30 connections
  • 2 impactful | 7 active | 13 weak | 7 gaps
  • Weighted coverage: 30% — a deeply immature ecosystem relative to the ambition

The 30% coverage score tells the story: California has spent $37 billion on homelessness since 2019, yet the network infrastructure needed to coordinate that spending toward a 90% reduction goal barely exists. The ecosystem is dominated by "weak" and "gap" interventions (20 of 29), meaning most of the coordination architecture is either fragmented or missing entirely.

What's Actually Working

Tier 1 — Delivering Measurable Impact:

Only two interventions earned "impactful" status, and they're both in the Activist strategy:

  • Pro-Housing Advocacy Coalition — California YIMBY and its coalition of 80,000+ members, labor unions, business groups, and environmental organizations have secured passage of dozens of pro-housing bills since 2017. This is the ecosystem's clearest success story: a well-funded, well-organized coalition that has demonstrably changed state law. Open Philanthropy and other funders have made sustained investments. The legislative wins are concrete — SB 9, SB 10, AB 2011, and now the landmark 2025 CEQA reforms.

  • CEQA & Zoning Reform Campaign — The 2025 passage of AB 130 and SB 131 exempting infill housing from CEQA review represents arguably the most significant regulatory reform for housing production in a generation. Greenbelt Alliance's participation was key — demonstrating that environmental and housing goals can align. Implementation is now the challenge.

Tier 2 — Active but Impact Uncertain:

Seven interventions "exist" but lack strong impact evidence:

  • Affordable Housing Production Coordination — California Housing Partnership provides essential data infrastructure, and multiple state programs fund production. But there are no shared statewide production targets, no accountability for delivery timelines, and coordination across 44 CoCs is minimal.

  • Tenant Rights & Eviction Defense Coalition — Stay Housed LA and legal aid organizations provide critical services, but coverage is spotty and most renters facing eviction still lack legal representation.

  • Behavioral Health Access & Accountability Advocacy — NAMI California, the Steinberg Institute, and others advocate for treatment access, but the voice is fragmented between mental health and substance use constituencies.

  • Street-Level Treatment Innovation — UCSF's HOMING project, Homeless Health Care LA, and Brilliant Corners are demonstrating promising models for integrated care. But these remain pilot-scale.

  • CoC Alignment & State-Local Coordination — Cal ICH and HDIS provide the government backbone, but it functions as top-down reporting rather than true collective impact coordination.

  • Housing Investment Budget Coalition — Housing California leads an effective annual budget advocacy effort, but it's primarily defensive (protecting existing funding) rather than building the case for the $5-8B/yr sustained investment needed.

  • Homelessness Funder Alignment Network — Funders Together to End Homelessness operates the California Policy Network, but most major foundations still work independently with no shared investment thesis.

The Defining Challenges

Two structural patterns constrain this ecosystem more than any others:

1. The Hollow Transformer Column — Narrative and Paradigm Work Is Almost Entirely Missing

Of 7 gaps in the ecosystem, 5 are in the Transformer strategy. This is the most critical finding. The interventions needed to shift mental models — housing as infrastructure, prevention as the organizing principle, shared systemic responsibility, outcomes-based accountability, professional identity for the workforce — are almost completely absent. This matters because:

  • Without the "housing as infrastructure" paradigm, political will for decade-long investment won't hold
  • Without the "prevention first" paradigm, funding will continue flowing 90% to response and 10% to prevention
  • Without "shared responsibility" narrative, public concern will continue declining (already dropped from 58% to 37% "very concerned")
  • Without "outcomes-based" paradigm, the next $37 billion will be as unaccountable as the last

The Transformer column is chronically underfunded across every systems change challenge — but in homelessness it is essentially unfunded. Housing California's New CA Dream initiative is virtually the only organized narrative effort, and it functions as a communications campaign rather than the cross-sector learning network needed for genuine paradigm transformation.

2. The Workforce Void — You Can't Deliver What You Can't Staff

The workforce sub-inquiry has the weakest ecosystem of any dimension: every single intervention is either "weak" or "gap." 79% of providers are hiring (mostly backfilling), 45% report increased turnover, the only statewide training program is at risk of losing funding, and there is no organized advocacy for worker compensation. This is a binding constraint — even if housing units are built and funding is secured, there aren't enough people to deliver the services. And unlike housing production or behavioral health, where at least fragments of infrastructure exist, the workforce dimension has almost nothing.

Critical Gaps

Seven interventions have no network or coordination in place at all:

  1. Housing as Infrastructure Learning Network — No cross-sector network shifting the paradigm from housing as commodity to housing as essential public infrastructure. Academic work exists (Terner Center, SIEPR) but isn't organized into practitioner and policymaker paradigm change.

  2. Prevention-First Paradigm Shift — No organized effort to shift the dominant mental model from responding to homelessness after it happens to preventing it before it happens. Prevention gets a tiny fraction of spending despite 10-20x better ROI.

  3. Regulatory Innovation Lab — No structured space for prototyping and scaling regulatory innovations across willing jurisdictions. Individual cities experiment in isolation.

  4. Outcomes-Based Funding Paradigm — No learning network building consensus on outcome metrics and accountability frameworks. $37B spent with limited outcome tracking, and no organized effort to change this.

  5. Homeless Services Worker Compensation Campaign — No organized advocacy for living wages for front-line workers. The root cause of workforce shortages is unaddressed.

  6. Homeless Services as a Profession Community of Practice — No professional community building shared identity, standards, or career pathways for homeless service workers.

  7. Shared Responsibility Narrative Transformation — No cross-sector learning network driving the deepest narrative shift needed: from individual blame/compassion to shared systemic responsibility.

Priority Actions (First 12-18 Months)

  1. Commission a Backbone Feasibility Study (Months 1-4) — Convene Housing California, Cal ICH, All Home, and Destination: Home to assess whether the statewide backbone should be built by expanding an existing organization or creating a new entity. Study Destination: Home's county-level model for statewide adaptation. A funder consortium (CHCF, Hilton Foundation, Ballmer Group) should fund the study and commit to 5-year backbone funding contingent on findings. Led by: Funders Together to End Homelessness CA Policy Network.

  2. Launch a Transformer Strategy Fund (Months 3-8) — Pool $15-25M from California foundations specifically for the five missing Transformer interventions: narrative change, paradigm shifts, learning networks. This is the most underfunded strategy and the easiest to launch because it doesn't require government action. Commission FrameWorks Institute to develop CA-specific narrative research; fund Housing California to scale the New CA Dream into a genuine cross-sector learning network; seed a prevention-first paradigm network anchored by UCSF and California Policy Lab. Led by: California Health Care Foundation and California Community Foundation.

  3. Build the Workforce Pipeline (Months 4-12) — Convene the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office, county workforce development boards, and major providers to design a statewide homeless services training infrastructure. Start with 5 pilot community college programs modeled on Santa Monica College's curriculum. Simultaneously launch a compensation campaign through existing labor allies (SEIU, California Labor Federation). Led by: All Home (employment program) with CCC Chancellor's Office.

  4. Create a Public Outcomes Dashboard (Months 6-12) — Build on Cal ICH's HDIS data and the California Policy Lab's analytical capacity to create a public-facing dashboard showing homelessness spending and outcomes by jurisdiction. This serves both the accountability gap and the narrative gap — giving citizens, voters, and advocates the data to hold officials accountable. Led by: California Policy Lab with Cal ICH.

  5. Establish the Regulatory Innovation Lab (Months 8-15) — Recruit 8-10 willing jurisdictions to prototype expedited approval pathways for supportive housing. Partner with Terner Center for evaluation. Test models that can become state legislation within 2-3 years. Led by: Terner Center with HCD sponsorship.

  6. Convene Prevention-First Network (Months 10-18) — Build a cross-sector learning network connecting Destination: Home's predictive prevention model, UCSF's research, CalAIM's health-to-housing pathways, and legal aid organizations into a coherent prevention strategy. Goal: shift the state's funding ratio from 90/10 response/prevention toward 60/40 within 3 years. Led by: UCSF Benioff Initiative with Destination: Home.

The Meta-Insight

California's homelessness ecosystem is not primarily suffering from a shortage of organizations, programs, or even money. It is suffering from a coordination failure compounded by a narrative failure. There are 18+ significant organizations in this analysis alone, billions in annual spending, and 44 Continuums of Care — but no backbone connecting them into a system that can achieve a shared goal. And the Transformer column — the narrative and paradigm work that sustains political will, shifts funding patterns, and builds professional identity — is almost completely empty.

The primary intervention is not building 29 new networks. It is building the backbone that connects what already exists and investing in the narrative infrastructure that sustains a decade of collective action. Without the backbone, the ecosystem remains a collection of well-intentioned fragments. Without the narrative transformation, even a well-coordinated ecosystem will lose its funding and political support before 2035.

The 90% reduction goal is not impossible — California has the wealth, the institutional capacity, and many of the organizational building blocks. What it lacks is the connective tissue between them and the shared story that holds the effort together across political cycles, budget crises, and public attention spans.