Prevent Homelessness to End Homelessness

Earlier this month, the results of the 2024 Point-in-Time Count were released for Orange County. The Point-in-Time Count, or PIT Count, is a survey of people that are homeless conducted over one night in January across the United States. The PIT Count is the most reliable way we have to know how many people in our community are living on the street or in shelters. In Orange County, the number of homeless residents ballooned to never before seen heights in 2024.

Over the past five years, the County of Orange and many cities in Orange County have had a specific focus on building shelters and permanent supportive housing to provide the necessary homes for people living on the streets. United Way of Orange County has taken a slightly different approach, where they’ve worked to place homeless households in existing homes and apartments using Housing Choice Vouchers through their United to End Homelessness program. All of these efforts are commendable and have been fairly effective on moving people from the streets into housing. There have been over 1,000 permanent supportive housing apartments built since 2019 or that are currently under construction in Orange County, and United to End Homelessness has placed hundreds more homeless individuals and families into housing. And yet, the number of homeless residents keeps growing.

In 2019, Orange County had a total of 6,860 homeless residents. By 2022, due to the hard work of the County and cities, and because of all of the housing and economic stabilization policies during the pandemic, the homeless population dropped to 5,718 people. Unfortunately, now in 2024 the homeless population is back above its high from 2019 with 7,322 people living in shelters and on the streets. You can see this increase when driving around Santa Ana and in Anaheim around Disneyland, and even in our neighborhoods.

While this is a significant increase, it’s a much more moderate increase than California as a while or the counties surrounding Orange County. The work Orange County has done to move people into homes has paid off by ensuring our homeless population isn’t even bigger than it currently is. Between 2019 and 2023, California saw a 20% increase in homelessness, while the surrounding counties saw a staggering 29% increase. With these new Orange County numbers for 2024, the county has seen a much more modest 7% increase in homelessness since 2019. While any increase is bad, the more modest increase seen in OC is evidence that the County’s efforts have had a positive impact.

And yet, the homelessness epidemic is growing.

At this point, we should be reassessing how we are addressing homelessness and why our considerable efforts have failed to house the homeless. Why is it that Orange County has moved thousands of people off the streets since 2019, and yet there are nearly 500 more people living in homelessness today than five years ago?

The obvious answer is that people are becoming homeless faster than new housing can be built for them. By focusing on ending homelessness by housing the homeless, we’ve completely ignored any policies that would prevent the housed from becoming homeless in the first place.

There are many good reasons to focus on preventing homelessness rather than addressing homelessness once people are on the street. First and most importantly, it is simply more humane to keep people from becoming homeless. Being homeless is traumatic for people and affects them for the rest of their lives. Homelessness often leads to substance abuse and mental health issues, even when people didn’t have those issues prior to becoming homeless.

Even if you’re a heartless SOB, unmoved by the human toll of homelessness, there are still good reasons to prefer preventing homelessness before it happens. It is much less expensive to ensure people don’t become homeless than to rehouse them once they are homeless. Very often, homelessness creates mental health and substance abuse issues, especially for people who are chronically homeless. Once these issues are present, people require supportive services in order to stabilize their lives enough to remain housed once housing is available. More than anything else, it is these supportive services that drive the cost of permanent supportive housing. To avoid the cost of these services, we must focus on ensuring people don’t become homeless in the first place.

As Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern successfully argue in their book, homelessness is a housing problem. Fundamentally, the rate of homelessness is driven by the availability of homes. While personal factors like mental illness, addiction, job loss, and family dynamics often determine who becomes homeless, a lack of available housing determines how many people become homeless.

The first obvious solution then is to simply build more homes. They don’t need to be deed-restricted or subsidized, simply building any type of home will help, but we need a lot of them. This is no a fast solution to homelessness, but in the long run it’s the surest solution. Unfortunately, in the meantime, many families will be displaced, suffer living on the streets, and be irreparably harmed in the process. We must also look to solutions that have more immediate effect.

One place to look is at the policies that reduced homelessness between 2019 and 2022. Most importantly were the twin policies of an eviction moratorium and cash assistance to households. While these policies might not work long-term, they do point to policies that might. Some policies that should be considered include a low-barrier cash assistance program for renters that can’t pay their rent due to short-term unforeseen circumstances (i.e. a rent increase, job loss, car repairs, medical bills, etc.), moderate rent control that limits annual rent increase to inflation plus a couple percent, or a ban on no-fault evictions. These policies would greatly stabilize the housing situation of people living on the edge of homelessness and reduce the number of people becoming homeless in the first place.

The County of Orange and OC cities should expand the range of policies they pursue to end homelessness beyond building permanent supportive housing. More important than moving people from the streets into homes is preventing people from becoming homeless. Currently we have no policies to prevent homelessness but to end homelessness we must pivot our policy approach from rehousing to prevention.