Shelters in Orange County have eaten up nearly a third of the county’s almost $1 billion spent addressing the homelessness crisis over the past seven years, but records show they don’t help many people get off the streets.
That’s starting to open questions from activists and homeless service providers on what the future of homeless response should look like in Orange County as the county’s own reports show the problem isn’t getting any better.
Voice of OC requested data from a dozen of Orange County’s shelters, and found most of them struggle to move more than 20% of their residents into housing each year or even show how many people are moving into housing at all.
“There’s no evidence at all that showed we were putting a high enough number of people into permanent housing for the cost,” said Paul Leon, former CEO of nonprofit the Illumination Foundation, which operates shelters in Fullerton and Santa Ana, in an interview on Monday.
In his current job as CEO for National Healthcare and Housing Advisors, he said the abandonment of homeless shelters is a trend happening nationwide.
“The model and system just stopped working because there’s not enough affordable housing,” Leon said. “I don’t know moving forward that anyone is building and using big shelters.”
Eve Garrow, a senior policy advisor for the American Civil Liberties Union, agreed.
“I think that shelters tend to simply warehouse people for extended periods of time,” Garrow said in a Tuesday interview. “There’s no cost argument and there’s no policy argument for investing in shelters rather than housing.”
County Supervisors Don’t Question Shelter Spending
In their last meeting on March 26, Orange County supervisors renewed the contract for nonprofit Mercy House to keep operating the Bridges at Kraemer Shelter in Anaheim despite the fact they failed to meet any of the county’s goals for people leaving homelessness over the past two years.
Last year, the shelter managed to place around 45 of its 406 visitors into housing, or a success rate of around 11% – the benchmark set by the county was 30%.
“Since the increase of 20 percent to 30 percent for the performance metric related to exits into permanent housing in 2021, Mercy House has struggled with meeting the performance metric,” wrote county staff in their report. “However … there have been less permanent housing opportunities for participants to transition to.”
Despite staff raising concerns about the shelter’s poor performance, saying they’d be regularly checking in with them to help bring their numbers up, county supervisors approved the new contract with just over five minutes of discussion.
In a Wednesday interview, Supervisor Doug Chaffee defended the work of the county shelters, saying they had plenty of people who want to go into housing but nowhere to send them.
“The issue we’ve run into is where do they go?” Chaffee said. “I think if we had the ability to place them somewhere, we’d see those numbers change.”
Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento declined to comment on past spending, saying the decisions were made before his time on the board, but said that going forward he wanted to focus on keeping people out of homelessness to begin with in a statement to Voice of OC.
“I don’t doubt that the expenditures were made with the best intentions to address the multi-faceted issues associated with being unhoused,” Sarmiento wrote. “I would like to continue to focus on preemptive measures as we work hard to provide services to people already experiencing homelessness.”
No other supervisors responded to requests for comment.
Next week, county supervisors are set to expand their contract with nonprofit People Assisting the Homeless, also known as PATH, for its operation of the county’s Yale Shelter in Santa Ana, adding in another $1 million to the contract, bringing it to a total of $7.8 million for this year.
But the shelter’s own statistics show it only helped 35 people exit homelessness this fiscal year, or about 3% of homeless people who passed through its doors, according to county spokeswoman Molly Nichelson.
“We have more individuals who desire housing, but the current housing supply and housing resources do not match the needs at this time,” Nichelson said in a text.
Tyler Renner, a spokesperson for PATH, didn’t dispute the center’s 3% success rate over the past year, saying exit rates “vary across the regions we serve” in a Wednesday statement.
“We work with our guests to maximize successful exits at Yale, including those to permanent housing, and with the OC homeless system of care resources available,” Renner wrote.
Shelters Struggle Reducing Homelessness Countywide
The same struggle is true for many of the shelters not operated by the county, many of which don’t publicly disclose how many of their residents actually get into permanent housing.
In Anaheim, the city’s emergency shelter operated by the Salvation Army has managed to move 345 people into housing since it opened in 2019, a success rate of just under 15% for the 2,341 people who have used the shelter.
“Coming to a shelter is a big change, for the better for most and challenging for others. Not everyone is ready to commit to the first step of getting out of homelessness,” wrote Erin Ryan, a spokesperson for the city, in an email when asked about the shelter’s performance.
In other cities, it’s a similar story.
Huntington Beach’s Navigation Center, which is run by Mercy House, reported about 18% of its shelter occupants made it into permanent housing last year.
The Buena Park Navigation Center, also run by Mercy House, reported just over 10% of its residents making their way into housing in their report for last year.
Laguna Beach reported 12 people moved into housing from July to February, but it’s unclear how many people were served by the shelter over that time.
The city of Costa Mesa reported that over the past nine months, about 13% of the 216 people in its shelter made it into housing, while another 10% were matched to a “housing opportunity,” but are still looking for a unit.
Since the Santa Ana Navigation Center opened in May 2022, it has helped 93 people exit homelessness, or about four people a month.
City staff weren’t able to answer how many homeless people had passed through the shelter’s doors, noting they recorded 1,819 people had entered, but that some of those could be the same person coming back multiple times.
Operators for the Placentia and Fullerton Navigation Centers did not respond to requests for comment.
The only city that appears to buck that trend is Tustin, who reported their emergency shelter moved about 40% of the homeless people in the shelter into housing over the past four years.
When asked about their data, city spokesperson Stephanie Najera said it was possible that Tustin “defines ‘housing’ broader than other shelters,” in a statement to Voice of OC.
“Housing can be moving in with family or friends. Housing can be moving into transitional housing or a facility for treatment. Housing can be temporary with a plan beyond the temporary housing,” Najera wrote. “We figure out what getting housing looks like for them.”
What Could the Future Look Like?
While the future of the county’s homeless shelters are an open question, activists agree there are better ways to handle the problem.
“The problem with the shelters is if you put people in the shelters, they tend to get institutionalized. They kind of just stay there,” Leon said. “It works, just not for the masses.”
Leon, who’s now CEO for National Healthcare and Housing Advisors, pointed to a new campus model, highlighting cities like Long Beach that are trying it and showing promising results.
The campus model places numerous resources together, like a walk-in shelter, housing and healthcare, allowing people at different points in exiting homelessness to all come to the same spot.
While the campuses can’t hold as many people inside as a shelter can, Leon said they’re much more effective at helping people get treatment and get off the street.
“You have the whole continuum right there. Shelter on the front end, recuperative care in the middle, and permanent housing at the end,” Leon said. “If you’re in a shelter and you don’t use that housing and you lose it, you’re out. In a campus model, you can stay on the same campus and go backwards.”
He also highlighted that programs like Long Beach’s can cost less to run than a homeless shelter by billing health insurance plans for the recuperative care, and admitted that even that system wouldn’t work for everyone.
“There’s always that 10% that’s not going to come in anyway,” Leon said. “Either way, you’re still going to have to enforce a little bit.”
Garrow said that for the existing shelters to work, the county has to invest more of its own funding into building housing.
“When you look at the funding they commit to actual affordable housing from their discretionary budget, it’s such a small amount,” Garrow said.
She also highlighted how many of the people who escape homelessness end up returning quickly because they can’t afford the housing they’re set up with.
“There’s this sort of churning of people in and out of temporary housing situations. Shelters, the streets, and back again,” Garrow said. “It can only be alleviated through affordable housing, and we think this is what the board needs to be focusing on.”
Chaffee said that going forward, he wants to focus on programs to help prevent people from falling into homelessness in the first place, noting a pilot program his office hosted offering rental assistance received hundreds of requests for aid.
“My current emphasis where we can do it is prevention,” Chaffee said. “Overtime if you can do that, you’ll shrink the number of homeless people out there and people are spared the homeless adventure if you can call it that.”
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @NBiesiada.
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