Leaders From All 9 Bay Area Counties Announce Plan To Shrink Homelessness By 75%

Local and state leaders, housing experts, businesses and social justice advocates from all nine Bay Area counties have united to create a Regional Action Plan that aims to house 75 percent of the area’s homeless population by 2024.

After a year of planning, the multi-pronged strategy was announced at a virtual news conference on Tuesday.

There, Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez, state Assemblymember David Chiu, D-San Francisco, and leaders from All Home, the nonprofit that is leading this effort, conceded that this was an ambitious goal.

The Bay Area has more than 35,000 individuals living in the region’s streets, according to a 2019 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development report, and that number may have gone up since the pandemic’s start.

In three years, the goal is to bring that number down to 10,000 individuals.

“Anybody who’s lived in the Bay Area for any length of time knows that is a very audacious goal,” said Ken Kirkey, chief partnership officer at All Home. “But we believe it is achievable in part because the plan has an integrated approach with a simultaneous provision of things that in the past we have pitted against each other.”

The strategy has lots of moving parts but focuses on two main areas: creating more housing and preventing more people from falling into homelessness.

The Regional Action Plan, commonly referred to as RAP, has an initial focus on extremely low-income residents with an emphasis on racial equity.

“We actually are seeing more people fall into homelessness faster than we can rehouse them,” said Sherilyn Adams, executive director of the non-profit Larkin Street Youth Services. “Cost-effective investment and prevention can keep our families and our individuals stable and housed.”

To Adams and the rest of the coalition, that means providing accelerated cash payments, income-targeted rental assistance and other housing support from the state and federal level to people impacted by Covid-19.

To address the racial inequities, the coalition is calling on the state to create and expand practices to measure equity levels across California to observe progress and increase accountability for outcomes by tying funding to demonstrated progress toward closing disparities.

It also calls on counties to extend eviction moratoria for at least 60 days if the state’s moratorium, set to expire on June 30, is not extended.

The second major component of the RAP is actually getting people into interim or permanent housing.

The coalition plans to do this using what they call the 1-2-4 framework.

Essentially the plan outlines that for every one unit of interim housing built, there should be two units of permanent housing and four units of homeless prevention interventions to keep people housed.

“The one to four, that ratio is our analysis of the Bay Area homelessness population writ large,” Kirkey said. “When that is brought to a county level that might look different in Santa Clara County ... than in Sonoma County.”

However, Kirkey said the coalition intends to work with individual counties to find a tailored approach.

All of the aforementioned ideas brought by the coalition are not new, but a regional, comprehensive plan with input and organizing from the Governor’s Office, local governments, philanthropic partners and many others is new, the leaders said.

And it could allow the region to be more fluid in the way that funding is used to address the trans-jurisdictional issue that is homelessness.

“By working together we're going to be able to change the trajectory of a whole number of initiatives, including how we fund permanent supportive housing, how we fund the services that people need,” Chavez said.

All Home founder and CEO Tomiquia Moss said this is because counties can communicate and work together to find gaps in funding.

This is necessary because resources are often specifically tied to local or county jurisdictions and cannot to be shared across geographies, Moss said.

“Our region is interconnected, and we need to have our policies and systems be connected in a way that allows people to be served,” Moss said.

The coalition includes the mayors of San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, local elected officials from all nine Bay Area counties, Facebook, Salesforce, Kaiser Permanente, Goodwill, and Destination Home, among many other partners.

11 Comments

  1. Will someone remind me to comment on the success or failure of this plan in 3 years?

    Over the past 20 years or more, virtually every major city in CA has announced multiple “five year “ plans to eliminate homelessness. The result, in every case, has been an increase in homelessness.

    These virtue-signaling Pollyannas need to be held accountable for their intellectually challenged flights of self-abuse.

    I can almost hear their sotto voce dialogue, “Hey kids, let’s make this a regional issue so none of us have to take any local heat for our failure to solve the problem.”

  2. “To address the racial inequities, the coalition is calling on the state to create and expand practices to measure equity levels across California to observe progress and increase accountability for outcomes by tying funding to demonstrated progress toward closing disparities.”

    Politicians keep trying to, illegally in California, bring race into the picture as they hand out services. You can “equity” all you want but allowing politicians to provide special treatment for specific races was deemed repugnant by voters and rejected at the last election. Looks like we’ll need a new initiative to hold politicians criminally liable for violating this California law. It’s especially egregious when the politicians try to cook the books and narrowly use income and other factors to provide special treatment to specific races. Even if that isn’t technically illegal (which I think should be questioned in the courts) it is ethically and morally wrong.

  3. We spent a billion dollars under Chavez’s watch in Santa Clara county and things took a significant turn for the worse. One thing for sure is we don’t need to throw more money at this problem. We need new leaders.

  4. Another doomed to fail, tax payer funded virtue signaling extravaganza. Will this program make public the expenditures for payroll and monies diverted to the various “non-profits” that will surely be lining up at the trough? Will it take an honest look at how this type of program only attracts a new wave of homeless people to the region?
    I guess it doesn’t really matter; what’s important is that warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you’ve convinced yourself that you’re helping others(but really aren’t).

  5. kèo cúp c1 Football going to school start out slow but is now on for the major nights. Some would even say that college has several more followers than nationwide football nba. From the tailgating parties, fans that paint their entire body, even if college nfl.

  6. It’s official, government officials admit their brains have shrunk past 75% of normal capacity.

    Personally, I never thought they had any “brains.”

    David S. Wall

  7. I missed the part of how much money this will cost?

    Do we already have the funding, or will my wallet be raided again? Shall we divert our gas tax and property taxes to this noble cause, too make all of these NGO CEO’s can receive large salaries, bonuses and benefits packages?

    At some point we have to acknowledge that throwing more money at the issue, on top of the billions we have already spent and committed, is just not going to make a difference. When do we create a plan that provides solid short term help, and requires the homeless to become responsible for themselves?

    Does anyone have details for Santa Clara County that show how many homeless have been housed each year for the past 10 years? How many individuals become self reliant and moved on? How many spaces/units does the county currently have available for housing? How long have the occupants resided in those spaces?

    Also, we need to be honest about the fact that San Jose and Santa Clara County will never have any significant amount of affordable housing, our political leaders have made sure of that with their wish-washy policies and constant backroom deals for political pundits.

  8. My biggest challenge is that everyone is afraid to tackle the elephant in the room. Many people are difficult to help. Also, personal responsibility is never mentioned in regard to any of people who find themselves homeless. And then there are those particular idiots that believe people should be free to live where they want, and do drugs and throw trash wherever they want with no consequences. I will agree that housing is a right, if those being housed can agree to the societal and community standards for maintaining a healthy neighborhood and home. I also believe we should forcibly remove the people unable to help themselves due to addiction and mental illness. If they don’t like it, they can choose to be homeless somewhere else.

  9. How can you have that smiling sack of gas in that photo pretend for one minute she gives a rat’s fart about a homeless person? She was the D3 queen as the homeless numbers mounted and the thugs, dealers, pimps and panderers all snuck in and invaded the homeless population!! They have managed to reign terror on it since she than. She took a swing at the Mayor seat after she ripped everyone off in the Trash Scandal but got clowned by the skinny guy with a flag tie. Remember, she won the D3 seat with a racist hit piece against Tony, a black man who actually lived in the neighborhood long before old Cindy the smoke stack moved in to play politics. You can’t let people like her continue to babble about what they are doing for anyone…she should have been in jail with the guy who was licking the stamps..

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