State homeless prevention plan modeled on Santa Clara County

Riding on the coattails of Santa Clara County’s homelessness prevention program, California will be creating its own statewide prevention strategy.

State officials are planning out their first homelessness prevention strategy after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1924 last month. The law requires the California Interagency Council on Homelessness to come up with a blueprint for measurable prevention goals and an action plan by July 1, 2028. It also tasks the council with identifying efforts with the highest impact locally and making recommendations for funding them in the future. Because of budgetary constraints, the law does not include funding for homelessness prevention programs — meaning it could be up to cities and counties to pay for.

“It’s an important transformation for the state to move in this direction,” Michael Feuer, senior policy advisor at nonprofit Inner City Law Center, one of the co-sponsors of AB 1924, told San José Spotlight. “Having a stabilized prevention strategy is a first step to really making the kind of progress we need in reducing homelessness. It’s also much less expensive to prevent someone from falling into homelessness than having to serve that person once they become homeless.”

Nearly 190,000 Californians experience homelessness for the first time each year. In Santa Clara County, homelessness reached an all-time high of more than 10,700 people last year. Nearly 60% of homeless residents surveyed in the county’s point-in-time count in 2025 said they were homeless for the first time in their lives.

For every person who gets housed in Santa Clara County, nearly two become homeless. Statewide, three people become homeless for every one person housed.

Feuer said it’s essential to keep people housed before they become homeless, which becomes more expensive and difficult for them to get back on their feet.

“With that math, we’re never going to make meaningful progress on homelessness unless we prevent the inflow into homelessness in the first place,” he said.

The idea for a homelessness prevention strategy started incubating in Santa Clara County in 2017, spurred by the ballooning numbers of homeless people. Nonprofit Destination: Home started a program to provide rental assistance, case management and legal support to hundreds of families on the brink of eviction, and received help from private funders to make the work possible.

“The statewide prevention strategy will build on our community’s successful prevention model,” Destination: Home spokesperson Chelsea Muller told San José Spotlight. “The Santa Clara County Homelessness Prevention System’s effectiveness is proven by both third-party researchers and local outcomes. Our local model provides families at imminent risk of homelessness the right help at the right time through four essential components: shared assessment tool, rapid response, flexible funding and embedded case management.”

In 2024, Santa Clara County adopted the program into its own homelessness prevention strategy and scaled it countywide.

The program has helped approximately 44,000 county residents avoid living on the streets. A randomized control trial found 90% of residents who received this assistance remained housed two years later, according to data collected by the University of Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities.

Santa Clara County’s homelessness prevention program helps more than 2,600 families remain housed every year, according to county officials.

“The county is pleased to see that California is implementing a statewide homelessness prevention strategy, and we are eager to share the success of our local program to inform the statewide strategy,” Kathryn Kaminski, director of the county Office of Supportive Housing, told San José Spotlight. “(The program) has emerged as a national model, and efforts to replicate and scale (it) are underway in 10 communities across the United States through an initiative called Right at Home USA.”

Destination: Home is piloting a national homelessness prevention program. Earlier this year, it announced a partnership with 10 different organizations across the U.S. to bring rental assistance and case management for people facing eviction, with a goal of helping more than 10,000 families remain stably housed. These organizations span both large and small cities, rural areas and tribal communities in Minnesota, Alaska, Atlanta, Georgia, Asheville, North Carolina and more.

At least $5 million will be given to each community to serve 1,500 households over five years. By incubating homelessness prevention pilot programs in various locations, Destination: Home is making the case that prevention is a necessary strategy that can be widely adopted.

For now, advocates believe the move to adopt a statewide strategy could lead to other states following suit.

“It’s always very challenging to move from responding to a problem to trying to stop it before it happens. Yet I think that that’s the promising approach now,” Feuer said.  “I think this will put California in the forefront of national efforts to put homelessness prevention at the center of homeless policy.”

Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X.