California spends billions preventing homelessness, but it’s fighting in the dark

Gov. Gavin Newsom recently announced the state would be distributing $145.4 million to eight California regions in an effort to end homelessness. This is the sixth round of Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention grants since 2019. The state legislature has appropriated $5 billion for the program, to fund shelter beds, social services, rental assistance and subsidies. 

Rental assistance is a key part of homelessness prevention for good reason — eviction for nonpayment of rent is driving homelessness across the state, because of high housing costs. 

A third of the state’s unhoused adults were long-term leaseholders who had been evicted, many for the first time, a recent study by the UC-San Francisco Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative found. In fact, an eviction order increases the probability of becoming homeless by more than 300%, relative to those who are not evicted, and these effects can persist years after eviction.

Last year 13% of low-income households in California — more than 800,000 renters — reported facing eviction. If California is going to fix its homelessness crisis, it must thoroughly understand this phenomenon. 

Unfortunately policymakers responsible for curbing evictions and lowering rates of homelessness are too often working in the dark. They lack critical information about eviction cases across the state. 

When a landlord files a notice to evict, courts typically record and report that information to the California Judicial Council, the policymaking body for the state’s 58 county superior court systems. 

But not all eviction filings result in evictions, and there is no standard to report what happens after the paperwork is served. The Judicial Council does not mandate reporting legal outcomes, so counties have adopted various approaches to documenting and making this information available to the public. 

And counties with the largest number of eviction cases — Los Angeles, Riverside, Sacramento, and San Diego — don’t report outcomes at all.

Eviction court outcomes are different, and in many ways more important, than filings.

Filings represent the number of evictions initiated, while outcomes indicate what actually happened during the legal process — whether a tenant lost their home, settled with their landlord, or had their case dismissed, for example. Outcomes provide a much more detailed picture about who evictions are hurting, where they are happening most and what is driving them. 

Without a full picture of why evictions are happening across the state, it’s hard to craft effective policy solutions that keep people housed. And policymakers who can’t observe the difference between eviction filings and actual evictions risk misdirecting the state’s finite resources.

In recent years, legislators have tried to fix this problem. A bill introduced in 2023 would have standardized reporting across the state, but Newsom vetoed it, citing budget concerns. Two years later, a similar bill died in the state Senate Appropriations Committee. 

The governor and Legislature are making it difficult for jurisdictions to understand one of the primary drivers of homelessness by obstructing eviction data accessibility.

But help may be on the way. In February, state Sen. María Elena Durazo sponsored Senate Bill 1160, which would require California’s county superior courts to provide the Judicial Council with information about eviction cases — called unlawful detainer cases —  aggregated by ZIP code, each month. 

If passed, this bill would go a long way toward helping California embrace a data-driven homelessness prevention policy. 

Relevant data is not limited to eviction filings and outcomes. Local municipalities should develop comprehensive rent registries and dashboards that present data on rental harassment and habitability complaints and other issues that advocates say are closely related to evictions. 

The more Californians know about what is driving housing insecurity in the state, the better new policy solutions can prevent it.