California treats homelessness spending as action. That’s not a measure of success

California is spending billions on homelessness prevention without the governance infrastructure to know whether it is working. I watched that failure happen firsthand.

I remember when a mother in Sacramento County was facing eviction and trying to find help before she and her children lost their housing. For two months, she called 211 and the county’s Department of Human Assistance looking for answers. Each system referred her to the other. Back and forth, week after week, neither could tell her what assistance was actually available or who owned the process.

I was on the other side of the phone.

For more than 11 years, I worked as a human services specialist for the county, helping administer CalFresh, CalWORKs and Medi-Cal benefits. I have seen California’s safety net from the inside. What recent CalMatters coverage highlighted is not simply a data problem — it is a governance failure.

That mother I tried to help was not “falling through the cracks.” The cracks were built into the system itself. Agencies operate in silos, each assuming the other has the answer. Meanwhile, the person in crisis remains stuck in the middle.

A UC San Francisco study found that a third of California’s unhoused adults were long term leaseholders who had been evicted, many for the first time. An eviction order increases the probability of homelessness by more than 300%.

We understand the pathway into homelessness. What California still lacks is a coordinated system designed to interrupt it before families lose housing.

Thanks to my work, I see the issue clearly: California funded multiple rounds of homelessness prevention programs without requiring measurable outcome reporting tied to continued investment.

When it comes to project management, no responsible organization would continue approving phase after phase of funding without evidence that prior phases produced results. Yet California distributed billions through the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention program while failing to build consistent statewide accountability measures.

The California Interagency Council on Homelessness was intended to serve as the oversight layer. In 2021, it was directed to collect statewide homelessness program data. It completed one report, then largely disappeared from public visibility, as a scathing state audit found three years ago.

That is not effective governance. It is the appearance of governance.

California has focused heavily on outputs, such as dollars distributed, shelter beds funded and services launched. But outputs are not outcomes. The real question is whether people remained housed six or 12 months later. Too often, the state has labeled activity as success.

Frontline workers did not create this problem. The failure happened upstream in the design of the system itself.

Senate Bill 1160, which would require county courts to report eviction outcomes by ZIP code, is an important step and should pass. But data alone will not fix a governance design problem.

California must require measurable outcome reporting as a condition of continued homelessness prevention funding. The interagency council must function as an active oversight body with real authority and accountability. Most importantly, the state must treat the person in crisis as the unit of measurement, not simply the dollar distributed.

At some point that mother stopped calling. I do not know whether she kept her housing, entered a shelter or became homeless. The system didn’t require anyone to track the answer.

That is the real cost of operating without accountability.