County homelessness programs sometimes don't track key information, report finds

“Unfollowed.” “Not readily available.” “To be determined.”

Those phrases appear repeatedly in a new assessment of dozens of homeless programs overseen by San Diego County, which found that officials aren’t tracking key information about crucial services.

THE “Enterprise-wide homelessness assessment” further pointed out that some initiatives measured success in different ways, making their effectiveness difficult to assess, while others lacked clear objectives.

“Deploying services to meet the needs of growing numbers of unhoused people has been the priority,” the report says, “with monitoring of works and the establishment of data tracking systems a secondary priority.”

The resulting patchwork of programs and funding makes aid distribution difficult. “Many people experiencing or on the verge of homelessness do not know how to navigate and connect to available resources,” the analysts wrote, while “staff overseeing programs have repeatedly reported difficulties related to to the lack of case management tools to support their work.

The departmental supervisory council commissioned the study late last yearand officials hired Deloitte Consulting LLP in May to conduct the analysis. The report is dated November 2024, but does not yet appear to have been presented at a public meeting. A copy was shared with the San Diego Union-Tribune by the office of board President Nora Vargas.

“The results highlighted the need for emergency and temporary housing, better data collection, stronger performance measures and deeper collaboration,” Vargas said in a statement. “I am committed to acting on these findings.”

When analysts examined the county’s 46 homeless programs, a problem quickly emerged: They were funded by 28 separate funds from multiple levels of government as well as private donors, many of which had different requirements for how whose work needed to be done. documented.

Worse, 18 programs rely at least in part on money that could soon run out. The constant threat of closure then makes long-term planning and building trust within a community difficult, the report says.

Other cases had the opposite problem: available funds were not spent. The Home Start program, for example, which helps people on probation find housing, used only a little more than half of its roughly $800,000 budget last fiscal year, according to the annexes of the report. It was by no means alone.

Tamera Kohler, CEO of the Regional Homeless Task Force, noted that complicated spending rules and tight donor deadlines often made it difficult for organizations to use all the funding they had. “We’re leaving money on the table,” she said in an interview.

Analysts recommended the county find more stable funding sources, create a unified tracking system for how money is spent and expand services in unincorporated areas, among other suggestions.

Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe promised to increase transparency. “We cannot afford to invest money in programs with minimal to no results,” she said in a statement.

The report contained some good news.

Vouchers that help cover rent have been more successful in keeping people in housing than similar efforts in other parts of the country, although San Diego’s program was significantly more expensive, likely due to the cost of living high in the region, the analysts wrote. The county has also helped fund nearly 200 permanent supportive housing units over the past five years and has more than 630 more in the pipeline.

The assessment also put price tags on important services. Cleaning up just one cubic yard of debris in an encampment could cost anywhere from $189 to more than $2,000, depending on the extent of the outreach efforts that accompanied the cleanup, the report said.

The contract with Deloitte cost $102,064, according to county spokeswoman Tammy Glenn.