The Brief

California counties are reporting decreases in homelessness, suggesting the state is finally making progress in solving one of its most difficult and persistent problems.

But even as Gov. Gavin Newsom and local officials are celebrating, the money that made those wins possible is at risk of evaporating.

President Donald Trump’s administration this month tried to block organizations that don’t support its social agenda from accessing federal homeless housing funds — causing experts in the field to worry that politically liberal California could find itself blacklisted from crucial dollars.

Cuts to state homelessness funding are also on the horizon, and some local jurisdictions are pulling back funds as they struggle with their own budget deficits. That has counties, nonprofits and industry experts worried California’s homeless counts will soon go right back up.

“I do think that we’re doing something right,” Sharon Rapport, director of California state policy for the Corporation for Supportive Housing, said of the recent decreases. “That all may come to a crashing end with a lot of concerns with what’s happening at the federal level, federal policy changing and funding cuts happening.”

Of the 29 places in California that reported an official homeless census this year, more than half saw a decrease compared to 2024, according to an analysis of point-in-time counts by the Hub for Urban Initiatives. That includes drops of about a quarter in Contra Costa and Sonoma counties, 20% in Santa Cruz County, 16% in Ventura County and 14% in Merced County.

San Diego and Los Angeles counties each saw a decrease of less than 10%. For LA County, this marks the second year in a row that homelessness is down.

But funding worries loom like a black cloud over those promising results. As purse strings tighten, service providers will have to cut staff, programs and bed capacity, meaning they can help fewer homeless people. For years, California cities, counties and nonprofits have been pushing the Newsom administration to provide an ongoing source of homeless funding, so service providers can plan ahead without worrying each year about how much money they’ll get.

Some organizations already are feeling the squeeze.

From December through July, Union Station Homeless Services in Los Angeles County turned away 700 families who needed housing, said CEO Katie Hill.

“We just don’t have anything available for them,” Hill said.

The county cut housing vouchers as the city and county struggled with financial fallout from recent wildfires, falling property tax revenues and increasing legal payouts.

Other organizations are closing their doors for good. Downtown Streets Team, which helps unhoused residents in 16 California cities find housing while earning money cleaning up local streets, plans to close next month after two decades of service.

“The financial and political environment we operate in has shifted dramatically in recent months,” CEO Julie Gardner said in an emailed statement. “During this time, (Downtown Streets Team) lost several significant contracts and grants, creating a multi-million-dollar loss in overall funding. When combined with other factors, including rapidly rising operational costs, these losses made it impossible to continue running the organization in a financially sustainable way.”

‘I just don’t think we’re going to see that funding’

Congress in 2023 appropriated $75 million for something called the Continuum of Care Builds grant, which was supposed to help support the construction of new homeless housing. Former President Joe Biden’s administration started the application process for those grants in 2024. When Trump took the helm in 2025, his administration re-started the process with new criteria, making applicants apply again.

Then, at the start of September, the Trump administration made everyone apply a third time — with a very different set of criteria seeming to disqualify organizations that support trans clients, use “harm reduction” strategies to prevent drug overdose deaths or operate in a “sanctuary city.”

Applicants had to attest that they don’t deny the “sex binary in humans or promote the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic.” They had to promise not to distribute drug paraphernalia or allow the use of drugs on their property.

Applicants also had to attest that they operate in a city, county or state that cooperates with federal immigration enforcement. Newsom has resisted Trump’s immigration crackdown at a state level, and recently signed a set of bills intended to further check ICE.

And applicants were required to operate in a city, county or state that prohibits public camping and enforces that rule. That one could be an easier lift: Arrests and citations for camping-related activities have soared in some California cities over the past year, after the U.S. Supreme Court gave cities more leeway to crack down, and Newsom encouraged cities to ban camping. But two recent statewide attempts to ban homeless camps from near schools and other areas fell flat.

The new funding rules were a major blow to Contra Costa County-based Hope Solutions, which was initially selected to receive $5.5 million to build 15 tiny homes for homeless 18-24-year-olds in Pittsburg. After staff spent at least 100 hours completing the project proposal, they learned this month that they’d no longer qualify because of the new criteria. The Pittsburg Police Department says it does not participate in immigration enforcement. In addition, the new program rules specify the money must go to buildings that serve elderly residents — an about-face that takes Hope Solutions’ youth project out of the running.

“It felt like a gut punch,” said CEO Deanne Pearn, “and really disheartening to know that we had spent so much time and asked so much of our county partners and others, and that that time could have been spent elsewhere.”

The camp where a person experiencing homelessness lives on a hillside above U.S. Route 50 in Sacramento, on Oct. 25, 2024.

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Fred Greaves

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CalMatters

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Hope Solutions is still moving forward with the project, which Pearn hopes the organization can fund with its own financial reserves. But that means the nonprofit won’t have that money for its next project.

The National Alliance to End Homelessness recently sued the Trump administration over the new grant conditions, claiming that all projects in California and three dozen other states would be ineligible for funds. Earlier this month, a federal judge sided with the Alliance, and temporarily barred the federal government from distributing those funds.

Now, that $75 million is frozen as the case moves forward.

While the new conditions at issue in the lawsuit apply only to one specific federal homelessness grant, experts worry it’s an ominous sign for California. Service providers expect applications to open this fall for the main source of federal homelessness funding — the Continuum of Care Program — which funneled about $600 million to California counties in 2023.

If that application poses similar requirements, California could be in trouble.

“Personally, I just don’t think we’re going to see that funding,” said Hill, of Union Station Homeless Services in Los Angeles County.

In a separate lawsuit, San Francisco and Santa Clara Counties sued the Trump administration over contracts that prevented recipients of federal homeless funds from using the money to promote “gender ideology,” “elective abortions” and “illegal immigration.” The counties won an early victory last month, when a judge temporarily blocked the administration from imposing those conditions.

Other federal cuts are looming, too. The Emergency Housing Vouchers program, which launched during the COVID-19 pandemic and now helps more than 15,000 Californians pay their rent, is expected to run out of money next year.

That’s not even counting the cuts to housing vouchers and other federal housing and homelessness programs Trump proposed in May, which are still being negotiated in Congress.

California turning a corner on homelessness

California appears to be decreasing its homeless population, according to the Hub for Urban Initiatives, a California organization that helps local communities shape their homelessness policy, apply for grants and survey their homeless populations.

The 29 California communities that counted and reported their homeless populations this year tallied a total of 131,209 people — a 4% decrease from what those same communities reported last year. That’s a significant step for a state where the homeless population has been stubbornly rising for years.

That data comes from the federally mandated homeless point-in-time count, where teams of volunteers count the unhoused people they see on the street on one night in January. The counts are imperfect, as volunteers can overlook people sleeping in out-of-the-way places, and different counties use different methods — while some places count every year, others count every other. Of the 44 “continuums of care” required to count in California (some small, rural communities combine multiple counties into one continuum of care), 14 didn’t count this year.

The federal housing department will release an official total for the state later this year.

Newsom trumpeted the initial decreases, taking credit for pouring money into homeless housing and other services. He’s not wrong.

Contra Costa County, which saw the state’s biggest drop in homelessness this year, attributes its success largely to the recent boost in state funding, said Christy Saxton, director of Health, Housing and Homeless Services for Contra Costa County. Over the past two years, the county increased its homeless shelter and housing capacity by more than a third.

A big piece of that was the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention program, which Newsom launched in the 2019-20 budget year to fill what until then had been a void of state homelessness funds. For the past few years, that program gave cities and counties $1 billion each year.

Those funds support programs such as Contra Costa County’s Delta Landing temporary housing site in Pittsburg, which opened 172 units in 2021. Until then, that part of the county had about 20 beds for its unhoused residents, Saxton said.

But instead of making that state funding ongoing, Newsom’s administration opted to dole it out in one-time grants each year, leaving cities and counties continually guessing what next year’s budget will bring.

This year, that state program will get no new funding (because of the glacial pace at which the state distributes these funds, cities and counties have yet to receive money from the last round). Next year, the amount is set to shrink to $500 million.

“We are significantly concerned about the cuts that are coming,” Saxton said, “because it has taken an influx of money in order to see those decreases, and we need that to continue on now more than ever.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected the Trump administration’s latest attempt to sideline the L.A. region’s lead homelessness agency from a $239 million federal funding process, clearing the way for the agency to complete an application due next month.

The three-judge Ninth Circuit panel denied the federal government's request for a stay pending appeal, which would have paused a lower court's order blocking its June suspension of LAHSA.

The decision Thursday allows LAHSA to continue to function and steer funding for local service providers who rely on that money to offer services and housing for unhoused people.

“This ruling provides greater stability at an important moment for Los Angeles,” Stephanie Graves, chair of LAHSA’s governing board, said in a statement. “Most importantly, it gives our region the opportunity to keep people housed, help more people find a path home, and give people hope,” her statement continued.

The judges wrote in the latest decision that the federal government failed to adequately explain why an immediate suspension of LAHSA in June was necessary to protect the public interest.

That suspension was put on hold in August by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, who ordered the federal government to restore LAHSA’s role in the region’s federal homelessness funding process while the case plays out.

Carter's injunction on LAHSA’s suspension is currently set to expire on Oct. 27.

The question of whether HUD’s suspension of LAHSA was ultimately lawful is still headed for trial, with a hearing before Carter expected in February.

What’s this fight about?

The legal dispute, at this stage, has focused primarily on who gets to control some key decisions about how $239 million in federal U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grants are spent on housing and services for unhoused people in L.A.

The nationwide deadline to apply for that funding is next week, on Sept. 30, although HUD recently extended the deadline to Oct. 14 for L.A.-area applicants.

HUD’s rules require service providers and public agencies in places like L.A. County to form local geographic bodies called “continuums of care” and designate one agency to apply on behalf of the whole region for federal funds dedicated to solving homelessness.

L.A.’s regional body designated LAHSA as that one agency.

This year, LAHSA staff have been working since April with homeless service providers and other municipal partners to prepare a funding application according to HUD’s guidelines.

Then HUD’s June suspension of LAHSA stymied that process.

The appeals court said the timing of HUD’s suspension left the Los Angeles region in the lurch since the suspension came after a deadline to name another designated applicant had passed.

“HUD chose to suspend LAHSA at a time when it would leave the Los Angeles region particularly vulnerable,” the panel wrote.

Ben Kay works for a homeless services nonprofit and leads L.A.'s Continuum of Care Board. In a statement shared with LAist, Kay said "HUD’s attempts to impose its agenda on our community have created uncertainty and chaos in Los Angeles."

He said the Ninth Circuit ruling recognizes that there is a local legal right to set priorities for addressing homelessness.

Alternatives considered

HUD’s proposed alternative — allowing individual service providers to apply directly for federal funding — was “extremely difficult if not virtually impossible to implement,” the judges wrote.

That approach, according to HUD’s lawyers, would ignore much of LAHSA’s prior decisions about how to spend federal dollars.

“HUD, in the direct to HUD process, will not rely on any priorities set by LAHSA,” Weili Shaw, a U.S. Department of Justice attorney, said at a hearing in the case held Tuesday in San Francisco. “That's expressly what HUD wants, is not to have to rely on LAHSA’s allocation and prioritization decisions.”

Thursday’s court decision means that the direct-to-HUD process is off the table, at least for now.

On Wednesday, a regional homelessness body recommended that, in case LAHSA remained suspended, L.A. County departments could handle the region’s application instead. That body, the L.A. Continuum of Care, is also soliciting applications for organizations to take on LAHSA’s key federal roles beginning next year, including the annual federal funding application and the homeless count.

LAHSA has indicated it will not compete to keep those roles itself next year. Other local government agencies, including L.A. County’s Department of Homeless Services and Housing, have applied to take those roles sometime in 2027.

What LAHSA said in court

At Tuesday's hearing in San Francisco, the panel focused on the fast-approaching deadline.

Keri Curtis Axel, LAHSA's attorney, argued her client is the only entity actually prepared to make that deadline.

She also said dozens of local homeless service providers who rely on LAHSA to apply on their behalf wouldn't qualify to apply under HUD's alternative process, potentially cutting them out of guaranteed funding entirely.

Attorneys for the Los Angeles Continuum of Care, the regional body responsible for coordinating the application said that HUD never gave it a real opportunity to name a replacement for LAHSA for the process happening now.

Attorney Shayla Myers told the panel her client formally asked HUD whether it could designate a new collaborative applicant during a 30-day response window this summer. HUD never responded, she said, instead proceeding with plans for its own direct-to-HUD process.

The fight over LAHSA's suspension took on new urgency since the First Circuit Court of Appeals revived HUD’s controversial funding guidelines last week. That cleared the way for HUD to reopen this year's funding competition on a tight timeline.

Gita O’Neill, LAHSA’s interim CEO, said the agency “is moving full speed to finalize” the L.A. region’s federal funding application, due Oct. 14.

“Our priority has always been keeping frontline services running and ensuring that federal funding reaches our service providers,” O’Neill said in a statement.

LAHSA’s leader also said the agency will work with HUD to make sure that previously approved grant funding is promptly disbursed and will continue to prepare for January’s 2027 homeless count.

HUD has until Dec. 1 to announce this year's awards under a congressional deadline.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said in a statement that it “stands by the lawfulness” of its suspension of LAHSA.

“The Department will comply with the Ninth Circuit's temporary order, which was made in part due to the quickly approaching deadline for CoC applications,” a department spokesperson said.

“HUD looks forward to seeing the Ninth Circuit's full resolution on the merits,” the statement continued.

A status conference in the original case — which will ultimately decide whether HUD’s suspension of LAHSA was legal — is currently scheduled for Sept. 30 in Judge Carter’s courtroom.

The Ninth Circuit is scheduled to hear oral arguments Oct. 19 on HUD's appeal of the preliminary injunction. The appeals court Thursday declined to pause the injunction while the case moves ahead, keeping it in effect. But the October hearing is where the judges will decide whether to uphold or overturn it.

If you're a fan of Indian food, there's a good chance you head to places like Artesia or Orange County when the craving strikes.

But there's a growing destination for Desi food you may not have heard of: Downtown Los Angeles.

Several Indian chefs have put down roots there in the past few years, and are doing their best to convince Angelenos there's more to the cuisine than the standard takeout or lunch buffet offerings.

Drawing on both street food tradition and a new confident creativity, they're producing dishes that arguably belong in a fine dining category.

Brick Lane

Take Brick Lane, a new Indian restaurant on the outskirts of the Arts District, near the 6th Street bridge, which opened earlier this year. The server arrives with a steaming plate holding what appears to be a large pie. The golden crust is topped with black sesame seeds; the server places it on the table and immediately begins carving a circle around its edges. Steam rises, and a rush of aromas and spices fills the air.

But it isn’t a pie; it’s dum biryani, a layered mixed-rice dish featuring marinated wild mushrooms, sealed and slow-baked, topped with a crispy puffed naan crust.

Executive Chef Sanjay Rawat at Brick Lane uses modern cooking techniques to execute beloved Indian flavors.

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Courtesy Brick Lane

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It’s the kind of dish that Sanjay Rawat, the executive chef, wants to showcase on his new restaurant menu. Originally from New Delhi, he left at 17 to train as a chef in Malaysia. Before opening Brick Lane, he ran Kahani at The Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel. In his Arts District space, Rawat is using a variety of techniques he’s picked up during his tenure, such as using his Santa Maria grill to prepare Malaysian-Indian branzino and offering his delicate take on dessert: Valencia-orange-cardamom tarts.

Cali Chilli

Tandoori Chicken Wings from Cali Chilli's downtown L.A. location.

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Joshua Mejia

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Cali Chili

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At Cali Chilli, on the border of Little Tokyo and downtown, owner Parveen Nair and Michelin-starred chef-collaborator Manjunath Mural have carved out their own path. They opened their Long Beach location in 2022, and their DTLA location in 2024. Mural also leads Song of India in Singapore, which has held a Michelin star since 2015. The pair experiment with their menu, which they dub "unauthentic Indian" — a series of dishes rooted in traditional Indian cuisine and expanded through the lens of a street-food narrative. Think nachos and quesadillas made with tandoori chicken alongside butter lobster in a Thai panang curry.

Baar Baar

Baar Baar's tasting menu begins with pani puris, a popular Indian street snack made with tamarind, mango, yogurt mousse, and raspberry chat masala.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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Further west, a short walk from Crypto.com Arena, is Baar Baar, which has been open since 2023. Executive chef Sujan Sarkar’s restaurant portfolio spans the U.S., including a sister Baar Baar location in New York, Tiya, a restaurant in San Francisco, and Indienne in Chicago, which holds a Michelin star. Sarkar has built a career pushing the boundaries of contemporary Indian cuisine. Diners can take advantage of their $55 prix-fixe menu, including a dahi puri canapé (tamarind, yogurt mousse, raspberry chaat masala), Cauliflower 65 (a riff on Chicken 65, with carrot pachadi, peanut chutney, thecha) and beef short ribs in Madras curry.

Why DTLA

Speaking with Nair and Rawat, I found that each chef saw an opportunity in downtown’s changing character: a steady flow of travelers for Nair and a growing, still-forming community for Rawat.

“In downtown, we get 60% travelers and say about 40% ... from the neighborhood," said Nair.

He says the area’s possibilities sparked Cali Chilli's innovative approach: "There was a vacuum ... the idea [of the restaurants] was conceived pretty much at the same time."

A look inside chef Sanjay Rawat's open kitchen at Brick Lane in the Arts District.

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Courtesty Brick Lane

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Meanwhile when Rawat first visited the future site of Brick Lane, near the 6th Street bridge, he wasn’t sure exactly where he was. “Looking from the outside, it made me think, where am I going?”

But when he entered the space, he knew he’d found the right place. With high ceilings and surrounded by large windows, the interior is filled with natural light.

“It's such a beautiful space. Whatever food you put into this space, it's just gonna shine.”

Just a ten-minute walk from Crypto Area, Baar Baar offers modern Indian cuisine with a unique twist.

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Courtesy of Baar Baar LA

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He also appreciates the location, too. “Arts District is a beautiful community, which is growing. ... Plus, it's a destination too,” he said.

Still, the chefs understand they have their work cut out for them to make their menus seen as high-end dining, beyond the traditional form Indian food has taken till now.

It’s going to take Indian cuisine in L.A. time to continue to modernize, Rawat said, to a point “where it is acceptable by other cultural groups or even by Indian people.”

The Legislature is forcing the city and county of Sacramento to try something unusual in their fight against homelessness, and both critics and supporters of the controversial plan say it could have broad implications for the rest of the state.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 802 on Sunday, which requires Sacramento, as well as all smaller cities within the county, to coordinate and form a joint powers authority that will lead the region’s homelessness response.

“Homelessness does not stop at jurisdictional boundaries,” Newsom wrote in a signing message, “and no city or county can solve this crisis alone.”

A joint powers authority is a public partnership where two or more local governments or agencies team up to jointly manage something. In Sacramento, the idea is that this new framework will allow the cities and county to better communicate and work together on homelessness – hopefully leading to more people getting off the streets.

Supporters say it’s a no-brainer, and they hope it will be an example to fix an age-old problem playing out in regions across the state: Cities and counties must work well together to effectively address homelessness, but they often don’t. On the other hand, opponents say forcing local governments to work together sets a bad precedent: Cooperation works best if it’s voluntary.

Meanwhile, this new experiment in co-governance is highly atypical for a number of reasons.

For one thing, this appears to be the first time the California Legislature has forced anyone to form a joint powers authority. Typically, those agreements are voluntary. In Sacramento, local jurisdictions chafing under this new mandate worry the new law will embolden the Legislature to do this again in other regions.

“This would be unprecedented, so it could have ramifications in 57 other counties,” said Sacramento County Supervisor Patrick Kennedy, who opposes the legislation. The county is threatening to sue the state to stop its implementation.

In addition, while it’s not uncommon for local governments to form joint powers authorities to manage other things that cross city boundaries — such as sewers or public transit — it’s very rare for this type of structure to govern a region’s homelessness response. In 2020, there were only three examples in all of California, according to Joe Colletti, chief executive officer of the nonprofit research organization HUB for Urban Initiatives. The most well-known is the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which recently has been reduced to a shell of its former self as a result of one headline-making crisis after another. In the rest of the state, a region’s homelessness response usually is led by a county or nonprofit.

Squabbling between cities and counties

This legislation was controversial from the beginning. It took Sen. Angelique Ashby, a Democrat from Sacramento and former city councilmember, two years of tense negotiations and multiple amendments to get it across the finish line. The final version allows the county and participating cities to keep control of their own funds, rather than pooling everything together — a major sticking point for the local governments.

The Sacramento region needed this legislation, Ashby argued during a recent committee hearing, because its various agencies have eight boards and nearly 90 board members working separately on homelessness without coordinating. The result is duplicated and inconsistent services, leaving people who are homeless in Sacramento County with no idea where they should go for help, she said.

It’s a problem the city and county have tried to fix for more than two decades. In 2010, the county board of supervisors and city council approved resolutions that supported creating a joint powers authority, but it didn’t happen. Two separate grand jury reports, one in 2019 and another in 2023, said the region’s homelessness response was dysfunctional and recommended better coordination.

It’s hardly an issue unique to Sacramento. Across California, cities typically provide shelter beds, while counties are responsible for the other services homeless residents need, such as mental health and addiction treatment. That’s because counties receive state funding for social services, and cities don’t. So, neither can effectively address homelessness unless they work together. But, frequently, they don’t. Instead, they often squabble over who should pay for what, and who isn’t doing their fair share.

Fighting between neighboring cities is common, too. As unhoused people move across city lines, local governments argue over who should have to provide shelter beds and other resources.

It was a major frustration for former Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg. His constituents saw people on the street in mental health crisis, suffering. Voters demanded he do something, but his hands were largely tied, he said, as he had no control over the county’s mental health services.

“There was just a major gulf between my accountability to the people and my authority to be able to actually make the difference that the people expected,” Steinberg said.

During his time in office, which ended in 2024, Steinberg negotiated a partnership between the city and the county. But it lacked a governance structure that would have forced them to make decisions together. That’s the missing piece that this law brings to the table, he said.

Under the new law, the city and county of Sacramento, as well as Elk Grove, Rancho Cordova, Citrus Heights and Folsom, have until January 2028 to finalize their joint powers authority. They recently convened a joint task force of elected officials, and have started working together on homelessness issues.

But there’s some lingering tension. While the city of Sacramento is on board with the legislation, the county and the city of Folsom are opposed. Neither is against the idea of collaboration, but they don’t like that it’s being forced upon them.

“It’s an unnecessary cost,” county Supervisor Kennedy said. “It’s an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy, it's an unnecessary burden that’s just going to slow down processes.”

Staffing and running the new joint powers authority is expected to have an annual price tag of anywhere between the mid-hundreds of thousands of dollars, to the low millions, according to a Senate analysis.

Examples in Los Angeles and Solano counties

As the Sacramento region gears up to create this new power structure, it has two main examples it can turn to.

One, in Los Angeles, is a cautionary tale. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a joint powers authority between the city and county, was the target of recent audits criticizing its handling of homelessness funds. A downward spiral followed. LA County pulled its funding from the authority and the Trump administration now is prosecuting homeless services providers that it alleges misused money from the agency.

Kennedy said the parallels between LA and Sacramento’s new agency worry him “very much,” and clearly show that a joint powers authority is hardly a panacea for homelessness.

But Steinberg believes the new Sacramento agency can do better. The LA agency didn’t have enough authority, and as a result, the city and county weren’t governing effectively together, he said. He hopes that will be different in Sacramento.

The other example Sacramento leaders can turn to is in Solano County, which created the current version of its joint powers authority in 2022. Local leaders pushed for a collaborative agency after hearing reports that other cities were dropping off their homeless residents at parking lots in Fairfield, assuming that services would be available because it’s the county seat, said Doriss Panduro, a Fairfield city councilmember and chair of the joint powers authority.

Now, the authority is made up of two elected officials from each city and the county, and they meet once a month to discuss how to spend money and how many people are receiving services.

“It is a big undertaking,” Panduro said. “We started the work in 2021, 2022, and here we are four years later just getting paid staff on board. It’s been a big lift.”

But, she said, it’s been worth it.

Recently, the county and all the cities involved in the joint powers authority applied together for state funding to clear one encampment along a flood control basin in Vallejo. Even though Vallejo would be the only city to get that money, it arguably would benefit everyone since it targets the largest encampment in the county, Panduro said. And Vallejo wouldn’t have had the resources to manage the state grant without the support of everyone else, she said.

“Homelessness is such a big issue, and I think finding an out-of-the-box way to approach it, for me, I can only say it’s a positive,” she said. “Everyone felt like we had been doing the same things over and over and nothing was changing.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.