The Brief

California’s homeless service providers have a problem: They aren’t getting paid on time, and it’s making it even harder for them to get people off the street.

Nonprofits that provide everything from shelter beds, to counseling for homeless residents, to affordable housing, say they regularly are kept waiting weeks, if not months, for the city, county and state funding they rely on. That means they’re struggling to pay their employees, make rent payments for their clients, and, in some cases, even keep the lights on.

Some are turning down new projects despite the massive need for services in their communities. Others are borrowing to stay afloat, ending up paying tens of thousands of dollars each month in interest — money they would rather spend on helping homeless Californians. It’s hampering the state’s efforts to solve what is arguably its biggest problem: Nearly 186,000 people have nowhere to call home.

“It is the single biggest factor in our inability to grow and serve more people,” said Vivian Wan, CEO of Abode Services, which provides shelter, housing and other aid for unhoused people across seven Bay Area counties. “This is a huge issue.”

And it’s getting harder to ignore. With inflation driving up expenses and the growing homelessness crisis driving up need, some nonprofits have reached their breaking point. After a group of Los Angeles-based homeless service providers raised the alarm earlier this year, the county Board of Supervisors overhauled the way it doles out funds. Providers hope the move will be replicated throughout the state.

Why are nonprofits missing millions of dollars?

It’s the kind of problem that’s a hallmark of bureaucracy.

When a city opens a new shelter or housing program, it lacks the capacity to run the program itself, so it contracts with a nonprofit that has expertise working with unhoused clients. The nonprofits who provide these services told CalMatters that because city officials are trying to move quickly, they sometimes set up the program and start providing services immediately — even before a formal contract is signed. The nonprofit can’t get reimbursed for the services it’s already provided until that contract is finalized, which can take months.

But even when a contract is drawn up right away, it generally requires the nonprofit to start work before getting paid, and then send an invoice to the city asking for reimbursement. That process can get bogged down in delays at multiple levels.

First, drafting invoices is onerous and time-consuming, requiring the nonprofit to account for every penny spent. Next, the city or county has to go over each invoice with a fine-tooth comb, which can take weeks or months. Finding any problems means the process starts over.

Delays also crop up when the city is waiting for state funding to pay its contracts.

Santa Cruz County usually pays its invoices within two to four weeks, said Robert Ratner, director of Housing for Health for the county. But if there’s a problem with the invoice, payment could be delayed another month.

“I think everyone involved would like it to go faster,” he said.

On any given day, Abode generally is owed between $35 million and $40 million from their various government contracts, Wan said. Despite those missing funds, Abode still has to make rent payments on the first of every month for its thousands of clients living in subsidized housing.

“We’re not going to let people become homeless or not get their rent paid,” Wan said.

Instead, she’s turning down new projects that would make the organization’s funding gap worse — to the detriment of the people in desperate need of Abode’s services. She recently decided not to apply for a contract providing rental assistance on behalf of the Santa Clara County Probation Department, even though Abode is one of the few organizations that could do the work.

High-interest loans

Multiple nonprofits CalMatters spoke with said they’ve had to take out high-interest loans to fill the gaps while they’re waiting for government funds. The People Concern, which provides homeless services in Los Angeles County, is paying $63,000 a month in interest on its lines of credit. The nonprofit will never get that money back, even when its government checks come in.

“That’s $63,000 a month we should just be burning, because we can’t be compensated for it,” said CEO John Maceri.

Funding delays also are hampering Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ signature effort to get Angelenos off the streets. Through the program dubbed Inside Safe, the city contracts with nonprofits to move people from encampments into hotels.

PATH was one of the nonprofits that jumped at the chance to participate, back when the program first launched in 2022. But lately, CEO Jennifer Hark Dietz is more wary. As of last month, the city owed her organization close to $7 million for its work on Inside Safe. The city, under recent pressure from local nonprofits to speed up its reimbursements, paid off some of that last week. But it still owes PATH $1.18 million for work done in June, Dietz said.

Now, to avoid over-extending her organization, she’s having to make hard choices. She’s started refusing when the city asks her to take on new Inside Safe locations before a contract is in place.

“It’s definitely for me, personally, heartbreaking,” she said.

Mayor Bass knows there’s a problem, and says her office is working on a solution with the city council, but she hasn’t provided details on what that solution will look like or when it will roll out. The situation came to a head in May, when the city owed $26 million on its homeless services contracts. In September, the mayor’s office said that money has been paid and all Inside Safe invoices for the first quarter of the fiscal year have been processed.

“We must transform the City’s entire approach to payment — going beyond the payments for service providers — to overhaul and modernize the entire system,” Bass spokesperson Clara Karger said in an emailed statement.

Los Angeles County recently tried to do just that. Now, the county offers nonprofits advances on some of their contracts upfront, so they don’t have to do work without first getting paid.

“It’s new,” Paul Rubenstein, deputy chief external relations officer for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, said of the overhaul. “But it feels like it’s working.”

California’s role in the problem

Sometimes, the state government is to blame for these delays. In April, Gov. Gavin Newsom awarded his latest round of grants through the Encampment Resolution Fund, a program that doles out state money to help cities and counties clear encampments and move camp occupants indoors. Marin County, which won an $18 million grant, was told to expect the contract in July, said Gary Naja-Riese, director of the county’s Whole Person Care and Homelessness Division. Instead, the document kept getting delayed, and now it’s been five months and no one has yet to see a penny. The state finally sent out the contracts last month, but it’s unclear when the money will come through.

That’s created a big headache in Santa Barbara County. The county won a nearly $8 million grant to clear 21 vehicle encampments, and it contracted with nonprofit New Beginnings to do the work of connecting with people living in cars and RVs, offering them services and moving them into housing. New Beginnings got straight to work as soon as its contract with the county was signed in June, and so far has moved at least 23 people into shelter and another six into permanent housing. They couldn’t afford to wait: the grant has a strict timeline, requiring recipients to spend half the money by June 30, 2025, or risk losing it.

But New Beginnings has yet to be paid for that work. The nonprofit has had to borrow money — $350,000 so far, at a 9.5% interest rate — to make ends meet in the meantime, said Executive Director Kristine Schwarz. She’s worried borrowing too much more will plunge her organization into a hole it can’t get out of. So she’s pulling back on the services she offers. That means she’s leaving people on the street because she can’t afford a hotel room for them, she said.

“I can’t just continue to spend money without any idea of when we’re going to get reimbursed,” Schwarz said.

The delay at the state level is at least partly because the California Department of Housing and Community Development took over the grants from another state agency this year.

“The ERF Round 3, Window 1 standard agreements were somewhat impacted by the transition and additional accountability considerations, but that should not be an issue going forward,” Megan Kirkeby, deputy director of housing policy development for the Department of Housing and Community Development, said in an email to CalMatters. Cities and counties will be reimbursed for money they spent before the contracts were signed, she said.

‘I need my money when it’s due’

Funding delays are an especially dire problem for small nonprofits. Kalain Hadley’s organization Reclaim-Possibility provides 44 beds in Los Angeles for men recently released from jail and prison. Hadley opened right before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and because he had no clients and therefore no income, had to burn through his savings and go into debt to keep the organization afloat.

Now, his payments come from the state and Los Angeles County, through two contractors that act as intermediaries. They’re usually at least a few days late, Hadley said. That might not be a big deal for a larger nonprofit, but for an organization like his that has no cushion, it’s devastating.

“I’m running around trying to withdraw cash so I’ll be able to pay my folks over the weekend. And that’s the pattern every month,” he said. “I need my money when it’s due.”

To stay afloat, Hadley is taking advantage of a new lifeline in Los Angeles County. Nonprofit Future Communities Institute recently launched a program called the LA Working Capital Fund to give no-interest bridge loans to homeless service nonprofits waiting for government funding. So far, Hadley has taken out four loans ranging from $15,000 to $20,000 – all of which he’s paid back.

Future Communities Institute hopes to raise money to scale up the program and offer more loans, said Justin Szlasa, director of homeless initiatives.

Without that money, Hadley’s nonprofit might have shut down by now, he said. But even so, the loans aren’t a solution to the overarching problem — they’re just a Band-Aid.

“Somebody needs to figure out why we can’t get paid on time,” Hadley said.

California clocked its second-worst snowpack on record Wednesday, a potentially troubling signal ahead for fire season.

It’s an alarming end to a winter that saw abnormally dry conditions briefly wiped from California’s drought map in January, for the first time in a quarter-century.

Though precipitation to date has been near average, much of it fell as rain rather than snow. Then March’s record-breaking heat melted most of the snow that remains. The state’s major reservoirs are nevertheless brimming above historic averages and are flirting with capacity, and a smattering of snow, rain and thunderstorms are dousing last month’s heat wave.

But experts now warn that California’s case of the missing snowpack could herald an early fire season in the mountains.

On Wednesday, state engineers conducting the symbolic April 1 snowpack measurement at Phillips Station south of Lake Tahoe found no measurable snow in patches of white dotting the grassy field.

“I want to welcome you call to probably one of the quickest snow surveys we’ve had — maybe one where people could actually use an umbrella,” joked Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources. “We’re getting a lot of questions about are we heading into a hydrologic drought? The answer is, I don’t know.”

State data reports that California’s snowpack is closing out the season at an alarming 18% of average statewide, and an even more abysmal 6% of average in the northern mountains that feed California’s major reservoirs.

Only the extreme drought year of 2015 beat this year’s snowpack for the worst on record, measuring in at just 5% of average on April 1st, when the snow historically is at its deepest.

“I think everyone's anticipating that it will be a long, busy fire season,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network.

“Without a snowpack, and with an early spring, it just means that there’s much more time for something like that to happen.”

‘It’s pretty bizarre up here’ 

In the city of South Lake Tahoe, which survived the massive Caldor Fire in the fall of 2021 without losing any structures, fire chief Jim Drennan said his department is already ramping up prevention efforts.

“It's pretty bizarre up here right now. It really seems like June conditions more than March,” Drennan said. “People are already turning the sprinklers on for their lawns.”

Without more precipitation, an early spring may complicate prescribed burning efforts. But Drennan said fire agencies in the Tahoe basin can start mechanically clearing fuels from forest areas earlier than usual.

“That means we can get more work done,” he said.

It also means homeowners need to start hardening their homes now, said Martin Goldberg, battalion chief and fuels management officer for the Lake Valley Fire Protection District, which protects unincorporated communities in the Lake Tahoe Basin’s south shore.

Goldberg urges residents to scour their yards for burnable materials, create defensible space and reach out to local fire departments with questions. The risks are widespread — from firewood, wooden fences, gas cans, plants, pine needles — even lawn furniture stacked against a house.

“In years past, I wouldn't even think of raking and clearing until May,” Goldberg said. “But my yard's completely cleared of snowpack, and it has been for a couple weeks now.”

‘A haystack fire’

Battalion chief David Acuña, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, said fire season is shaped by more than just one year’s snowpack.

Climate change has been remaking California’s fire seasons into fire years. And California’s recent average to abundant water years have fueled what Acuña called “bumper crops of vegetation and brush.”

“Most of California is like a haystack. And if you’ve ever seen a haystack fire, they burn very intensely because there's layers of fuel,” Acuña said.

Like Quinn-Davidson, Acuña wasn’t ready to make specific predictions about fires to come.

But John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced, said the temperatures and snowpack conditions this year offer a glimpse of California in the latter decades of this century, as fossil fuel use continues to drive global temperatures higher.

How this year’s fires will play out will depend on when, where and how wind, heat, fuel and ignitions combine. But it foreshadows the consequences of a warmer California for water and fire under climate change.

“This,” Abatzoglou said, “is yet another stress test for the future in the state.”

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

Thousands of immigrants who are lawfully in California are set to lose their food assistance benefits, known as CalFresh, starting this month.

The new restrictions stem from H.R. 1 — also known as the “Big Beautiful Bill” — which Congress passed last year.

The changes remove eligibility for certain noncitizens, including people with refugee status and victims of trafficking. It also applies to immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan who have special immigrant visas for helping the U.S. government overseas.

 ”These are folks … many of whom have large families that we have a commitment to as a country because we welcomed them and invited them here to find a place of refuge,” said Cambria Tortorelli, president of the International Institute of Los Angeles, a refugee resettlement agency. “They’re authorized to work and they’ve been brought here by the U.S. government.”

The federal spending bill, H.R. 1, made sweeping cuts to social safety net programs, including food assistance and Medicaid. In signing the bill, President Donald Trump said the changes were delivering on his campaign promises of “America first.”

Officials estimate 23,000 people in Los Angeles County will be affected. The state estimates about 72,000 immigrants with lawful presence will be affected across California.

CalFresh is the state’s version of the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Undocumented immigrants have not been eligible to receive CalFresh benefits.

State officials say noncitizens who are currently receiving benefits will continue to get them until it’s time to renew their benefits — adding that people might be able to receive benefits again if their legal status changes to lawful permanent residents.

Who the changes apply to:

• Asylees
• Refugees
• Parolees (unless they are Cuban and Haitian entrants)
• Individuals with deportation or removal withheld
• Conditional entrants
• Victims of trafficking
• Battered noncitizens
• Iraqi or Afghan with special immigrant visas (SIV) who are not lawful permanent residents (LPR)
• Certain Afghan Nationals granted parole between July 31, 2021, and Sept. 30, 2023
• Certain Ukrainian Nationals granted parole between Feb. 24, 2022, and Sep. 30, 2024

Nearly every student in the California State University system has used artificial intelligence tools, but most don’t trust the results, are worried about how AI will affect their future job security and want more say in systemwide AI policy.

That’s according to results of a 2025 survey of more than 80,000 students enrolled at CSU’s 22 campuses, plus faculty and staff — the largest and most comprehensive study of how higher education students and instructors perceive artificial intelligence.

Nationwide, university faculty struggle to reconcile the learning benefits of AI — hailed as a “transformative tool” for providing tutoring and personalized support to students — and the risks that students will depend on AI agents to do their thinking for them and, very possibly, get the wrong information. Educators want a say in how and which AI tools are used. Students across the CSU system want to be included in those discussions.

Some professors teach students how to use AI and encourage students to use it, while others forbid its use in the classroom, said Katie Karroum, vice president of systemwide affairs for the Cal State Student Association, representing more than 470,000 students.

“Both of these things are allowed to coexist right now without a policy,” she said.

Karroum said that faculty practices are too varied and that what students need are consistent and transparent rules developed in collaboration with students. “There are going to be students who are graduating with AI literacy and some that graduate without AI literacy.”

In February 2025, the CSU system announced an initiative to adopt AI technologies and an agreement with OpenAI to make ChatGPT available throughout the system. The system-wide survey released Wednesday confirms that ChatGPT is the most used AI tool across CSUs. The system will also work with Adobe, Google, IBM, Intel, LinkedIn, Microsoft and NVIDIA.

Campus leaders say the survey and accompanying dashboard provide much needed data on how the system continues to integrate AI into instruction and assessment.

“We need to have data to make data-informed decisions instead of just going by anecdote,” said Elisa Sobo, a professor of anthropology at San Diego State who was involved in interpreting the survey’s findings. “We have data that show high use, but we also have high levels of concern, very valid concern, to help people be responsible when they use it.”

Faculty at San Diego State designed the survey, which received more than 94,000 responses from students, faculty and staff. Among all responding CSU students, 95% reported using an AI tool; 84% said they used ChatGPT and 82% worry that AI will negatively impact their future job security. Others worry that they won’t be competitive if they don’t understand AI well enough.

“Even though I don’t want to use it, I HAVE TO!” wrote a computer science major. “Because if I don’t, then I’ll be left behind, and that is the last thing someone would want in this stupid job market.”

Faculty are divided about the impact of AI on teaching and research. Just over 55% reported a positive benefit, while 52% said AI has had a negative impact so far.

San Diego State conducted its first campuswide survey in 2023 in response to complaints from students about inconsistent rules about AI use in courses, said James Frazee, vice president for information technology at the campus.

“Students are facing this patchwork of expectations even within the same course taught by different instructors,” Frazee said. In one introductory course, the professor might encourage students to use AI, but another professor teaching the same course might forbid it, he said. “It was a hot mess.”

In that 2023 survey, one student made this request: “Please just tell us what to do and be clear about it.”

Following that survey, the San Diego State Academic Senate approved guidelines for the use of generative AI in instruction and assessments. In 2025, the Senate made it mandatory that faculty include language about AI use in course syllabi.

“It doesn’t say what your disposition has to be, whether it’s pro or con,” Frazee said. “It just says you have to be clear about your expectations. Without the 2023 survey data, that never would have happened.”

According to the 2025 systemwide survey, only 68% of teaching faculty include language about AI use in their syllabi.

Sobo and other faculty who helped develop the 2025 survey hope other CSU campuses will find the data helpful in informing policies about AI use. The dashboard allows users to search for specific campus and discipline data and view student responses by demographic group.

The 2025 survey shows that first-generation students are more interested in formal AI training and that Black, Hispanic and Latino students are more interested than white students. At San Diego State, students are required to earn a micro-credential in AI use during their first year — another change that was made after the 2023 survey.

Students in this year’s survey said they want training that will be relevant to their careers. “I want to learn AI tools that are actually used in my industry, not just generic chatbots,” a mechanical engineering student responded. “Show me what engineers are actually doing with AI on the job.”

The California Faculty Association, which represents about 29,000 educators in the CSU system, said in a February statement that faculty should be included in future systemwide decisions about AI, including whether the contract with OpenAI should be renewed in July.

“CFA members continue to advocate for ethical and enforceable safeguards governing the use of artificial intelligence,” the CFA said in the statement, asking for “protections for using or refusing to use the technology, professional development resources to adapt pedagogy to incorporate the technology, and further protections for faculty intellectual property.”