San Diego County will start giving monthly updates about homelessness stats

San Diego County leaders will begin receiving monthly updates about homelessness in unincorporated communities under a plan approved Tuesday.

Staffers are to publicly report how many homeless individuals recently got housing and the number of people renting motel rooms through a county program, among other statistics.

Officials asked staff to come back in 90 days with a more detailed proposal.

“We need data to inform our policy decisions,” Supervisor Jim Desmond, who sponsored the measure, said from the dais.

Several agencies in the region do offer regular updates on the crisis. The housing commission in the city of San Diego reports how many people ask for, but fail to get a bed in the area’s packed shelter system. (The answer is, “most everyone asking.”) The Regional Task Force on Homelessness releases monthly data summarizing the number of individuals losing a place to stay for the first time. (That total generally exceeds how many homeless people get housing.)

But there are fewer sources of information for just unincorporated parts of the county.

Desmond’s plan could include statistics about the size of the population sleeping outside, the number of individuals entering treatment programs and how often county staffers contacted homeless residents.

Members of the public expressed skepticism.

“We’ve got enough dashboards,” John Brady, head of the advocacy organization Lived Experience Advisors, told the board. “What we need is some accountability.” He proposed a more streamlined complaint system where homeless individuals could share their experiences with various programs.

Natalie Raschke, a mother of four whose family was homeless during the pandemic, said poor treatment from some county staffers led her to simply stop asking for help. “It was more traumatic for me to go and try to speak to somebody.”

A county report completed last year similarly noted that many people were “uncertain how to navigate and connect to available resources.” The analysis also found officials sometimes weren’t tracking key information about crucial services.

Several supervisors nodded to those concerns ahead of Tuesday’s vote.

“A lot of our questions should be questioning the system that we have,” said Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe. “I do think that there’s a lot of room for accountability.”

All five members of the board, however, ultimately agreed that monthly data reports were still worth it.

In a separate unanimous decision, the supervisors asked staffers to research which organization should be hired next year to oversee county programs that help residents pay rent. Those initiatives are currently overseen by the limited liability company Equitable Social Solutions. Their contract ends in 2026, and Tuesday’s vote allows officials to consider other candidates.

The region’s point-in-time counts have recently found around 200 people sleeping outside or in vehicles throughout unincorporated communities.