Since 2019, California has spent about $24 billion on homelessness, but in this five-year period, homelessness increased by about 30,000, to more than 181,000. Put differently, California spent the equivalent of about $160,000 per person (based on the 2019 figure) over the last five years. With this level of spending, it was reasonable to expect that homelessness would decline substantially. What went wrong?

There are three major problems with California’s homelessness policies that are facilitating this increase. One problem is a significant lack of oversight and information about homelessness spending. The state auditor recently evaluated this spending and submitted a report that highlights the failure of the state to track spending and outcomes:

The State lacks current information on the ongoing costs and outcomes of its homelessness programs, because [it] has not consistently tracked and evaluated the State’s efforts to prevent and end homelessness. . . . [The state] has also not aligned its action plan to end homelessness with its statutory goals to collect financial information and ensure accountability and results. Thus, it lacks assurance that the actions it takes will effectively enable it to achieve those goals.

The auditor attempted to closely evaluate the costs and benefits for five separate homelessness programs, though they only found data that permitted this for two of those programs.

More broadly, the failure of investing in adequate information technology infrastructure and data collection within California’s state government has been a chronic problem and has been very costly. In 2020, California’s antiquated hardware and software within the Employment and Development Department (EDD) was a key factor in about $32 billion in unemployment benefits fraud. The department’s computer system is based on 1980s architecture running 1950s software.

And........

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