After a seemingly endless stretch of bleak homelessness headlines, San Diego County is ending the year on a high note.
New data show that more homeless residents were connected to housing last month than the number of people who lost a place to stay, meaning the crisis contracted for the first time in more than two-and-a-half years, according to the Regional Task Force on Homelessness.
Nine hundred and fifty individuals got a stable home in November compared to the 894 who became newly homeless. The last time this happened was March 2022.
The region is “housing more people and that’s encouraging for a lot of reasons,” Tamera Kohler, the task force’s CEO, said in a statement. “We obviously want to see these trend lines continue in 2025, but I’ll say this again: we need more housing across the board, and we need a dedicated funding source to help our most vulnerable.”
The good news comes with a number of questions.
For one, it’s unclear whether the trend can hold. There have been only two other similar months since late 2021, when the task force began publishing this data, and both now look like outliers. New homelessness has outpaced how many homeless people got housing for 35 of the last 38 months.
Two, even if local leaders and service organizations are gaining ground, the incoming Trump administration may change the playing field. The president-elect has suggested spending more money on veteran homelessness (which might have a big effect on a military town like San Diego) while slashing support for asylum seekers (potentially leading to more migrants on the street). Then there are tariffs: Could higher costs lead to more evictions in a place where the vast majority of low-income San Diegans are already spending most of their incomes on rent?
One longtime North County resident, Annette Kohler, was in her late 60s a few years ago when her Poway home burned down. She couldn’t afford to rebuild so moved into a motel. When money ran low, she found herself sleeping in horse stalls.
Kohler finally stuffed her belongings into diaper bags and asked for help at Father Joe’s Villages. “I thought not having a home was usually due to people that were law breakers, or that were into drugs,” Kohler, who now has a permanent place downtown, said in an interview. “Boy, was I uneducated.”
The new data further offer a sliver of relief for the region’s strained shelter system.
There are nowhere near enough beds for everybody asking — only around 1 out of every 10 requests recently succeeded — and many proposals to boost capacity face uncertain futures, the most prominent being San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria’s plan to turn an empty Middletown warehouse into one of the nation’s largest shelters. The City Council met behind closed doors Monday to discuss the newest version of the lease, but officials have not released details about that discussion.
Council members previously worried that the agreement introduced too many legal and financial risks.
“Since I took office, my administration has been dogged in our pursuit to build more housing and get people off the street,” Gloria said in a statement, and this contraction in homelessness “is another encouraging sign that our efforts are turning the tide.”
Council President Joe LaCava praised outreach workers and those helping residents find housing. “To make this a long-term trend, we must continue the hard work to tailor solutions to the unique needs of each individual or family.”
The task force’s monthly reports are one of several ways to calculate local homelessness. The nonprofit also oversees the region’s annual point-in-time count, which in January tallied more than 10,600 people living in shelters, vehicles or outside. That total was only a slight increase from the year prior, and officials at the time wondered whether the county was hitting its “high-water mark.”
The next point-in-time count is Jan. 30.
The Downtown San Diego Partnership additionally surveys the city’s urban core, where the number of encampments has dropped since council members passed a camping ban that boosted penalties for sleeping outside. Conversely, the homeless population living in more isolated areas like waterways recently hit its highest total yet, according to the San Diego River Park Foundation.
