The moment didn’t last long.
The final two months of 2024 saw homelessness countywide contract for the first time in years, giving local leaders a sliver of hope that the region might be turning a corner. But the data from January instead painted a familiar picture: The number of people who lost a place to stay for the first time again exceeded how many homeless residents found housing.
The regression comes at a critical time for everybody. Elected officials are weighing budget cuts amid stark deficits, the state is considering taking a harder line against encampments, and many people on the street are just hoping for a safe place to sleep. “Shelter,” Rose Curran, a 56-year-old woman living in a green tent in National City, said last month. “Definitely need shelter because we need to bathe and try to get work.”
There are nowhere near enough beds for everybody asking — only about 13% of all shelter requests were recently successful in the city of San Diego — leaving officials scrambling to add spots. The San Diego Housing Commission signed off on a new facility for women and children that should open next month and city staffers may turn another downtown office building into a long-term shelter, although the latter proposal is far from a done deal.
In the meantime, a new bill in the California Legislature would make it easier for cities to move tents off state property.
Gov. Gavin Newsom last summer told all agencies under his control to “move with urgency” when it came to clearing encampments. This largely affected the California Department of Transportation, or Caltrans, which oversees land next to highways like on- and off-ramps. Yet while the agency has increased sweeps in recent years, the executive order didn’t come with any new funding, and downtown San Diego has recently seen more tents by roadways. Some residents who have asked Caltrans to clear encampments have also found the process to be, at best, slow going.
Senate Bill 569, introduced Thursday, aims to let the agency hand off some of that responsibility to municipalities through “delegated maintenance agreements.”
“The state needs to do better in preventing and removing encampments,” state Sen. Catherine Blakespear, a Democrat from Encinitas who introduced the proposal, said in a statement. The bill “establishes a state process for local governments and Caltrans to work together.”
San Diego city officials have previously said they’re open to clearing Caltrans land as long as they can be compensated, and a number of mayors around the state are supporting the measure, including Todd Gloria. “While cities like mine are making progress in clearing encampments on city-owned property, we’re seeing more and more encampments along our freeways — state land where cities have no authority,” Gloria said in a statement. “My hope is this bill leads to a streamlined abatement process, formalizes an agency coordination process, and develops innovative funding solutions.”
“Innovative funding solutions” will be key, as California is facing its own deficit and President Donald Trump has proposed broad cuts to coffers that area leaders have long relied on. Ongoing attempts to freeze a broad swath of federal spending have roiled a range of local organizations, and the head of the Housing Commission has said they were briefly unable to access a rental aid system used to support more than 17,000 area families.
It’s not entirely clear why homelessness briefly shrank in San Diego County. Officials previously offered several theories, from landlords being hesitant to issue evictions during the holidays to decreased numbers of asylum seekers at the border, but there is no definitive answer as to why fewer families, older adults and other groups were ending up outside.
More than 1,200 people countywide became newly homeless last month, according to the Regional Task Force on Homelessness. During the same period, only 1,025 residents got a permanent place to stay. The numbers are taken from the Homeless Management Information System, a database used by more than 140 organizations that work with low-income residents.
The crisis has now grown for at least 36 of the last 40 months.
Staff writer Tammy Murga contributed to this report.
