Homelessness ticked downward across much of California this year, according to early results from the annual point-in-time count, continuing a trend that began in 2025 after years of steady increases statewide.
Counties from the Bay Area to the Central Valley are reporting fewer people living on the streets or in shelters compared with last year, based on preliminary tallies from January’s count. Some of the declines were dramatic. San Joaquin County, for instance, saw its overall homeless population fall by nearly a third since 2024, with unsheltered homelessness cut nearly in half. Other regions saw smaller improvements — San Francisco’s count dipped about 4 percent.
Of the 28 California counties and regional homeless service areas that have released 2026 figures so far, more than half showed a decrease. Eight did not conduct a count this year, and seven have yet to make their results public.
Local officials crediting the drop point to new shelter beds and affordable housing units funded by a wave of state homelessness spending in recent years. But not everyone is convinced the numbers tell the full story. Homeless advocates note that cities have intensified encampment sweeps and citations for illegal camping, which can scatter unhoused residents and make them harder to locate — and count — even if they haven’t actually found housing.
And even where officials are touting real progress, there’s growing worry about whether those gains can hold up. Federal cuts to Medi-Cal and other social services threaten to undo recent momentum, several county leaders said.
“We’ve made progress,” said Jonathan Russell, director of Alameda County Health Housing and Homelessness Services, which reported a 13 percent decline compared with 2024. “And there are real threats, real peril.”
Point-in-time counts are federally mandated tallies that most counties conduct every one to two years, typically on a single night in January, when volunteers and outreach workers fan out to count every person sleeping outside, in shelters or in vehicles. The method is widely acknowledged to undercount the true homeless population — people hidden in cars, tucked behind buildings or otherwise out of sight are easy to miss — but it remains the primary tool used nationwide to track trends over time.
Last year’s statewide count found 181,934 homeless Californians, a nearly 3 percent decline from 2024. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which compiles the official statewide and national figures, won’t release final 2026 numbers for months, but many counties have already published their own preliminary data.
Not every region saw improvement. Los Angeles County, after two consecutive years of decline, reported a 1 percent increase in homelessness this year. Sacramento County’s overall count rose 13 percent from 2024, even as the number within Sacramento city limits fell. Contra Costa County, which had posted a significant drop between 2024 and 2025, saw a 7 percent increase this year.
The count’s limitations were also on display. A Los Angeles Times investigation found that an accounting error had inflated the city’s homeless total by more than 600 people. And in Fresno and Madera counties, which reported what appeared to be the state’s steepest decline — 34 percent — officials acknowledged the drop may be misleading. This year, volunteers counted only people who confirmed they were homeless and agreed to be surveyed, a change from the broader method used in 2025 that counted anyone visibly living on the street. Officials told the Fresno Bee that the shift makes year-over-year comparisons unreliable.
Some counties are highlighting a different kind of progress: moving people from the streets into shelters, even if they remain technically homeless. In Alameda County, the share of unhoused residents living in shelters rose from 21 percent in 2019 to 37 percent this year. The county also reached a milestone last year — for the first time since it began tracking the data in 2021, slightly more people exited homelessness into housing than fell into it.
Russell attributes much of that shift to a surge of state funding that arrived roughly four years ago, including money from the Homekey program, which helps local governments convert hotels into homeless housing, and the state’s Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention fund. Additional state dollars targeted at homeless residents with mental illness or substance use disorders followed in 2023 and 2024.
San Joaquin County, meanwhile, added 304 shelter beds and 1,078 permanent housing units between 2024 and 2026, boosting the number of people in permanent housing by 86 percent.
“There just wasn’t money available 10 years ago like there is now,” said Dawn McLeish, deputy director of the county’s human services department. “It just took a couple years for those investments to get all the way off the ground.”
Not everyone is buying the good news. Niki Jones, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, is skeptical of the downward trend.
“They can call it progress if they want to,” Jones said. “I call baloney.”
Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling giving cities broader authority to clear homeless encampments, many municipalities have adopted new camping bans, increased citations and stepped up encampment clearings. Advocates say that has pushed unhoused residents into hiding, making them harder to find during the count.
“It’s a lot harder to find one person with a blanket somewhere than it is to see a camp,” Jones said.
A recent RAND Corporation study of Los Angeles’ Skid Row, Hollywood and Venice neighborhoods found that overall unsheltered homelessness stayed roughly flat between December 2024 and January 2026 — but the composition changed. The number of people living in tents fell 23 percent, while the number sleeping without any shelter at all rose 20 percent. That shift could complicate efforts to house people, since Mayor Karen Bass’ signature Inside Safe program focuses on clearing tent encampments and moving residents into hotels. People sleeping rough, the study noted, often struggle to keep hold of identification and phones, making the path into housing more difficult.
In Monterey County, homeless services director Roxanne Wilson said it’s hard to know exactly how much enforcement is skewing count results, but she has seen tangible movement of people into housing. The county reported a 15 percent drop in overall homelessness compared with 2024, with unsheltered homelessness down nearly a quarter. Wilson credits three state Encampment Resolution Grants that helped relocate more than 150 people from encampments along the Pajaro River levee and in Soledad and King City. The funding paid for a new shelter in Santa Cruz County for former Pajaro River residents, tiny homes in Soledad and hotel rooms in King City — stepping stones toward permanent housing.
Wilson called it “a huge accomplishment,” but cautioned that state homelessness funding typically arrives as one-time grants, leaving counties uncertain from year to year about what support they’ll receive. That unpredictability makes long-term planning difficult.
“The reality is that it’s going to be hard to hold this line,” Wilson said, “if we don’t start having more stable funding sources.”
Original source: CalMatters
