As California continues to pour billions of dollars into homelessness prevention, critics say the state still lacks a reliable way to determine whether that spending is actually keeping people housed.
Tangela Babbitt, a senior project manager and consultant in Elk Grove who previously spent more than 11 years working for Sacramento County’s Department of Human Assistance, says she saw the problem from inside the safety net system. Her work included helping administer CalFresh, CalWORKs and Medi-Cal benefits for residents in crisis.
Babbitt points to the case of a Sacramento County mother facing eviction who spent two months calling 211 and the county for help. Each agency directed her back to the other, with neither able to clearly identify what assistance was available or who was responsible for guiding her through the process.
The woman, Babbitt said, was not simply lost in a bureaucratic gap. Rather, the system was structured in a way that allowed agencies to operate separately while assuming another office had the answer.
That concern has implications across California, including in Southern California and the Inland Empire, where rising rents, limited affordable housing and evictions continue to pressure low-income families.
A UC San Francisco study found that one-third of unhoused adults in California had previously held long-term leases and had been evicted, many for the first time. The research also found that an eviction order increases the likelihood of homelessness by more than 300%.
Those findings, Babbitt argues, show that California understands a major pathway into homelessness but has not built a coordinated prevention system capable of intervening before families lose housing.
The state has funded several rounds of homelessness prevention and response programs, including the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention program. But Babbitt says the state has not consistently required measurable outcome reporting tied to continued funding.
In other fields, she noted, organizations typically do not approve repeated rounds of funding without evidence that earlier phases worked. California, she argues, has distributed billions of dollars without creating a uniform statewide accountability system to measure results.
The California Interagency Council on Homelessness was created to help provide that oversight. In 2021, it was directed to gather statewide data on homelessness programs. But according to a state audit cited by Babbitt, the council produced one report and then largely faded from public view.
Babbitt said the result is a system that often measures activity rather than success. Dollars awarded, shelter beds funded and programs launched may show movement, but they do not answer the central question: whether people are still housed six months or a year later.
She emphasized that frontline workers are not responsible for the failure. Instead, she said the problem stems from decisions made at the policy and program-design level.
One proposal, Senate Bill 1160, would require county courts to report eviction outcomes by ZIP code. Babbitt called the bill an important step, but said better data will not be enough unless the state also changes how it governs funding and measures results.
She argues that California should require outcome reporting as a condition of ongoing homelessness prevention dollars, give the interagency council a more active oversight role, and measure success by what happens to people in crisis — not simply by how much money is distributed.
In the case of the Sacramento mother, Babbitt said the calls eventually stopped. She does not know whether the woman kept her home, entered a shelter or became homeless.
The larger problem, she said, is that California’s system did not require anyone to find out.
Original source: CalMatters
