BY LAUREN HEPLER
Unsafe Havens
The records catalog the chaos inside California homeless shelters.
In Salinas, internal emails say the staff at one brand-new shelter grabbed the best donations for themselves and helped friends and family jump the line for housing. In Los Angeles, court records show a leading nonprofit hired a man who was convicted of attempted murder to work security at a shelter, where he committed three sex crimes in one day.
Then, buried deep within thousands of pages of shelter reports, there are the stabbings in forgotten corners of Silicon Valley, the child abuse in Fresno and black mold in Oakland. Just about everywhere, a hidden epidemic of shelter death lurks.
Even if residents of the state’s roughly 61,000 emergency shelter beds endure the gauntlet, they’ll likely get stuck in housing purgatory. New state data obtained by CalMatters shows that fewer than 1 in 4 residents who cycle through shelters each year move into permanent homes, far below what many shelter operators promised in their contracts with public agencies.
A boom in shelter beds didn’t translate into more permanent housing
As homelessness rises in California, state and local officials keep relying on shelters as the backbone of their increasingly aggressive efforts to get people off the streets. But the conditions inside, combined with low housing rates, now have some experts and even shelter executives calling on governments to fundamentally rethink their approach.
Dennis Culhane, an expert in homelessness and housing policy, calls outsize reliance on shelters and other short-term services “the big failure” in California. It’s true, he said, that the facilities can be a lifeline for sick and older people who might otherwise die outside. But he worries about how officials prioritize shelters over other ways to deliver lasting housing, such as direct financial support.
“The shelters are not a solution,” said Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania social scientist who has advised the city of LA, the U.S. Congress and other public agencies. “We have every reason to believe that if we scaled up income support and provided rental assistance, we would probably see the homeless numbers cut in half.”
To better understand what’s happening inside shelters, CalMatters requested and analyzed previously unreleased state performance data, reviewed thousands of police calls and incident reports, and interviewed more than 80 shelter residents and personnel.
The reporting provides a unique window into facilities that are almost always closed to public access and ban residents from taking pictures or video. Among the findings:
- California spent big on a shelter boom. No state agency could provide an estimate for how much total taxpayer money is spent on shelters, so CalMatters analyzed local contracts and state funding data. We found that governments have invested at least $1 billion since 2018. The number of emergency shelter beds in the state more than doubled, from around 27,000 to 61,000, federal data shows. There are still three times as many homeless people as there are shelter beds in California.
- Those shelters are deadlier than jails. Annual shelter death rates tripled between 2018 and mid-2024. A total of 2,007 people died, according to data obtained from the California Interagency Council on Homelessness. That’s nearly twice as many deaths as California jails saw during the same period.
- Scandals have plagued fast-growing shelter operators. Oakland’s Bay Area Community Services saw revenue climb 1,000% in a decade to $98 million in 2023. At the same time, it faced a long list of allegations against staff at one taxpayer-funded shelter, including fraud and inappropriate relationships with clients. LA’s Special Service for Groups brought in $170 million in 2023, a nine-figure jump since 2017, while drawing complaints and lawsuits over violence and sexual misconduct.
- Oversight is failing at every level. While the state sends local governments hundreds of millions of dollars for shelters, it does little to ensure accountability. Nearly all of California’s 500-plus cities and counties have ignored a state law that requires them to document and address dangerous shelter conditions, CalMatters found. Meanwhile, audits and complaints show that the local agencies that directly pay and monitor shelter contractors often fail to follow up on reports of unsafe conditions, unused beds or missed housing targets.
- The result: Shelters become a bridge to nowhere. California shelters fail to move the vast majority of residents into permanent housing. Shelters operators, governments and researchers don’t always agree on the best way to calculate their effectiveness — but even under the most generous formula, the state’s shelters delivered housing for just 22% of residents from 2018 to early 2024. Shelters often kick out far more people than they place in housing.
“All you’ve done is create a very expensive merry-go-round,” said Sergio Perez, who until recently served as the Los Angeles city controller’s chief of accountability and oversight.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office did not respond to repeated requests for interviews about how homeless shelters fit into the state’s housing strategy, referring all questions to other state agencies.
Nonprofit organizations run most of California’s publicly funded shelters. Leaders say they’re constantly scrambling to address a thicket of challenges: high turnover among low-paid staff, slow government payments, unrealistic budgets, addiction and mental health crises and a lack of affordable housing.
Larry Haynes, CEO of Mercy House, a Santa Ana-based shelter operator, said many large group shelters are essentially forced to serve as psychiatric wards.
“So then I have to ask, as kindly and as respectfully as I can, ‘Well, what the fuck did you think was going to happen?’” he said.
“Shelters are part of a system, and they’re being judged and rated and critiqued for things over which they have no control,” he said. “That doesn’t mean the shelters don’t suck, that they don’t have problems, but it’s got to be put in its right context.”
Holly Herring has seen it all in five years of work at shelters in the San Diego area. Her clients have survived everything from hate crimes to electrical fires to moldy food, leaving her wondering why shelters don’t at least get inspected and publicly graded like restaurants.
Then Herring became homeless herself, fleeing violence in her own home. She had a choice to make: Would she stay in a shelter like the ones she had worked in? She decided she couldn’t.
“I know that it is safer and more dignified for me to sleep in my car than it is in a shelter,” she said.
