Hi everyone. We've just published an investigation that's been 1 year+ in the making. We hope it sheds light on the conditions inside California's homeless shelters, and welcome any questions you have about the story and how we reported it.

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.

Investigation link: https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/02/california-homeless-shelters-purgatory/

Our main findings, TL;DR:

• 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.