A San Diego County program that now provides 60 low-income older adults with a $500 per month rental subsidy is expected to expand to about 220 people by the end of July.
The growth of the program comes in the wake of a major study that suggests an extra $300 to $500 each month could have made the difference in keeping many people in California from falling into homelessness — or could help them pull out of it.
The timing was a coincidence. The county pilot program was approved by the Board of Supervisors last year and launched in February with plans to expand later this year. The study on homelessness by UC San Francisco was released last week.
But the study highlighted the notion that direct economic assistance may be needed in addition to more shelters, housing, mental health services and substance abuse programs to substantially reduce homelessness in California.
Increasingly, policies are being crafted to help people up front, before they are forced out on the street.
“The real failure is we’re not really preventing people from becoming homeless in the first place,” said Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer, who spearheaded the rental assistance program with Supervisor Joel Anderson.
A study by Serving Seniors, a San Diego nonprofit, released two nearly two years ago gave momentum to the concept of this kind of rental subsidy.
The expansion of the county program seems particularly timely. The results of this year’s point-in-time count of homeless people released three weeks ago showed the number of unhoused seniors has grown dramatically.
Rental subsidies like San Diego County’s and other broader income-boosting programs for low-income residents in the region are taking hold across the country.
Whether providing rental assistance or guaranteed income, the goal of these programs is the same — to help stabilize people on the brink of not being able to make ends meet and to keep a roof over their heads.
The county budget for the coming fiscal year approved by the supervisors on Tuesday also includes tens of millions of dollars to address homelessness, including prevention efforts, along with increasing behavioral health services.
The budget includes money to grow the senior rental subsidy program to 300 people later in the year, according to the county.
The UCSF study pointed to numerous reasons why people become homeless, but economic pressures were key among them.
“High housing costs and low income left participants vulnerable to homelessness,” according to the authors of the report.
In surveying homeless people across the state, researchers found that 70 percent said they thought “a monthly rental subsidy of $300-$500 would have prevented their homelessness for a sustained period.”
More than 80 percent said receiving a one-time payment of $5,000 to $10,000 would have prevented their homelessness. A higher percentage of those surveyed said some form of housing voucher would have done that. However, the study noted that some people who obtained vouchers said they were unable to find housing.
Even a larger portion of survey participants said they believed such subsidies would help them “obtain housing and exit homelessness,” according to the report.
Lawson-Remer has high hopes for the rental assistance program, but is reserving final judgment until a planned analysis is completed in the months ahead.
It’s too early to draw conclusions, and both the local and statewide research on subsidies were based on interviews with homeless people or those at risk of becoming unhoused.
“There’s a difference between what people say and behavioral-action data,” the supervisor said.
Lawson-Remer said seniors mostly become at risk of becoming homeless for financial reasons, but added that may not be the case for others. For people with mental health and substance abuse problems, treatment likely would be a priority over rental assistance.
The supervisor said there’s “no one-size-fits-all solution” to homelessness.
The San Diego region’s first guaranteed-income program began giving $500 a month to 150 low-income South Bay families in March 2022, according to David Garrick of The San Diego Union-Tribune. Two nonprofits — Café X and Jewish Family Service — launched a program to provide $1,000 a month to dozens of low-income Black women.
Guaranteed-income programs give poor families money to use at their discretion, whether on food, rent or medical expenses — or possibly child care that will allow a parent to either begin working full-time or take a higher-paying job.
Such programs have their critics, whose concerns about subsidies range from the notion that they discourage work to allowing employers to keep wages down.
There’s not much data yet on those programs, either.
In April, a study was released on the city of Stockton‘s guaranteed-income pilot program, one of the earliest in the nation launched in 2019. However, the analysis was complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of wildfire smoke on the city, according to CNN.
In addition to the public health implications, the unhealthy air from the fires kept some people indoors and changed their spending behavior, such as having groceries delivered rather than going out to buy them in person.
The study included two groups, one that received the monthly payment and one that didn’t.
The researchers said their findings appear to show “that guaranteed income, under normative economic and health conditions, does calm income volatility and allay financial emotional and psychological distress” and could have a “profound” impact on public health.
“The effect of guaranteed income on work was not statistically detectable, meaning that in both groups maintained their work obligations at equal rates,” said Stacia West, a professor at the University of Tennessee and one of the authors of the study.
Garrick noted that an earlier study of the Stockton subsidies showed 28 percent of those receiving the monthly payment from the program had a full-time job at the beginning of the program, and 40 percent did one year later.
If such programs ultimately prove to be effective, they would be expensive to carry out on a large scale.
But any policy that makes a serious dent in homelessness, or keeps people out of poverty, won’t come cheap.
