Key Initiatives

Key Initiatives

Articulating the Cost of Inaction

While the growing community impacts of homelessness were clear, stakeholders across the community still did not have a clear picture of the full cost of this crisis. So, Destination: Home and the County of Santa Clara partnered together to analyze the public costs of homelessness.

This multi-year effort would end up representing the most comprehensive study assembled in the U.S. and culminated in the publication of Home Not Found: The Cost of Homelessness in Silicon Valley.” Among its many key findings, te study revealed that the County of Santa Clara was spending a staggering $520 million each year responding to the needs of homeless residents without actually resolving their homelessness.

The report ended up providing a compelling case for investing in solutions to the homelessness crisis and serving as a huge catalyst for the coalition’s growing efforts in the years ahead.

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Securing New Sources of Funding

With a new shared Community Plan in place, the coalition had a roadmap for moving forward. But it had not yet secured the funding necessary to really start investing in these strategies.

The first key piece of the puzzle came in 2016, when the County of Santa Clara proposed and secured approval for a $950 million affordable housing bond (known as Measure A) that created a large dedicated source of funding to build more deeply affordable housing. Other public entities would follow suit too – the Santa Clara County Housing Authority began allocating housing vouchers and other federal resources to the effort, and the City of San Jose aligned many of its existing resources, as well as a 2020 transfer tax (known as Measure E) behind this collective work – adding several hundreds of millions of additional private dollars. In addition, Destination: Home launched a years-long effort to raise private and philanthropic funding, ultimately bringing in more than $300 million in additional private funding.

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Ramping Up the Production of Deeply Affordable Housing

After the adoption of the Measure A housing bond in 2016, the coalition undertook a concerted strategy to ramp up production and development of deeply affordable housing in Santa Clara County – and particularly extremely low income and supportive housing units. Yet the voters’ stamp of approval was not enough; truly scaling up deeply affordable housing production also required aligning members throughout the coalition.

By coming together around this shared goal, the coalition has successfully launched more than 64 new housing developments with more than 7,000 affordable units over the past decade.

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Launching a New Homelessness Prevention System

From the start, the coalition’s primary focus was to produce more affordable housing and get more people into those homes. But over time, it became clear that these efforts needed to be complemented by efforts to prevent more families from being pushed into homelessness in the first place. And helping families stay in their existing homes costs much less – both financially and in terms of suffering – than assisting people once they are already pushed out of their homes. 

So, in 2017 coalition brought a wide array of public, private and non-profit partners together to launch a new Homelessness Prevention System. And over the next half-dozen years, this system would ultimately serve 20,000 people at-risk of homelessness – 95% of whom remained stably housed – and become a key part of the local homelessness response.

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Centering Lived Experience in Our Work

Too often, people with lived experience of homelessness are treated only as beneficiaries, rather than key constituents of, and advisors to, the system of care. As the model in Santa Clara County evolved, it was abundantly clear that voices of lived experience should be front and center and the coalition took intentional steps to center lived experience in its work.

Today, a half-dozen different decision-making bodies include dedicated seats for people with lived experience and, over the years, hundreds of millions of dollars in publicly-funded homelessness contracts have been vetted by people with lived experience.

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Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic

A new challenge presented itself in early 2020, when COVID-19 started spreading throughout Santa Clara County. The pandemic placed individuals who were homeless or at risk of homelessness in an even more precarious situation. In addition to the public health concerns related to people living in crowded shelters or on the streets, the economic impacts of COVID-19 on those living paycheck to paycheck threatened to push even more people into homelessness.

However, the coalition was able to lean the collective impact model it had built over the previous decade to quickly mobilize in response to this enormous threat. By working together over the next two years, the coalition helped shepherd a massive collective effort that successfully deployed nearly $85 million to 20,000 households at-risk of homelessness, temporarily sheltered 5,000 homeless individuals and piloted several new efforts that would become a key part of our overall homelessness response – during and beyond the pandemic.

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