Audit homeless efforts to see what works

No one wants to get audited when the number-crunchers are Treasury Departmentbased and coming after you, personally.

But all of us can agree that when it comes to ensuring that government itself is spending those tax dollars wisely, we’re audit-friendly. We have a right to know about efficiences, and inefficiencies.

That’s why a new plan in the Legislature to fully audit California’s homeless spending has to be applauded by all California taxpayers.

Assembly Bill 2903 by Assemblyman Josh Hoover, Rfolsom, would require California’s homelessness programs to report cost and outcome data every year to the California Interagency Council on Homelessness. It would also require the council “to develop uniform procedures for collecting the data and reporting it to the public.”

In the last six years, California has spent over $20 billion on the effort to reduce homelessness. And yet in many places, the number of people sleeping rough has only grown. To be fair — and it seems as if those who rail against the spending while the problem persists never consider this — who knows how much worse the problem of homelessness would be without the efforts that have been expended.

But the California state auditor has recently expressed concerns that the spending is not being tracked, and this bill would appropriately address the issue.

As Andrew Sheeler in the Sacramento Bee has reported, State Auditor Grant Parks “found that only a handful of state programs were found to be cost-effective, including the Homekey program from the Department of Housing and Community Development and the CALWORKS Housing Support Program from the Department of Social Services . ... Parks wrote that there just wasn’t enough data for the other programs the audit looked at to determine whether they were cost-effective. That’s because those agencies collected an insufficient amount of outcome data.

The bill would require the council to “create partnerships among state agencies and departments, local government agencies, participants in the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care Program, federal agencies, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, nonprofit entities working to end homelessness, homeless services providers, and the private sector, for the purpose of arriving at specific strategies to end homelessness.”

This kind of coordination goes to the heart of the matter. We’re a big state. Relatively speaking, we’re a good place to be homeless in. Better at least than the cold Northeast, the wet Northwest, the hot Southwest. The attractiveness of California can’t be ignored. That and the goodwill of our people.

So we want to help the dispossessed among us. Of course we do. But of course we are also frustrated by the huge expenditures of our money and of human resources with so little to show for our efforts. And with not enough ways to know what is working and what is not.

“We have already spent billions of taxpayer dollars only to see homelessness grow. This has to change. We will not solve this crisis without real accountability,” Assemblyman Hoover said.

There may be some resistance in the Democratic-dominated Legislature to this bill because Hoover is a Republican and to support it could be construed as some kind of non-essential criticism of the governor and statewide efforts to mediate homelessness. That resistance would be misplaced. Everyone can agree that with so many programs out there, that data is needed to understand the best path forward. That’s what the bill would provide.