Homelessness Prevention Overview
Homelessness Prevention is an Our City, Our Home (OCOH) Fund service area that supports programs designed to prevent homelessness. The OCOH Fund designates that up to 15% of the Fund may be appropriated for homelessness prevention services.
Homelessness Prevention programs are designed to help households at risk of homelessness secure or retain housing and can provide legal services, financial assistance, and other support services to those at risk of eviction.
Data notes and sources
Data notes and sources
Homelessness Prevention funds were used to support a portion of programming related to delivering behavioral health and clinical services in permanent supportive housing (included within the “Case Management” category across OCOH Fund dashboards). While the Homelessness Prevention portion of the funding is reported in the financial dashboards above, information about capacity, clients served, and outcomes from this program are reported within the “Case Management” category in the Mental Health service area section of this report.
Positive Outcomes
Homelessness Prevention is successful when a household retains their housing or finds a safe, indoor solution to their housing crisis outside of the Homelessness Response System.
Positive Outcomes exclude outcome data for Problem Solving and Targeted Homelessness Prevention programs as HSH only reports on encounters that led to resolutions funded through the OCOH Fund and are therefore always 100%. The City uses a portion of OCOH-funds to support The Office of Economic and Workforce Development’s (OEWD) problem-solving program, and these positive outcomes are excluded from the dashboard because they represent a small proportion of overall Problem Solving services, and the larger portion has been excluded.
Please visit the Glossary for additional terms and definitions.
The following program names were shortened in the chart visual:
- Targeted Homelessness Prevention Services = Targeted Homelessness Prevention
- Eviction Prevention and Housing Stabilization = Eviction Prevention
- Permanent Supportive Housing Rental Subsidy = Rental Subsidy PSH
During Fiscal Year 2023-2024 (FY24):
- The City spent $40 million on OCOH Fund Homelessness Prevention programs.
- The City spent 8% less in FY24 than in FY23, with the largest reduction in spending on Targeted Homelessness Prevention services, a 30% decrease from $20.8 million in FY23 to $14.6 million in FY24.
- Homelessness Prevention programs served 12,319 households in FY24.
- Eviction Prevention and Housing Stabilization programs and Targeted Homelessness Prevention Services served the most households, reaching over 70% of the total households served within the service area (8,668 households). Some households may receive service in more than one program, and data about households is not deduplicated across programs.
- During FY24, a total of 4,992 households had a positive outcome after receiving services through OCOH-funded Homelessness Prevention programs, with 73% of all households successfully retaining their housing, securing new housing, or finding a safe, indoor solution to their housing crisis outside of the Homelessness Response System.
- Just two of the four program categories in this service area report on outcomes, Eviction Prevention and Housing Stabilization and Permanent Supportive Housing Rental Subsidy. These two programs served 6,919 households in FY24.
- While these programs served the most households in the Homelessness Prevention service area, both served fewer compared to FY23 with a decrease of 19% and 12%, respectively.
- As a result of these reduction, in FY24, the Homelessness Prevention programs overall served 10% fewer households than the prior year, when 13,632 households received services.
Programs in the Homelessness Prevention service area do not report on capacity in the same ways as other service areas. Programs in this service area primarily offer flexible financial assistance and/or support services that keep people in housing or rapidly solve their housing crisis. These programs do not offer a fixed number of program slots or units; instead, the level of support may vary based on the needs of the household served. As a result, in this service area, the number of households served in OCOH Fund programs provides a reasonable proxy for “capacity.”
The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH), the Department of Public Health (DPH), and the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD) deliver OCOH-funded prevention services.
FY24 Implementation Updates
Eviction Prevention and Housing Stabilization
Programs in the Eviction Prevention and Housing Stabilization category provide wraparound and integrated services that keep vulnerable tenants housed and make otherwise precarious housing options sustainable for very low-income households.
- In total, Eviction Prevention and Housing Stabilization programs served 4,424 households in FY24 and reported positive outcomes for 61%. This is an increase from FY23, where just 44% of programs reported positive outcomes for households served in that year. Data collection issues regarding client outcomes may mean that programs underreport positive outcomes.
- While Eviction Prevention and Housing Stabilization programs served the most households in FY24 among all Homelessness Prevention program areas (36%), these programs served 19% fewer households than in FY23, which previously served 5,483 households.
- In FY23, the City may have served more households in this program due to the end of COVID-19 moratoriums on evictions, which led to an increase in households seeking support. The decrease in households seeking services in FY24 may represent the ongoing scale of need for the program, though the number of legal actions (e.g., evictions) remains high.
Targeted Homelessness Prevention
Targeted Homelessness Prevention services provide households with flexible financial assistance to maintain housing or quickly return to housing. Programs target services to households most likely to become homeless based on risk factors, particularly extremely low-income residents with housing vulnerabilities. A cornerstone of this program is the San Francisco Emergency Rental Assistance Program (SF ERAP), which provides direct financial assistance to support very low-income households to remain in housing.
- Programs served a total of 4,244 households in FY24, a slight decline (12%) from the 4,806 households served in FY23.
- Targeted Homelessness Prevention programs provide flexible grants to support high-risk households maintain their housing. A comparison of households served and total expenditures for this program may not account for blended funding and program administration costs. However, on average, spending per household declined by 21% in FY24, from an estimated $4,300 per household in FY23 to an estimated $3,400 per household in FY24. This change is likely due to the change in blended funding sources over time, as well as changes to the program model to ensure funds are spent on households who are most vulnerable.
Permanent Supportive Housing Rental Subsidies
Permanent Supportive Housing Rental Subsidies are deep rental subsidies for some tenants of City-operated permanent supportive housing programs to standardize rent levels to no more than 30% of residents’ income.
- The City continued to provide rental subsidies to mitigate the rent burden of 2,495 households in supportive housing in FY24.
- As a result, 94% maintained their housing or moved to other housing options during FY24.
Problem Solving
Programs deliver Problem Solving to help people explore all safe housing options available to them and identify possible resolutions to their housing crisis without waiting for City-supported shelter or housing. Problem Solving also includes workforce services for people experiencing homelessness to increase their income through education or employment. This program served 1,156 total households through problem solving conversations and workforce programming.
- In FY24, programs engaged 836 households in successful problem-solving conversations that led to a solution that was funded using the OCOH Fund.
- Programs delivering problem solving services do not currently track the thousands of problem-solving conversations they performed in FY24 by funding source; all data reported for this report relate to positive resolutions supported by an OCOH Fund grant.
- OEWD delivered workforce programming to 320 households in FY24.
- Among these households, OEWD reports that 210 households, or 66%, had a positive outcome of participation. OEWD defines a positive outcome as employment into a job (subsidized or unsubsidized), or acceptance into either post-secondary education or an occupational skills training.
Head of Household Demographics
The City collects demographic data about the heads of households served in OCOH-funded Homelessness Prevention programs where data is available. Demographic categories include race and ethnicity, age, gender identity, and sexual orientation.
Due to recent changes in tracking requirements by HUD, HSH programs currently show a higher proportion of heads of household in the multiracial category compared to prior reports and a lower proportion of heads of household identifying as Latine compared to data collected in other sources. Not all programs collected sexual orientation data. Please see the Data Notes for additional details.
- Black and African American heads of households made up the highest percentage of households served in OCOH-funded Homelessness Prevention programs, with 29% of heads of households identifying as Black or African American. Nearly half of heads of households identified as either White (22%) or Latine/Hispanic (21%).
- A quarter of all heads of households served in Homelessness Prevention programs were between the ages of 35-44 followed by the second largest age group of 45-54 (23%).
- Half of heads of households served in FY23-24 identified as a man while 45% identified as a woman. Heads of households identifying as transgender, genderqueer, or gender non-binary accounted for less than 3% of all households served, and 2% of heads of households did not specify their gender identity.
- Over 70% of heads of households, a total of 9,659 heads of households, identified as straight or heterosexual among Homelessness Prevention programs that collected sexual orientation data. Notably, programs did not collect data from over 2,000 heads of households. Over 1,000 heads of households identified as Gay/Lesbian/Same-Gender Loving or Bisexual, representing about 12% of all households served.
Data notes and sources
Data notes and sources
Race and Ethnicity
In 2023, HUD updated requirements for how HSH collects race and ethnicity data. Before this change, clients selected race and ethnicity separately and were not able to select 'Latine' as their race. Clients who identified their ethnicity as Latine would be reported as Multiracial if they also selected a non-Latine race. After the update, clients could identify as Latine alone and would not be asked to separately identify as a non-Latine race. Because of these data changes, HSH programs currently show a higher proportion of heads of household in the multiracial category compared to prior reports and a lower proportion of Latine heads of household than may be accurate according to how these households may identify.
Data for Middle Eastern or North African households or clients will be reported for departments in which the data has been made available (i.e., HSH, MOHCD, and OEWD) except for in Permanent Housing. Data provided by other departments (i.e., DPH, FIR, APD, and UAV) did not provide this category as an option and/or did not report on clients using this category.
The following race and ethnicity categories are combined in Data not collected: Other/Unknown, Missing data, and Doesn’t know or prefers not to answer.
Gender Identity
Heads of households who identify as Questioning or Non-Binary are coded in the Genderqueer or gender non-binary category.
The following gender categories are combined in Unknown: Other + Choose not to disclose, Unknown, Not listed, Decline to answer.
Age
The Office of Economic and Workforce Development (OEWD) program data falls under Problem Solving. OEWD uses different categories for age. In these instances, age data has been excluded.
Sexual Orientation
The following sexual orientation categories are combined in Data not collected: Questioning/Unsure, Other/Not Listed, Not Listed, Other, Missing data, Decline to answer, Data not collected, and Prefers not to answer.
Spending on Homelessness Prevention Programs
Data notes and sources
Data notes and sources
The OCOH Fund is a special fund which allows unexpended fund balances to carry forward into the following year automatically. The cumulative budget includes prior-year carry-forward balances as well as any budget reductions made to account for revenue shortfalls.
The financial data included in the dashboard was extracted from the City’s financial system after the close of the fiscal year books and all adjustments related to the year-end close occurred.
Case Management
Homelessness Prevention funds were used to support a portion of programming related to delivering behavioral health and clinical services in permanent supportive housing (included within the “Case Management” category across OCOH Fund dashboards). While the Homelessness Prevention portion of the funding is reported in the financial dashboards above, information about capacity, clients served, and outcomes from this program are reported within the “Case Management” category in the Mental Health service area section of this report.
Allocated Costs
This term refers to an allocated proportion of the cost to administer the services funded by OCOH, including information and technology, human resources, database and data management, finance and administration and other program supports. In most cases, the OCOH Fund is not the only source of funding for programs described here, and the allocation of administrative costs to run these programs accounts for mixed sources.
The following program names were shortened in the chart visual:
- Targeted Homelessness Prevention Services = Targeted Homelessness Prevention
- Eviction Prevention and Housing Stabilization = Eviction Prevention
- Permanent Supportive Housing Rental Subsidy = Rental Subsidy PSH
The dashboards aggregate the prior four fiscal years of budget and expenditures for the Homelessness Prevention service area (FY21-FY24). The cards at the top of the dashboard show the cumulative expenditures for OCOH-funded Homelessness Prevention programs and the total amount expended in these programs FY24.
- Since the start of the Fund, the City has spent $100.7 million on Homelessness Prevention programs through the OCOH Fund. Cumulatively, the City has spent 72% of the total budgeted amount of $139.7 million on OCOH Fund Homelessness Prevention services.
- In FY24, the City expended $40 million on Homelessness Prevention programs, an 8% decrease from FY23’s expenditures of nearly $44 million.
- The largest reduction in spending in FY24 is in Targeted Homelessness Prevention services where the City spent $14.6 million, 30% less than to prior year expenditures of $20.8 million.
- Problem Solving programs spent $7.7 million in FY24, a 26% increase over FY23 expenditures of $6million.
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