Look, I'm reading some pretty interesting news coming out of CalMatters Housing about what's happening with homelessness counts across California, and I want to walk you through what they're reporting because it touches on something that affects our whole region.
According to CalMatters Housing, California's showing some real progress on paper. More than half of the counties that released their 2026 preliminary homeless counts are reporting declines. San Joaquin County did particularly well, cutting their homeless population by nearly a third, while even here in our own backyard, Alameda County reported a thirteen percent drop. The counts are based on surveys volunteers conduct in January each year, trying to tally every unhoused person they can find on a single night.
The good news seems to be tied to real investments. Counties that are seeing improvements are pointing to state funding that's been flowing in over the past several years. They're using that money to create shelter beds and permanent housing. San Joaquin, for instance, added over a thousand permanent housing units between 2024 and 2026. Alameda County actually hit a milestone where more people moved out of homelessness into housing than became newly homeless for the first time since they started tracking it in 2021.
But here's where it gets complicated. According to the reporting, some activists and researchers are raising serious questions about whether these numbers tell the whole story. Since the Supreme Court made it easier for cities to enforce camping ordinances in 2024, enforcement has ramped up significantly. When people get pushed out of encampments, they scatter and become harder to count. A study in Los Angeles found that while tent camps dropped by twenty-three percent, the number of people sleeping without any shelter actually increased by twenty percent. So the people didn't necessarily find housing, they just became harder to spot during the count.
There are also some methodological issues worth noting. Fresno and Madera counties reported a huge thirty-four percent drop, but they changed how they counted this year in a way that makes direct comparison to last year impossible. And Los Angeles discovered accounting errors that had inflated their count by over six hundred people. The point-in-time counts themselves are acknowledged as undercount efforts, since it's genuinely difficult to find someone hidden in a car or behind bushes on a single night.
What I'm seeing locally is that we do have real progress happening in places like Alameda County, and the state funding is making a tangible difference in getting people into shelters and housing. But we need to be honest about the limitations of what these numbers are telling us. The decline in the official count might reflect genuine housing placements, or it might reflect people becoming harder to find. As the CalMatters reporting notes, we're also facing real uncertainty because of recent federal cuts to social services and Medi-Cal that could threaten whatever gains we've made. It's progress, but it's fragile progress, and we need to keep our eyes on actual housing outcomes, not just who shows up on the census.
