LA County's Homeless Initiative Annual Performance Evaluation: Year 4 Outcomes

Findings from Year 4 show that, for the third consecutive year, over 20,000 people experiencing homelessness exited homeless services to Permanent Housing (PH) placements (macro-measure 2). Nearly 10,000 of these PH placements occurred within the purview of HI-supported initiatives (meso-measure 3). Looking at these PH placements over the last three years, 56,000 unduplicated people exited shelter stays to PH (both HI- and non-HI-funded), and 31,000 of these exits came under the auspices of HI-supported services.Noteworthy also were Interim Housing (IH) placements, which declined 25% after significant year-over-year growth since FY 2016-17. Building IH capacity is a key component of reducing LAs large unsheltered population, and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting need to decompress shelter facilities, has handed these efforts an additional challenge. The reduction in IH housing capacity in Year 4 is one of the first indicators of COVID-19s impact on LAs homeless services, and COVID-19 will almost certainly have a much larger impact on HI strategies in the upcoming Year 5. In addition, the rental unit vacancies in LA has been very low over the past couple of years making permanent housing opportunities harder to secure. This has made the IH lengths of stay longer, thus reducing the number of IH beds that turn over.