Homeless in Santa Clara County: Report puts cost at $520 million a year

SAN JOSE — The human toll of homelessness can be seen daily throughout Santa Clara County with people living on the streets. But now, for the first time, a staggering fiscal cost has been calculated: $520 million annually.

A new study, described as the most comprehensive look ever at the expense of homelessness on a community, has determined that more than $3 billion was spent over a six-year period in the county on services such as trips to the emergency rooms, jail stays and mental health care.

“Home Not Found: The Cost of Homelessness in Silicon Valley” also identified how a small group of about 2,800 persistently homeless alone cost the county about $83,000 each, per year.

“What this shows is that having people live out in the open is tragic for the individual, destabilizing for the community and, at the end of the day, very expensive for the public,” said Dan Flaming, president of Los Angeles-based Economic Roundtable, which produced the report for Santa Clara County and the nonprofit Destination: Home. “The people who are the most tragic are the ones where there can be real cost savings simply by housing them.”

The study, which is being presented Tuesday morning at a community leader forum in San Jose, tracked more than 104,000 homeless in the county from 2007 to 2012, mining data from sources that included hospital and criminal-justice records.

The result is a detailed look at a population that often is hidden in the shadows and living off the grid. It appears to bolster a case long made by homeless advocates: Helping people off the streets is more than just doing the right thing, it’s also smart public policy that will save taxpayer dollars.

“We’ve never known the scope of the problem,” said Jennifer Loving, executive director of Destination: Home. “People often say, ‘It’s going to cost too much money to solve homelessness.’ Well, we’re spending a lot right now. If we’re spending $83,000 a year for some homeless, that’s far more than the cost of housing them.”

Perhaps nowhere else in the country is the dividing line between the haves and have-nots more stark than here in Silicon Valley, home to iconic companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook. But it’s also become a place where so many don’t have a home.

The county has 7,567 homeless — the nation’s seventh-highest total — according to the most recent published survey, the 2014 Annual Homeless Report to Congress. San Jose also drew national headlines in December with the closure of “the Jungle” encampment along Story Road, where as many as 300 people had been living next to Coyote Creek in Third World squalor.

The county commissioned the study, and underwrote most of the $200,000 cost, in an effort to better understand the drain on public resources and how best to devise strategies to reduce the homeless numbers.

It found that, in general, most homeless were resilient and their time on the streets didn’t last long. Programs such as food stamps and some public assistance often were enough to help them back on their feet.

“Some people just get stuck,” Flaming said. “They don’t have family or friends to help them. The wreckage just accumulates. Those are the people who end up spending days and days in the hospital, or end up in jail. They are very expensive.”

Loving is a proponent of a “housing first” model in which chronically homeless are moved into places to live — stabilizing their often chaotic lives — and then are fortified with services.

Destination: Home oversees a program called Housing 1000, which has found housing for 103 persistently homeless people. The report found that their public costs while homeless were about $62,000 annually. That figure dropped to just less than $20,000 on average after they were placed in housing.

For Loving, the take-away conclusion is to “target those really high users and quickly get them into housing.”

That is much easier said than done. Public money is limited. Even more scarce is affordable housing in one of the country’s most expensive places to live. Homeless complain that even when they receive subsidized housing vouchers, they often still can’t find landlords willing to accept them in a market where the vacancy rate is so low.

There simply is no magic wand.

“The difficult step is getting the additional housing units that are badly needed,” said Gary Graves, the county’s chief operating officer. “And in the short term, what are we going to do with the 2,500 or so people who cost the most? It’s a very tough problem, and one that the county can’t solve by itself. We need the entire community working together, and that includes the private sector like our corporate citizens.”

Most of all, he added, what’s needed is a sense of urgency.

“The hope is that this report gets the community’s attention,” Graves said. “We should not have thousands of people walking around every day without a roof over their head.”

Follow Mark Emmons at Twitter.com/markedwinemmons.