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Silicon Valley (aka Santa Clara County) is most known for being the heart of the tech sector, but most don’t know that it also has one of the country’s highest rates of homelessness and its third largest chronically homeless population.
According to an extensive new study, the best way to end homelessness is to… well… give the homeless homes. It’s an approach that Utah successfully adopted.
Evidence shows it is actually more expensive for a city to maintain its homeless population on the street than it is to house them. In Silicon Valley there are about 2,800 people who are consistently homeless. “Close to half of all county expenditures were spent on just five percent of the homeless population, who came into frequent contact with police, hospitals, and other service agencies, racking up an average of $100,000 in costs per person annually,” reports Mother Jones. In total, Santa Clara communities spend $520 million in homeless services each year.
Costs have gone down considerably with the city’s Destination: Home’s program, which has housed more than 800 people in the past five years. Giving them homes cost less than $20,000 per person. The result is an impressive annual savings of more than $42,000.
Now Santa Clara County looks to expand Destination: Home, and is also creating a “triage tool” in order to screen hospitals and jails to identify high-need, high-cost individuals.
“At the end of the day, the solution that really makes sense is to prevent homelessness. It creates a lot of wreckage for individuals and for communities,” says Daniel Flaming, head researcher and president of Economic Roundtable.. “For every community to get better at preventing people from falling through the cracks and to reduce the flow of people into homelessness—that is ultimately the best solution.”
