Dangerous and ineffective: CalMatters investigates homeless shelters
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All across California, temporary homeless shelters have become the foundation of taxpayer-funded efforts to get people off the street and back into housing.
Our new investigation found that shelters have instead turned into housing purgatory. They’re a mess — dangerous, chaotic and ultimately ineffective at finding people housing.
Shelters are usually off-limits to anyone but staff and residents. To understand what’s happening inside them, investigative reporter Lauren Hepler obtained previously unreleased state performance data; reviewed thousands of police calls and incident reports; and interviewed more than 80 shelter residents and personnel.
We found that local and state agencies have spent at least $1 billion on shelters since 2018, more than doubling the number of emergency beds. As officials have ramped up encampment clearings, shelters have increasingly become central to the government response to homelessness.
But more shelters does not equal more housing. We found that fewer than 1 in 4 people entering shelters have moved onto a permanent home. On top of that, internal records reveal allegations of shelter mismanagement, abuse and thousands of previously unreported deaths.
- Catherine Moore, former shelter resident: “The shelter is a volunteer jail.”
- Dennis Culhane, leading policy expert: “It doesn’t work, and it never has.”
- Holly Herring, shelter worker who faced homelessness herself: “I know that it is safer and more dignified for me to sleep in my car than it is in a shelter.”
Read the full investigation here, or check out just the key takeaways. Let us know if you have a story about living or working in a shelter, and click here for resources on how to file a complaint against a shelter by CalMatters’ Byrhonda Lyons.
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