'Volunteer Jail': 7 things to know about the failure of California's homeless shelters

Yahoo

26-02-2025

All across California, temporary homeless shelters have become the foundation of taxpayer-funded efforts to get people off the street.
CalMatters' new investigation found that shelters have instead become housing purgatory. They're often a mess—dangerous, chaotic and ultimately ineffective at finding people lasting housing.
Shelters are usually off-limits to anyone but staff and residents. To understand what's happening inside, we obtained previously unreleased state performance data, reviewed thousands of police calls and incident reports and interviewed more than 80 shelter residents and personnel.
Here are seven key findings from our investigation:
Large, bunk bed-lined group shelters have long been the default answer to homelessness in big cities. Now, officials in all kinds of cities, suburbs, and rural areas are banking on emergency beds to help clear the streets of tents after the Supreme Court's Grants Pass ruling gave cities more power to ban sleeping outside.
No state agency tracks the total amount of money spent on homeless shelters, but public records show that state and local agencies have spent roughly $1 billion on shelters since 2018.
This has more than doubled the number of emergency shelter beds in California, from around 27,000 to 61,000.
Once inside a shelter, residents are supposed to be connected with services and, ultimately, permanent housing. Many struggle to get in. There are still three times as many homeless people as there are shelter beds in California.
Annual shelter death rates tripled between 2018 and mid-2024. A total of 2,007 people died, according to data obtained from the California Interagency Council on Homelessness. That's nearly twice as many deaths as California jails saw during the same period.
Catherine Moore moved into an Anaheim shelter after getting clean in an area jail and found the two experiences eerily similar. She said in an ongoing class action lawsuit that she found drugs on the shelter floor, cleaned bloody toilets, dodged cockroaches, and was sexually harassed by staff.
"The shelter is a volunteer jail," she said. "The only difference is there are more standards and you have more rights as a person in jail. That's horrible, isn't it?"
Black mold. Bedbugs. Domestic violence. Sex crimes.
CalMatters analyzed thousands of police call logs and shelter incident reports. They catalog the deluge of issues inside shelters.
In Los Angeles, for example, court records show a leading nonprofit hired a man who was convicted of attempted murder to work security at a shelter, where he committed three sex crimes in one day.
In five years of work at San Diego-area shelters, Holly Herring has seen it all. Her clients have survived everything from hate crimes to electrical fires to moldy food, leaving her wondering why shelters don't at least get inspected and graded like restaurants.
But when she had to flee violence in her own home, Herring decided to avoid shelters like the ones she worked in altogether.
"I know that it is safer and more dignified for me to sleep in my car than it is in a shelter," she said.
Contracts often call for nonprofit shelter operators to find housing for between 30% and 70% of the people who come through their doors.
CalMatters obtained and analyzed state data on shelter effectiveness and found that, statewide, they're far behind that target.
Additionally, there's a difference of opinion in the shelter world on how to calculate their basic success.
Many shelters and the state measure it like this: Of the people who leave your program each year, how many find permanent housing? This excludes all the people still living inside the temporary shelter. Using this math, less than one in four people, about 22%, find housing.
Housing experts and some government officials prefer to measure it another way: How many total people who enter through a shelter's doors find housing? This method doesn't allow shelters to exclude its current residents. They say this is a more accurate measurement since the goal is to get people out of temporary shelter quickly, and shelters too often become de facto housing.
If you use this equation, the picture is even more dismal. Shelters are finding homes for only about 10% of their residents—a figure that's declined in recent years.
Regardless of what math you use, housing experts say the state has reached a tipping point: Keep pouring resources into shelters with questionable results, or rethink the entire system.
The Oakland-based Bay Area Community Services saw revenue climb 1,000% in a decade to $98 million in 2023. At the same time, it faced a long list of allegations against staffers at one taxpayer-funded shelter, including fraud and inappropriate relationships with clients. LA's Special Service for Groups brought in $170 million in 2023, a nine-figure jump since 2017, while drawing complaints and lawsuits over violence and sexual misconduct.
Larry Haynes, CEO of Orange County-based shelter operator Mercy House, said the issues go way beyond budgets. Shelters are often used as a stand-in for an "absolutely broken" health care system, he said, leaving many of the facilities to essentially operate psychiatric wards on low budgets with low-paid staff.
"I have to ask, as kindly and as respectfully as I can, 'Well, what the fuck did you think was going to happen?'" Haynes said.
While the state sends local governments hundreds of millions of dollars for shelters, it does little to ensure accountability. Nearly all of California's 500-plus cities and counties have ignored a state law that requires them to document and address dangerous shelter conditions, CalMatters found.
Meanwhile, local agencies that directly pay and monitor shelter contractors often fail to follow up on reports of unsafe conditions, unused beds or missed housing targets, according to audits and complaints.
"It doesn't work, and it never has," said Dennis Culhane, an expert on homelessness who has lived undercover in shelters and studied their evolution over several decades. "That is part of what makes being homeless such a bad experience—that you have to be in these awful facilities for survival."
Culhane is one of a growing number of experts who advocate for government agencies to redirect money from short-term shelter and services toward promising early-stage solutions like direct rent assistance.
And even staunch shelter critics agree that cities need some of the facilities since they play a crucial role for vulnerable people.
"These shelters are a lifeline," said Chris Herring, a UCLA assistant professor of sociology who spent more than 90 days in San Francisco shelters as part of his research. "There are many elderly people in there who would not survive a second outside."
He believes local and state officials should be more focused on changes that could get more people off the street, such as more specialized sober living options, smaller and less chaotic shelters or better housing counseling.
"The political role is mainly to clear the streets," he said. "What I'm really worried about is more funding going into shelter with very little attention to the things that would end homelessness."
This story was produced by CalMatters and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.