City Leaders Say Prevention, Housing, And Services Could Reduce Homelessness By 50 Percent Despite Limited Resources
Oakland, California, Mayor Barbara Lee has unveiled a new plan to reduce the city’s homeless population by 50 percent. The plan focuses on 5 key areas: preventing people from becoming homeless, improving access to services, managing homeless camps and neighborhood health, improving interim housing, and building permanent housing.
The latest numbers show that an estimated 5,485 unhoused people call Oakland home, with 3,659 of them unsheltered. Those numbers have been steadily rising over the last 4 point-in-time counts and are expected to rise again once this year’s count results are published.
The city’s newly formed Office of Homelessness Solutions has reviewed past strategies, promising ideas, and budgetary gaps to develop a plan to make this goal a reality.
A Pared-Down Goal
With many other locales making promises of reaching functional zero levels of homelessness within a certain number of years, Oakland’s commitment to reduce homelessness by 50% stands out. City officials like Sasha Hauswald, who leads the newly implemented Office of Homelessness Solutions, may have hoped for more, but feel that they’re being realistic with this goal.
“I wish that we could have said we’re going to get to functional zero in the next five years,” she said at a Commission on Homelessness meeting last month. “Not to mince words, but we don’t have the resources.”
The estimated cost of reaching a functional zero level of homelessness in Oakland would be an additional $3.2 billion over 10 years, and that’s on top of the current amount budgeted toward homelessness relief.
The plan plainly states that, “due to funding realities, unsheltered homelessness will exist in California, the Bay Area, and Oakland for the foreseeable future,” and “a humane and strategic approach to engaging with unsheltered neighbors will continue to be necessary, even as we turn the tide on rising homelessness.”
Sweeps Aren’t Working
The new plan highlights what has and hasn’t been working in the city’s homelessness response over recent years. Notably, it says in plain terms that encampment sweeps have not been working to solve the problem, only to shuffle people around:
“Despite a substantially increased pace of encampment closures in 2025, reported encampments still rose,” the draft plan says. “The city lacks shelter and housing to meet the needs of unhoused individuals and, without an indoor place to move, most individuals simply self-relocate to another Oakland location during encampment closures.”
The plan also highlights racial disparities in homelessness. Though the population of Oakland is only 22% Black, 59% of people entering homelessness in Oakland are Black.
What Is Working
Oakland’s current programs support 1,500 people each year to exit homelessness. Unfortunately, the number of people newly entering homelessness has outpaced that figure by 1,000. To address this, Oakland plans to ramp up its services to support 3,400 households annually and to stem the tide of people entering homelessness through strong preventative measures.
The Targeted Prevention Program, which has been working well, will receive more funding from several diverse sources, including the new slice of sales tax collected as part of Measure W.
An additional $21 million will be needed to bridge the funding gap between the services provided now and those needed to support 3,400 families per year. This program helps people stay in the housing they have by providing legal aid, social services, and financial assistance.
An ounce of prevention is well worth a pound of cure in this case, since preventing a family from becoming homeless costs about $6,000 to $10,000, while rehousing a family that’s already become homeless can cost ten times as much! This forms the basis of the plan’s first strategy: prevention.
What Will Work
The second strategy in the plan involves improving access to available services for everyone who needs them. To do this, the Office of Homelessness Solutions will focus on improving collaboration across agencies, improving access to the Coordinated Entry System, and encouraging a more holistic approach to case management. It will also improve training and support for outreach workers, who are presently subjected to low wages, high turnover, poor coordination, and inadequate training.
Strategy 3 focuses on improving living conditions for unsheltered people and their surrounding communities. The report acknowledges that Oakland lacks sufficient housing to meet the needs of its unhoused population. Without enough indoor space available, encampment sweeps will only move people from place to place pointlessly.
Despite this acknowledgement of the harms they can cause, sweeps are likely to continue. In fact, the report states that, “encampment closures are necessary to maintain usability of Oakland’s parks, schools, businesses, and critical infrastructure.”
The goals stated in the plan are merely to ensure each encampment resident has a relationship with a case manager or case worker and is offered support to meet their immediate needs, even when housing is not available.
The city will also increase trash removal around encampments and maintain existing sanitation stations. The plan further recommends that the areas around Oakland that are considered “high sensitivity” and therefore a priority for encampment sweeps be reevaluated, since currently over 90% of the city is considered high sensitivity.
Strategy 4 calls for the city to add an additional 215 interim housing units per year for the next 4 years. Doing so while maintaining existing units would increase Oakland’s total number of interim housing units to 2,300. The plan also recommends improving the quality of these units, not just increasing their quantity.
The ultimate strategy, of course, is to increase permanent, affordable housing. It’s the only foolproof way to end homelessness and yet the hardest strategy to get cities to adopt. The current plan estimates that “to effectively reduce homelessness by 50%, the City needs to create an additional 730 permanent housing units, including new units, renovated properties, and permanent vouchers, each year.”