SANTA CRUZ >> While authorities countywide touted this year’s homeless tally as a win, which held nearly steady after a dramatic reduction a year earlier, state grant authorities were less impressed.

Santa Cruz County, serving as administrator for the local “continuum of care” addressing homelessness, receives an annual funding allocation based in part on the number of people living homeless in the area, as tabulated by a yearly homeless point-in-time count conducted at the beginning of the year. The overall Santa Cruz County count increased from 1,804 in February 2023 to 1,850 in January, about a 2.6% escalation.

This year’s nearly $5.1 million state grant under the Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention program was reduced by about $840,000 or 15% from the year prior. County Housing for Health Division spokesperson Alan Villatuya termed the funding’s fifth round decrease as “significant” in a media release from the Santa Cruz County Housing for Health Partnership.

In recent years, Gov. Gavin Newsom has increased accountability for homeless funding awarded to local jurisdictions, requiring regional strategic planning. During an Oct. 29 press conference in Los Angeles announcing this year’s Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention program funding of $827 million to 37 jurisdictions statewide, Newsom detailed the history of growing homelessness resolution funding statewide. The state’s Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention program was preceded from 2018 to 2019 by the California Emergency Solutions and Housing and Homeless Emergency Aid Programs.

Initial years’ funding came without significant oversight, according to Newsom.

“Since then, we have significantly increased the investments, but we’ve also increased the accountability, transparency and the expectations,” the governor said.

Newsom added that addressing homelessness had reached a crisis point requiring a crisis mindset because “people are dying on our watch.”

Santa Cruz County created its January 2024-January 2027 strategic framework to reduce homelessness earlier this year under the new state mandate, updating its plan from an earlier three-year county homelessness roadmap. Major policy goals identified in the revised plan include lowering the average length of time people experience homelessness by 10% each year, reducing the number of people returning to homelessness each year by 20%, ensuring community partners capture data on our outcomes and community needs to help improve local programs and coordinating increased outreach and access to services countywide.

Awardees, said Villatuya, must adhere to increased documentation requirements to ensure improved tracking of statewide investments in housing and homelessness. The regional effort also is required to meet plan milestones and keep improving on assisting the unhoused population, he said.

Meanwhile, the city of Santa Cruz received a separate state set-aside, championed by state Sen. John Laird, Speaker of the Assembly Robert Rivas and Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, for $2 million to support homelessness response programs within the city.