California Stopped Tracking Billions in Homeless Spending, Audit Shows

Despite spending more than $24 billion to combat the crisis over the past five years, California has seen its homeless population continue to surge, in tandem with a deadly overdose epidemic and deteriorating public safety in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. Now, according to results of a statewide audit, it turns out no one knows how much is being spent on state-funded homelessness programs—or if any of them are working. That’s because California’s Interagency Council on Homelessness, tasked with overseeing and evaluating the state’s nine agencies and 30 programs devoted to combatting homelessness, stopped collecting and reporting data in 2021....