Homelessness in Silicon Valley: How Things Have Changed

Yesterday, the Housing 1,000 SV kicked off  in the Santa Clara County.

Today, those efforts continued in Mountain View and other areas throughout the county.

But while the early-morning outreach to the county's homeless residents might resemble the biannual homeless census required by the federal government, officals say that Housing 1000 SV is more about faces than numbers.

"The housing 1000 SV campaign is different because rather than talking about the numbers, we are trying to create a registry to identify individuals and match them with services," says Ky Le, Santa Clara County director of homeless systems.

Participants issue a survey to every single individual spoken to. The survey has two purposes: to identify and prioritize services based on their health and then, within Santa Clara County, house 1,000 chronic homeless people within the next two years, Le says.

Bob Dolci, the county's homeless concerns coordinator, has been with the department for five years but prior to that was with EHC Lifebuilders for 13 years. He says the changes in homeless issues have been surprising.

"There are more homeless families for sure," he says.

One of the biggest changes that he was surprised about was the actual number of homeless in the county. Preliminary numbers from a homeless census conducted in January have shown a drop, he says.

"It didn’t go up," Dolci says, "Actually, it went down a little from the last count in 2009. With the economic downturn we expected that number to go up because of the severity of loss of jobs and income."

Santa Clara County Homeless Census 2009

The funding for many of these programs has also changed.

"We have been able to house some of the shelter population, not so much with federal funding but with local funding," he says.

One example of this was the ability to provide vouchers through the Housing Authority to 200 individuals since October 2010. He hopes that they will be able to duplicate those efforts this year and add another 200 homeless individuals to those 200 now in permanent homes.

But the most significant change in the effort to end homelessness in the county is the support of what Dolic describes as the "politicos."

"At this point in time, this is the most political will and effort to respond effectively to end chronic homelessness in this county than I have ever seen in my 18 years working" he says. "The effort by the Mayor of San Jose, several council people and supervisors banding together through their Blue Ribbon Commission to end homelessness and the strategies to end homelessness within 10 years and dedicate resources to this have been huge."

Most recently, the Santa Clara County Executive Office is conducting an analysis of services to see if there's a better way to realign those services for better results.

"That's a huge commitment by the executive office to help in this effort," Dolci says.