In a blatant attempt to rewrite history, Gov. Gavin Newsom claims that Project Roomkey was a great success, which provides important lessons for other states. The only lesson other states should take from the governor’s program is what not to do.
To facilitate this revision, research firm Abt Global was contracted to evaluate Project Roomkey for its successes, challenges and outcomes. Despite the attempts to portray this report as a glowing review, a more careful examination illustrates that caution is warranted.
Judged against the numbers of homeless people in California, it is clear that Project Roomkey was not a success. There were nearly 162,000 homeless people living on California’s streets in 2020 – the year Project Roomkey was launched. By 2023, the number of homeless increased to more than 181,000. A 12.3% increase in the homeless population is a sign of a program’s failure, not success.
Perhaps the reviewers are defining success as improving the welfare of the homeless. Even judged against this criterion, there is no evidence that Project Roomkey attained its goals.
Unlike the data on rising homelessness, the data tracking Project Roomkey was sparse. As CalMatters reports, “the researchers acknowledged large holes in the accessible state and local data. For example, they couldn’t cross-reference death records or information about participants’ health, meaning they had no way to prove Roomkey prevented deaths or kept people healthier.”
This deficiency is material. Newsom justified Project Roomkey as a necessary program to help people avoid COVID-19, which was supposed to be a larger risk for those who moved from the streets to traditional shelters. Individuals were provided single-occupancy hotel rooms to provide them with privacy and socially distance from others. Without the ability to judge whether those health benefits were achieved, it is premature to call the program a success.
In fact, the report deems the program a success, in part, because it was implemented rapidly and participants were medically vulnerable. While getting the program up and running quickly and reaching out to the intended population are important, these are not sufficient criteria for claiming success.
One claim that may demonstrate some success is longer-term participants were more likely to exit to permanent housing. However, this claim is not what it seems. As CalMatters reported, only about one in five people left Project Roomkey for permanent housing. Twice as many people remained homeless and another one in five did not reveal where they were going.
Accounting for the $150 million the state released and the $300 million that the federal government (through FEMA) has indicated it will not cover, this comes to more than $30,000 per person who found permanent housing. This is an exceptionally expensive approach, which is made even more costly by the increasing numbers of homeless while the state was implementing the program.
It is also important to remember that these numbers are inconsistent with other reports that showed the program was less successful. For instance, an analysis by The Desert Sun found that “statewide, only 5% of Roomkey clients have found a permanent home.” Another investigation, this one from the San Francisco Chronicle, documented the many glitches of Project Homekey, the legacy of Roomkey. The rodent infestation, crime, drug abuse, disorderly behavior, room fires and too-frequent death detailed by the Chronicle made life in the city’s “supportive housing” hardly indistinguishable from the street.
We further note that government’s inability to monitor what has been spent on homelessness contradicts Newsom’s insistence that California has been “a national model” for addressing the crisis. According to the state auditor, officials have not consistently tracked and evaluated efforts to end homelessness. The auditor also said, “the state must do more to assess the cost-effectiveness of its homelessness programs.”
Remember that in 2004, then-San Francisco Mayor Newsom promised to end the city’s chronic homelessness in a decade. At that time, the homeless population for the entire state was around 190,000 people – not much different than today.
A program that is excessively costly, fails the majority of its participants, provides sub-par services, and fails to arrest the growing homeless problem is hardly a success. More accurately, one would more likely call it a failure.
Wayne Winegarden is a senior fellow in business and economics at the Pacific Research Institute. Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at PRI.