BERKELEY — Berkeley’s Homeless Response Team staff say they’re prepared to implement transparency and data-keeping recommendations made by the city auditor — but bigger financial problems loom.
More than $25 million was allocated to homelessness programs in Berkeley for the last fiscal year, but the city now faces an annual $20 million structural deficit, the state is grappling with a strained budget of its own and federal social services are being cut.
The financial uncertainty has created a dilemma for Berkeley. City staff charged with overseeing homelessness programming say they need at least $9 million “just to keep the lights on,” for existing programs by either finding new revenue or shrinking what efforts are already funded.
“We’re building momentum, but without reliable long-term funding we won’t be able to keep up,” Berkeley’s Homeless Services Coordinator Josh Jacobs said.
Berkeley residents have already agreed to tax themselves to support homelessness programming and the creation and preservation of affordable housing through the passage of Measure O, a $350 million bond item; Measure P and Measure W, which raise money through a property transfer tax; and U1, a business license tax on owners of residential properties.
Additional dollars will also flow into Alameda County cities through the county’s Measure W, a one-half percent general sales tax approved by the voters in November 2020 that was tied up in litigation until April.
It’s unclear exactly how much of that money will come to Berkeley, though. Neighborhood Services Manager Peter Radu said his team has already applied for funding through the county measure that’s meant to establish more interim housing, and “will jump on every opportunity.”
The impacts of running out of funding will be “immediate and visible” for the hundreds of Berkeley’s unhoused residents who receive support through the city daily, Jacobs said. Continued operations at three motel shelters and two permanent housing sites, and 24/7 operations at men’s and women’s shelter programs are at greatest risk, with funding running out between this year and 2033, according to staff.
Nearly 850 people were living unsheltered in Berkeley at the start of January 2024, according to the latest Point-in-Time Count. Of them, 445 were living on the streets, in vehicles or in makeshift shelters while 399 were being temporarily housed.
“As more and more people land on the streets amid the shortage of shelter and affordable housing, many of them wind up in encampments,” Jacobs said. “These encampments, while borne out of necessity when people have nowhere else to go, nonetheless frequently pose very serious health and safety risks both to the people living in them as well as the surrounding community.”
Mayor Adena Ishii warned that federal cuts will only make current conditions worse.
“I am very concerned about the federal cuts that have been made to food services, to healthcare, to housing — that is going to greatly impact our unhoused population,” Ishii said. “It doesn’t matter how you feel about the issue of homelessness. What is really important, I think, what we can all agree on, is that we need places for people to go.”
The warning of financial troubles and growing strain on city resources come at a time when staff managing the city’s catalog on homelessness programs are in the process of implementing recommendations by the Office of the City Auditor meant to improve transparency and data collection.
The audit, published in July, found that the work of the Homeless Response Team which provides outreach to unsheltered residents and conducts code enforcement, would be improved if they tracked more detailed data of each person the team’s three — soon to be four — employees come into contact with, including whether or not they accepted shelter and their reasoning.
More robustly collaborating with partnering organizations and sharing of that information with the public would also benefit the team, the audit found.
Councilmembers expressed an interest in seeing some of that data displayed on a dashboard — a recommendation made in the audit — and additional data like income information.
Implementation of the auditor’s recommendations has already begun and can be completed with current resources, City Manager Paul Buddenhagen said.
Looking ahead, Buddenhagen said city leadership and staff have good working relationships with their counterparts in the county and will continue to work with them to capitalize on opportunities to bring in additional dollars.
Taking a regional approach to addressing homelessness will be key, said Councilmember Rashi Kesarwani.
“That regional work is very important,” Kesarwani said. “Because we want to make sure other jurisdictions are making similar commitments, knowing that we’re all going to benefit from it.”
