Brief Chronic Homelessness Initiative: 2022 Progress Report
Samantha Batko, Pear Moraras, Lynden Bond, Kaela Girod, Mikaela Tajo, Brendan Chen
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In May 2017, Tipping Point Community announced the Chronic Homelessness Initiative (CHI), a $100 million initiative to halve chronic homelessness in San Francisco in five years. Although CHI formally came to an end on June 30, 2022, placements in CHI–supported programs continued throughout the remainder of 2022. This brief provides an update on progress made in 2022 toward CHI’s goals, describes challenges experienced throughout the initiative, and identifies lessons learned in the final year of implementation. 

Why This Matters

Tipping Point’s goal for CHI was to halve chronic homelessness among individuals without children, as measured by the difference between the 2017 and 2023 point-in-time counts. If Tipping Point and its city partners met the goal, 1,056 fewer individuals would be experiencing chronic homelessness in January 2023. The initiative relied on three primary strategies to reach this goal:

  1. Increase placements of people experiencing homelessness into permanent housing.
  2. Prevent people from becoming chronically homeless.
  3. Change systems in ways that help achieve strategies 1 and 2 and optimize the public sector by increasing capacity, accountability, transparency, and equity, as well as elevating the voices of people with lived experiences of homelessness.

What We Found

  • San Francisco’s government and nonprofit partners placed an estimated 2,011 people experiencing chronic homelessness into housing in 2022, marking a 44 percent (n=612) increase in housing placements from 2021 and the largest number of placements in a single year during CHI.
  • Based on reported placements in 2022, we predict that Tipping Point and its partners did not meet the goal of halving chronic homelessness by January 2023. However, we cannot conclusively determine this because there will not be a point-in-time count in 2023.
  • Interview respondents felt certain that Tipping Point investments had a positive impact on San Francisco’s response to chronic homelessness. They stressed the sustainable changes of developing a scattered-site housing strategy through CHI and the value of Tahanan as a proof point for developing permanent supportive housing at a reduced time and cost.

Overall, we find that CHI achieved its goals of housing people experiencing chronic homelessness and improving the systems that respond to homelessness in San Francisco.

Other reports from Urban’s evaluation of Tipping Point’s Chronic Homelessness Initiative are available here.

Research and Evidence Housing and Communities
Expertise Housing, Land Use, and Transportation Nonprofits and Philanthropy Preventing and Ending Homelessness
Tags Foundations and philanthropy
States California
Cities San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA
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