All right.

Good morning.

I'd like to call the health committee meeting to order for January 12th.

Clerk, take the roll.

Supervisor Town.

Present.

Supervisor Miley.

Present.

Okay.

Does the clerk need to provide any instructions?

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Okay, thank you.

All right.

So we have two informational items this morning.

The first one is the homeless state of emergency update.

Thank you, Supervisor Jonathan's gonna do uh both of the presentations.

So I'll turn it over to him.

Good morning.

Jonathan Russell, director for Alameda County Health Housing and Homelessness Services.

Um this is an update on the state of emergency at your request.

Um starting with just a brief summary, as I know you're aware, the Board of Supervisors declared a countywide state of emergency on homelessness on the 19th of September 2023.

And the then Office of Homeless Care and Coordination now Housing and Homelessness Services was tasked with uh facilitating and leading the development of a response plan in partnership with other county agencies, and we're providing an update today at the health committee's request.

Um obviously it was late 2023 when the emergency was declared.

So jumping forward here to the context in 2026.

Um just wanted to at a high level summarize kind of some of the assets and then of course some of the challenges we face in the ongoing uh emergency that is uh high levels of homelessness in our community.

Um, first, just summarizing in our last year reported to you, we're aggregating the figures for fiscal year 25, uh 2425 right now, but over 435 million dollars were uh dedicated to homelessness in Alameda County.

Apologies, there's a data miss there.

We'll fill that in, but um that's roughly 50 percent split between county investments and was that figure again.

What was that figure again?

435 million dollars in total funds awarded uh or committed.

So that includes federal, state, and local funding.

Uh 219 million of that is uh county funding, funding that has flowed through or been committed by the county, uh, and then the balance uh by the collection of our city partners.

So essentially 50-50 percent split in that year.

As you also know, we'll touch more on this in our next update on the point in time count.

We saw for the first time in the year following the declaration of emergency.

We saw the first time reduction in the point in time count numbers uh in 10 years.

We saw a 3% reduction overall and a higher reduction, an 11% reduction specifically in unsheltered homelessness, which of course we see as positive considering the particular focus on uh folks that are unhoused and unsheltered in the declaration of emergency itself.

Obviously, our guiding light, our North Star has been the Home Together 2026 community plan.

We are uh knee deep in the update to that plan right now and plan to bring uh draft before your committee and then eventually the board in the summertime, so that we might be able hopefully in the early part of the next fiscal year be launching into the updated home together 2030 plan again with the same goals to reduce homelessness, better coordinate with our partners, and address racial inequities in who's experiencing homelessness in our communities.

Of course, we also have the historic estimated 1.4 billion dollar investment through the Home Together Fund.

Decisions made in July 2025.

I'll present some updates today around some initiatives that have already launched, and of course, as we update the Home Together 2030 plan, that will really be our guiding light for driving those investments and all investments across the community to leverage those to continue our progress.

Challenges, of course, uh there are plenty of headwinds consistently, at least as of 2024, and our most recent report, those entering homelessness uh still outpace those exiting.

So much as we house uh nearly uh 4,000 people a year out of our homelessness response system into permanent housing with resources.

More than 4,000 on average fall into homelessness.

So one of the real goals of our updated plan is really to launch countywide homelessness prevention more intensively.

So to really combat that inflow, exceeding to try to get toward our outflow so that we can exceed inflow and begin to make progress.

Definitely resource constraints.

The Home Together 2026 plan calls for more than 24,000 additional housing resources with a high level of operating costs.

We are updating these estimates, of course, but given stagnation in state level and federal level housing resources, we of course need a lot more housing than we have for individuals, particularly deeply affordable housing.

So the persistent housing gaps are enduring.

We also, as a system struggle with the over-reliance on one-time sources.

So unlike many, many, essentially all of our other social safety net services in our communities where there are ongoing sources of one kind or another, homelessness funding is the vast majority of it, particularly state level funding is one-time investments without with the inability to plan on those investments for future years.

So we have to constantly balance between reserving funding to keep programs in operation and also standing up projects that could quickly be closed down, which as you can imagine doesn't work very well for scaling housing investments.

And then, of course, the federal threats to funding, both in terms of our the primary uh federal funding we receive through the Department of Housing and Urban Development for homelessness, roughly two-thirds of our federal funding each year is currently at risk with the federal government seeking to change the priorities for that funding and putting up to 60 million dollars at risk for Alameda County.

And then, of course, as I know you were discussing in other contexts also later today, that the threats from HR1 are pervasive as well.

So quickly summarizing in the development of the response plan.