(The Center Square) – Lawmakers have called in recent days for an audit for the state’s homelessness spending.
Roughly $24 billion of California taxpayers’ money has been spent on trying to curb the growing homelessness since 2019, according to Assemblymember Diane Dixon, R-Newport Beach.
“No one can tell me, number one, how much are we really spending; number two, how do we know it’s helping people, how many people are being helped,” Dixon told The Center Square in an exclusive interview. “I can’t get answers to those questions, so that’s what prompted me to do this [call for an audit]."
Data published by the Hoover Institution last March puts California’s homeless population as 187,000, up 60% from the state’s 2015 numbers and a 24% increase in 2019, when the state’s Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention program was launched. The program makes state-funded grants available to cities and counties throughout the state to help reduce homelessness in their communities, according to the California Department of Housing and Community Development.
In an emailed response to The Center Square, officials with the California Department of Housing & Community Development said a Homekey program resulted in the construction of 16,000 new homes, all part of 250 different housing projects in the state. The creation of new homes is expected to help more than 172,000 people, the department said.
“Our commitment to overcoming bureaucratic hurdles has led to an astonishing 59% increase in residential construction, slashing approval timelines by up to 62%,” Alicia Murillo, a communications specialist with the department, wrote in an email to The Center Square. “California is not just tackling homelessness; we are redefining what success looks like.”
Murillo also said that preliminary data from 2025 shows a 9% drop in unsheltered homeless rates in 2024.
“This isn’t just progress; it’s a bold declaration that California refuses to accept failure,” Murillo said.
Other lawmakers told The Center Square on Monday that there have been previous audits on funds allocated to the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention program, and that California isn’t the only state to see an increase in homelessness in the last several years. While they share concerns about the number of Californians losing their homes is going up, many homeless Californians have lost their homes to record wildfires in Southern California, particularly the Eaton and Palisades fires.
City and county governments could also increase efforts to expand affordable housing projects, lawmakers told The Center Square.
“Ultimately, when we look across the United States, we have built less housing units since the 1980s, and when we look at California, it’s the same,” Assemblymember Sharon Quirk-Silva, D-La Palma, told The Center Square. “The state can do what it wants to do as far as trying to incentivize, but it’s really ultimately up to local governments.”
A federal audit of California’s Department of Housing and Community Development found that the state needs to strengthen its fraud detection efforts, determining that the department was not equipped to properly detect fraud of taxpayer dollars used on the department’s programs.
According to that analysis, more than $319.5 million of federal money could be at risk from a lack of fraud detection on the department’s programs.
“With the government, we constantly judge based on spending,” Wayne Winegarden, economist and senior business fellow at Pasadena-based Pacific Research Institute, told The Center Square on Monday. “There’s a difference between spending and outcomes, and I think an audit just confirms that. We’re spending more, and the homelessness problem isn’t going away.”
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