Homelessness falls in Alameda County as Bay Area sees fragile signs of progress

Grant Stringer and Ethan Varian, The Mercury News on May 19, 2026

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Homelessness is falling in parts of the Bay Area after years of major public investment, with Alameda County the latest to report a significant decline, even as officials warn that progress could be fragile.

Homelessness in Alameda County fell by 13% since 2024, according to the results of its latest point-in-time survey, a count conducted by more than a thousand volunteers in January. Officials in Alameda County credited investments in housing programs and closer collaboration with cities, including Oakland, where most of the county’s unhoused people live. Still, more than 8,000 people remain homeless in the county, the second-largest such population in the Bay Area.

The drop fits a broad but uneven pattern. Across California, counties including Los Angeles, San Diego, Contra Costa, Sonoma and Santa Cruz have also reported encouraging declines in homelessness over the past few years, following record spikes in many communities throughout the state.

Experts and officials say the progress is largely thanks to the billions of dollars in public spending statewide, expanding street outreach, boosting rental assistance and converting motels into shelters and supportive housing, among other efforts to alleviate homelessness.

“What’s consistent across these communities is they invested dollars into getting people back into housing,” said Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow with the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

However, tens of thousands of people remain homeless in the Bay Area, and point-in-time counts are only rough snapshots of populations. Cities and counties in the U.S. conduct these surveys by dispatching volunteers on a single morning to observe and count people who appear to be living without homes.

That’s a challenge because of the sheer scope of homelessness in the Bay Area. Plus, homeless residents often prefer to live off the beaten path, out of sight from cities that routinely sweep encampments.

In Alameda County, about 1,300 volunteers fanned out for the most recent survey on a cold January morning. Some in Oakland said it would be harder to identify homeless residents because the city dismantled its largest camps last year in a wave of enforcement.

In the new Alameda County survey, volunteers counted 8,201 homeless people this year and 9,450 in 2024.

“We see it as momentum,” said Jonathan Russell, director of the Alameda County Department of Housing and Homelessness. “And we want to keep it going.”

Russell said the “optimistic” survey results align with the county’s internal data systems, which have also shown progress as the county begins to dole out hundreds of millions of dollars in voter-approved funds for homelessness solutions. During the past fiscal year, more unhoused people found housing than those who became homeless — a trend not seen in several years, Russell said.

In the most recent estimate, Alameda County and cities spent a combined $436 million on homelessness in fiscal year 2023-2024. Russell said that funding will ramp up as county staff releases more funds from Measure W, a sales tax increase approved by voters in 2020 that has raised $800 million.

In the Bay Area, not all regional measures of homelessness have shown progress. Santa Clara County, home to the Bay Area’s largest homeless population, reported an 8% increase during its biennial survey in 2025, bringing the total to 10,711 people. The number of unsheltered homeless people remained essentially flat at 7,472.

Progress in the South Bay has been uneven. In San Jose, where well over half of Santa Clara County’s homeless people live, unsheltered homelessness fell by 10% to 3,959. Mayor Matt Mahan, who is running for governor, attributed the drop to the hundreds of tiny homes and other shelter units the city has added in recent years. Even so, homeless advocates have questioned the city’s efforts to redirect funding from permanent housing to temporary shelters, arguing it is a shortsighted strategy.

The results from Alameda County’s count come as officials statewide warn that potential shifts in state and federal homelessness funding threaten to upend the recent progress.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, in his latest state budget proposal last week, included $500 million for local homelessness programs, down from $1 billion in prior years. At the federal level, the Trump administration is seeking to divert billions of dollars from permanent housing to shelters and sober-living sites, on top of proposed cuts to housing vouchers, which experts say help prevent millions of people across the country from falling into homelessness.

Visotzky, with the National Alliance to End Homelessness, argued that funding for housing and homelessness programs will only become more critical in the months and years ahead if inflation continues to accelerate in the Bay Area and across the country. So far this spring, rent costs have grown more slowly than the spikes in gasoline and grocery prices.

“We can lose that progress very quickly if we don’t fund the systems that catch people when they fall out of their housing, which we know happens more frequently when rents start to go up,” he said.