Homelessness is on the rise in Ventura County. After almost a decade of steady decline, Ventura’s 2019 point-in-time survey counted 1,669 men, women, and children experiencing homelessness, a fifty percent increase from 2017. This trend continued into 2020, with the January point-in-time count growing by an additional 4.4% to 1,743 adults and children experiencing homelessness.
Among this population, service use is often concentrated disproportionately among a relative minority of people who face acute and persistent challenges. In 2019, Ventura County partnered with the cities of Oxnard and Ventura to engage Social Finance in better understanding the service use and resulting costs of supporting this population.
The analysis, highlighted in this interactive report, integrated data from 13 County and City departments to track homeless programs, law enforcement, healthcare and behavioral health delivery, emergency transit, and other programs.
Social Finance
The analysis highlighted in this interactive report tracked usage across 5 service areas...
...integrating data from 13 County and City departments.
Hover over the circles to explore the data sets.
Defining the high-utilizing population
Determining whether or not an individual is experiencing homelessness is challenging through administrative data alone. Some individuals experiencing homelessness do not access government services, while many who are accessing services are not experiencing homelessness. No single data source provides a definitive demarcation.
By joining together data from across Ventura's public services, Social Finance developed a method to estimate the service use of people who are very likely experiencing homelessness and are frequent users of emergency services. Scroll down to explore.
Social Finance began with a data set of 8,999 individuals with at least three interactions with any service tracked through the Homeless Management Information System during FY17 & FY18.
Among these 8,999 individuals, 2,519 were flagged as very likely to be experiencing homelessness.
Of these, 541 individuals were experiencing homelessness over two or more years.
And of these individuals experiencing longer-term homelessness, 140 individuals were classified as high-utilizing.
Services for this high-utilizing population of 140 individuals cost $5-8 million per year, with an average per-person annual expenditure of $37,500.
Results
The interactive graph below displays the historical costs of the 140 highest-utilizing people experiencing homelessness, on average, across FY17 & FY18.
Each number on the x-axis represents an individual. Individuals are ordered from highest cost to lowest cost.
The y-axis displays average annual costs for each individual.
The colors in the graph correspond to the type of service utilized.
Hover over the graph to explore per-category costs.
For the top quartile, health care is the largest component of costs.
Jail becomes an increasingly larger share of total costs among the bottom three quartiles.
Even the lower end of this spectrum, as demonstrated by the bottom quartile, represents significant annual systems use with an average annual per-person cost of $17,203 to $30,642.
Client Journeys
This kind of aggregated analysis can be valuable to policy-making, but it’s only one part of the puzzle. The stories of the people whose lives are highlighted in these data are essential. We recognize the limitations of a purely numerical perspective, and recommend taking the time to hear directly from people experiencing homelessness.
One small contribution toward the goal of recognizing unique journeys through the homeless system of care is to understand how different people from the analysis interacted with public systems.
Explore the journeys of four of these individuals.
Top Services Utilization
High-utilizing individuals are more likely than the broader homeless population to interact with multiple agencies. The chart below explores service usage among the top-three utilized services: health care, behavioral health, and jail.
The high-utilizing population studied consistently interacted with more than one service.
115 of the 140 high-utilizers (82%) interacted with more than one of the three highest-cost services: behavioral health, health care, or jail.
Only 25 individuals (18%) accessed just one of the highest-cost services across both fiscal years analyzed.
This is a distinct contrast to the broader persistently homeless population of 541 individuals in which 33% of the population only interacted with one system.
52 of the 140 highest utilizers (37%) accessed all three of the highest-cost services.
The costs of persistent homelessness are high—not only to the County, but to the health and wellbeing of individuals experiencing homelessness as well. This analysis attempts to measure the dollars and cents associated with the status quo—with the hopes that it can inform future discussions about the most effective use of public funding to end homelessness.
Thank you to the staff and leadership in the following departments, without whom this study would not have been possible:
City of Oxnard, City of Thousand Oaks, City of Ventura, Corporation for Supportive Housing, Gold Coast Health, Mercy House Living Centers, Ventura County Whole Person Care, Ventura County Sheriff’s Office, Ventura County Rescue Mission, Ventura County Watershed, Ventura County Behavioral Health, Ventura County Emergency Medical Services, Ventura County Fire Department, Ventura County Human Services Agency, Ventura County Probation Agency, and Ventura County Public Defender’s Office.
Special thanks to Christy Madden, Deputy Executive Officer at County of Ventura, and Tara Carruth, Program Manager for the Ventura County Continuum of Care.
Analysis by Sean Burpoe, Shivan Sarin, Ryan Gillette, and Jake Segal of Social Finance.
Please contact Jake Segal (jsegal@socialfinance.org) with questions or for additional information about Social Finance.
To submit a referral to Ventura County community resources and health services, call 211, visit 211ventura.org, or text your zip code to 898211.
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![Bar chart of Ventura County homelessness data.](https://socialfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Screen-Shot-2023-04-14-at-12.49.54-PM-e1681491073281-1000x589.png")
![Sunset over the freeway in Ventura County, CA](https://socialfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/PSP-1-pager_sunset-in-Ventura-County-CA-1000x563.jpg")
![A birds-eye view of Ventura County, CA with the city buildings in the foreground and the ocean in the background.](https://socialfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/RESOURCE-PAGE-2400-x-1066-13-1000x444.png")