San Diego City Council spent hours on Sept. 19 hearing from national experts and the public on best practices in dealing with the homeless crisis, before voting for a new contract enabling outreach teams to help homeless struggling with mental illness out on the streets.

The testimony came during a special meeting held by the City Council on homelessness, a subject that Mayor Todd Gloria has declared his top priority.

Following extensive testimony, the City Council voted in favor of a nine-month contract agreement between the San Diego Housing Commission, and People Assisting the Homeless, to partner and operate the City’s Multidisciplinary Outreach Program. That program, costing $632,013 including $7,263 for a one-time startup expense, will begin on Oct. 1.

The new homeless outreach program is to be operated by Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness (PATH), which is expected to collaborate and subcontract with Father Joe’s Villages to provide homeless healthcare.

The outreach program will utilize an integrated multidisciplinary team to include a nurse practitioner, four clinical outreach specialists, a medical assistant/outreach worker, two peer support specialists, and a part-time substance abuse counselor.

PATH provides assistance to individuals who are homeless or at risk of homelessness and have serious mental illnesses. PATH funds are distributed to states/territories that, in turn, contract with local public or nonprofit organizations to fund a variety of services to homeless individuals.

At the start of the City Council’s special meeting on homelessness, Jeff Olivet with the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, spoke about national homeless trends. He also offered some insights on potential solutions to the homeless crisis.

“If we look over the last 10 or 15 years across the country, what we saw was a small but incremental decrease in homelessness from 2009 to 2016,” said Olivet. “What we’ve seen since then is an incremental rise in those numbers.”

Olivet attributed the cause of that previous dip in homelessness to “a very strong push on decreasing veterans’ homelessness where we saw veterans’ homelessness in the years from 2010 to 2016 slashed by about 50%.”

Added Olivet: “As you can see though, we’re seeing an uptick (in homelessness) since January 2020. On any given night we had about 580,000 of our brothers and sisters across the country experiencing homelessness. We know that, since 2020, some communities have seen increases in homelessness, while others have seen moderate decreases and have been able to reduce homelessness during the pandemic. But until we have housing supply and housing affordability issues figured out, emergency shelters need to be part of the solution.

“Homelessness is a tragedy,” said Olivet. “It is a crisis. It is a life-and-death issue for hundreds of thousands of people across the country.”

In terms of solutions to homelessness, Olivet said what has worked best around the nation is when people come together across the political spectrum, and cities and counties work together along with nonprofits, faith, and business communities, to jointly address homeless issues.

“We need to set a goal for what we’re trying to do as a community, and get everyone behind that goal and rowing in the same direction,” Olivet concluded. “When we don’t have that, what we see is finger-pointing. When we do have that, what we see is a success.”

According to the San Diego Regional Task Force on Homelessness, a one-day snapshot conducted this February of the minimum number of San Diegans living in emergency shelters, transitional housing, safe havens, on streets and along riverbeds, at least 8,427 people in San Diego County were found to be experiencing homelessness. That was a 10% increase since 2020.

There were bright spots in the point-in-time count, however, including a 30% decrease in San Diego’s veteran homeless population, and a 7% decrease in the chronic homelessness population versus 2020.