Overview

Vision

By working creatively and collaboratively, the City of San Diego will build a client-centered homeless assistance system that aims to prevent homelessness, and that quickly creates a path to safe and affordable housing and services for people who experience homelessness in our community.

Goals Within Reach

In three years:

1. Decrease unsheltered homelessness by 50 percent
2. Finish the job of ending veteran homelessness
3. Prevent and end youth homelessness as outlined in the San Diego County Coordinated Community Plan to End

Recommended Actions

• Advance high impact solutions. Developing long-term housing takes time. Aggressive measures must be taken now, and the system needs to be flexible over time to meet changing needs and circumstances.
• Support strong leadership. Creation of a city-wide leadership council and project manager to keep progress on track.
• Invest in new housing and service options. Increase temporary crisis response solutions while also investing in permanent long-term units.
• Quickly address key issues. Address items needing immediate attention including adding behavioral health resources, outreach coordination, utilization of vouchers and appropriately staff entities implementing this plan.

Key Strategies

1. Implement a systems-level approach to homelessness planning. Build capacity and infrastructure around city-level governance, strategic thinking and systems change to support the articulated goals.
2. Create a client-centered homeless assistance system. Create a homeless assistance system that centers around clients and values client feedback in system design and resource allocation.
3. Decrease inflow through increase of prevention and diversion. Work with other regional systems to prevent homelessness when possible and divert people from the system altogether.
4. Improve the performance of the existing system. Review current practices, performance and metrics to move from project-level thinking to system-level thinking.
5. Increase the production of/access to permanent solutions. Identify low-income and affordable housing options to increase opportunities to provide greater access to permanent housing.

Leadership Council

The plan recommended the creation of the Leadership Council to provide for cross-agency collaboration, alignment of resources toward systems-level thinking and accountability. The Leadership Council will review progress, problem-solve when challenges arise, identify funding and resources for implementation, and create an appropriate level of both accountability and insulation from political issues.

Implementation Team

The development of the plan included the creation of a Steering Committee that consisted of key staff members from major funding and policy-making agencies in the City. This group now serves as the staff implementation team to carry out the detailed actions within the plan.

Progress Updates