Housing for a Healthy Santa Cruz County

The Santa Cruz County Housing for Health Partnership is proud to announce the updated Three-Year Framework (2024–2027) has been approved by the Board of Supervisors in April 2024.

At the beginning of 2024, the Housing for Health Partnership held community meetings to gather innovative ideas and new partnership recommendations to ensure all county residents have stable, safe, and healthy places to live.

Information gathered at these sessions helped inform the updated Three-Year Framework for 2024 to 2027.

Building on the goals and successes of the prior Framework, the revised Three-Year Framework includes goals to:

• Lower the average length of time people experience homelessness by 10 percent each year.
• Reduce the number of people returning to homelessness each year by 20 percent.
• Ensure community partners capture data on our outcomes and community needs to help improve local programs.
• Coordinate increased outreach and access to services countywide.

The updated Framework also calls on our community to support all jurisdictions in the county in meeting their Regional Housing Needs Allocation for very low-income housing production goals in order to help reduce homelessness in the community.

Homelessness severely impacts the health and quality of life of those living without homes and the entire community. The County of Santa Cruz, cities within the county, and community members recognize the need for strong collaborative action to ensure all county residents have stable, safe, and healthy places to live.

The County and its partners created the Housing for a Healthy Santa Cruz County Strategic “Framework” through a collaborative process that used the experience, knowledge and input of a broad set of community stakeholders including cities, non-profit organizations, County Departments, and people with lived experiences of homelessness. Work on it began in March 2019 with a review of current local efforts and data on homelessness, along with an evaluation and discussion of experiences in other communities.

The Framework outlines coalition action steps that can reduce unsheltered and overall homelessness countywide by January 2024. The County Human Services Department’s new Housing for Health (H4H) Division will provide leadership and the backbone administrative support for implementation of this Framework.

The Framework sets goals to reduce the number of households experiencing homelessness at a point-in-time by just over 25% between January 2019 and January 2024. It also calls for a 50% reduction in the number of households living “unsheltered” in places such as the streets, parks, cars, and unsafe structures.

Over the past 18 months, the Santa Cruz County Homeless Services Coordination Office (HSCO), has been providing leadership for the development of a Three-Year Strategic Framework to Address Homelessness in Santa Cruz County. The HSCO engaged with a national consulting firm, Focus Strategies, to conduct an analysis of the existing efforts and guide a community planning process to design a more systematic and data-informed approach that aligns the efforts of all the entities and organizations in the community working to end homelessness.

The HSCO and the HAP have jointly set up this web page as a place where we can keep the community updated on the progress of the Plan development and opportunities for input. We are also using this page as a place to assemble the many materials that have been developed throughout the planning process. These reference materials provide important contextual information that stakeholders may wish to consult as we enter into our last round of community input to inform the draft three-year strategic framework to address homelessness.

For a streamlined summary of the background and work to date, please review the Background and Context PowerPoint.