County

COST COMPARISONS ACROSS INSTITUTIONAL SECTORS

By institutional sector, we refer to the cluster of durable, organizational entities that intersect and deal with people who are homeless in one fashion or another, ranging from monitoring and policing their movements and activities to providing housing of various kinds and a range of subsistence services. Included in this sector is the county, the 34 municipalities, the hospitals with emergency departments, the housing providers and the other nongovernmental social service agencies providing a range of services other than housing. We consider the costs associated with each, and then aggregate the totals to reach an estimated cost total.

County

The Director of Care Coordination for the county provided us with a listing of actual FY2015/2016 costs for homeless services across a range of county agencies and programs. Specifically, data were provided on housing for homeless individuals and families, health care services provided by the Orange County Health Care Agency, county resources for homeless individuals allocated to social service agencies (such as CalFresh and General Relief), costs for Homeless Liaison Officers in the County Sheriff’s Department, resources spent by OC Public Works (e.g., for encampment land management) and county funding for dedicated emergency shelters.

Aggregated, the costs for these various county services sum to $60,093,851, as shown in the second row of Table 4. Also included in the county cost total are the costs provided by the Orange County Transit Authority (OCTA). Although the OCTA is independent from the county, its transit services are county-wide and therefore included in the overall county costs.

Table 4. County Costs

County Department/Division Accumulating Costs Orange County (per Director of Care Coordination and County) $60,093,851 Orange County Transit Authority $2,073,566 TOTAL $62,167,417

We suspect that the total county costs of $62,167,417 are a somewhat conservative estimate, particularly since homeless-related court, jail and probation costs are not included. Additionally, the Sheriff Department’s costs include only the salaries of Homeless Liaison Officers assigned to 13 municipalities and unincorporated areas without their own police departments. Similarly, we suspect the OCTA homeless-related costs are higher than the number indicated in the above table, since a disproportionate share of that cost estimate is consumed by the costs associated with monitoring and cleaning a single, albeit major, transit center in the county. Finally, when assessing the overall county costs, it is important to note that they are for the fiscal year 2015/2016, which does not capture several newer efforts at the county level to address the homelessness issue, such as the Whole Person Care initiative targeting frequent users of medical services.21 The take away point is that the county costs for 2016/2017 are likely to be considerably higher than for 2015/2016.