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Calif. officials announce plan to house 75% of Bay Area’s homeless population by 2024

By Jana Kadah, SFGate, April 14, 2021

“Local and state leaders, housing experts, businesses and social justice advocates from all nine Bay Area counties have united to create a Regional Action Plan (RAP) that aims to [house over 25,000 individuals of the area’s more than 35,000 homeless individuals identified in a 2019 HUD report] by 2024.

The strategy has lots of moving parts but focuses on two main areas: creating more housing and preventing more people from falling into homelessness.

“[The plan has an initial focus on extremely low-income residents with an emphasis on racial equity.] To address the racial inequities, the coalition is calling on the state to create and expand practices to measure equity levels across California to observe progress and increase accountability for outcomes by tying funding to demonstrated progress toward closing disparities.

“The second major component of the RAP is actually getting people into interim or permanent housing [accomplished through what the coalition calls a 1-2-4 framework].

“Essentially the plan outlines that for every one unit of interim housing built, there should be two units of permanent housing and four units of homeless prevention interventions to keep people housed.

“All of the aforementioned ideas brought by the coalition are not new, but a regional, comprehensive plan with input and organizing from the Governor’s Office, local governments, philanthropic partners and many others is new, the leaders said [at a news conference announcing the plan].”

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