'A Revolving Door': Why Getting Housing Doesn't Always Mean an End to Homelessness

A couple of years ago, Larry Williams was living out of his Nissan Sentra and recovering from gunshot wounds that left him alternating between a wheelchair, crutches and a cane.

Williams, now 30, had gotten caught in the crossfire at Oakland’s Juneteenth festival at Lake Merritt in 2021, not long after the pandemic put an end to his job as a security guard.

He got a break in the spring of 2022 when an outreach worker signed him up for housing. Resources and support aligned to get him off the streets and into his own East Oakland apartment. He even got some help paying for furniture and other necessities. But there was a catch: That rental assistance came with an expiration date, and time was up.

The last of his subsidized rent payments was issued in May. Now he’s on the hook for the full $1,875 per month rent, while his only income is $1,300 a month in disability benefits, and Williams is on the verge of moving back into his car.

At a moment when Gov. Gavin Newsom is demanding cities get more people off the streets, Williams’ experience shows why that can be so difficult. He and his mother describe navigating a maze of assessments, nonprofits and public agencies that left them frustrated and discouraged. Meanwhile, providers describe working within a system crippled by scarcity and Byzantine regulations.

Their experience mirrors a scathing critique from the state auditor in April, which blasted Newsom’s administration for failing to track and evaluate its efforts to address homelessness despite allocating some $24 billion between 2019 and 2023. The report found that an alarming rate of people who entered some form of housing cycled back to the streets.

“They’re creating a revolving door,” Williams’ mother, Francine Edwards, said.

Williams was able to take advantage of a “rapid rehousing” program, temporary rental assistance meant to serve as a bridge to permanent housing. But advocates say the short-term help can also set up people like Williams, who lives on a fixed income, to fail. According to Alameda County officials, nearly 10% of program participants returned to homelessness.

Rapid rehousing programs were originally created to help people get back on their feet after temporary setbacks, like a job loss. Today, in the absence of enough permanent housing, they’re often applied to people with much higher needs.

“We’re putting very vulnerable homeless families on rapid rehousing and then expecting them to stabilize in 18 months, and in many cases, it’s not a sustainable situation,” said Mary Kate Johnson, director of regional homelessness prevention for the policy nonprofit, All Home.

Rapid rehousing programs provide rental assistance for up to two years while people try to increase their household income through work, benefits, or by getting roommates. Financial help usually tapers off as beneficiaries are expected to pick up a greater share of the rent.

Experts caution that supportive services, such as job training or substance use counseling, are essential to setting people up for success. Without that extra support, it’s unlikely the subsidy alone will keep someone exiting homelessness in stable housing, said Jovan Yglecias, chief program officer for Bay Area Community Services, a nonprofit that runs housing programs and homeless services throughout the region.

“Because you’re not addressing any of the antecedents, you’re not addressing any of the issues, whether they’re social, economic or otherwise, that prevent that person from obtaining long-term stability,” he said.

Williams and his mom say this support is what was missing for him. It was just a few months ago that he fully understood he’d need to find a way to transition off of the rent subsidy, he said. “I was like, ‘An exit plan? What are you talking about?’”

Over the course of his two years at an apartment near Lake Merritt, Williams said workers coordinating his services came and went, leaving him without a point of contact for a few weeks. When he did connect with staff, they seemed overwhelmed by their caseloads, he said.

“I couldn’t even get a hold of these people,” he said. “They dropped the ball on me all the way.”

By the time he fully understood he was facing the possibility of eviction, he said he’d completely lost faith in his latest coordinator and stopped responding to her texts and calls.

Vivian Wan, chief executive officer for Abode Services, the provider that managed Williams’ case, declined to comment on his specific situation but said typical caseloads range from 20 to 30 clients per coordinator. She acknowledged that high turnover at Abode — and across the entire homeless services industry — is a challenge. At Abode, entry-level salaries hover around $60,000 a year, a competitive figure, Wan said.

“It’s really hard to live at $60,000 a year,” she said. “It’s a problem.”

Experts say the issue starts at the federal level, where wages set by government contracts are artificially low, especially in high-cost regions like the Bay Area.

In the 15 years she’s been working with rapid rehousing, Wan has seen success rates decline as the program has begun tilting toward people who are increasingly worse off, including those who are chronically homeless, on fixed incomes and face bigger barriers to staying housed.

“It’s just a steeper hill to climb,” she said.

Providers like Abode don’t get to choose which housing programs are offered to clients; it’s the city or county that’s contracted them that decides eligibility. She wants to see them to rethink who they offer the program to.

Despite the limitations, Wan said the temporary help is the best of bad options for many people, including people on fixed incomes, as long as they can find roommates to share the rent.

“Not trying rapid rehousing often means a choice of staying unsheltered for a really long time,” she said. “It’s the imperfect tool that we have available to us that works for a lot of people.”

Abode’s data from fiscal years 2022 through 2024 show about 70% of people in rapid rehousing were still housed when they left the program, a figure that mirrors data from rapid rehousing programs across Alameda County.

But advocates say those who end up back on the streets are, in some cases, worse off than before they received assistance.

“When people have been on the streets for 15 years and then they go into housing and that ends with the sheriff yanking them out of the housing, it makes it harder to house them later because their experience was so bad,” said Ian Cordova Morales, head of the Berkeley nonprofit Where Do We Go and a housing navigator with the Homeless Action Center. “There’s so many reasons we want to do it right the first time.”

He’s currently assisting Williams and said he’s recently heard from a number of other people who may be facing eviction from rapid rehousing placements.

After Alameda County’s eviction moratorium was lifted last year, the East Bay Community Law Center saw a wave of eviction filings against formerly unhoused people who’d been put in rapid rehousing programs during the pandemic, said Meghan Gordon, who helps lead the center’s housing practice.

In these cases, not only can people end up with an eviction on their record, they can be left with substantial debt. “It’s a really, really challenging and demoralizing experience for clients,” Gordon said.

A housing services specialist who is not involved in Williams’ case but reviewed his case files said it may have been the best option available for him at the time. Permanent housing spots are reserved for the most vulnerable, and despite his disability, he may not have made the bar.

Jennifer Loving, CEO of the nonprofit Destination Home, said some people, especially seniors, families making minimum wage and those with disabilities or chronic health conditions, may never make enough money to afford the Bay Area’s costly market rents. But, she said, there simply isn’t enough affordable housing to go around.

“That idea of getting back up on your feet is becoming less and less of a reality,” she said. “So we try to patch all these things and expect that if we provide enough case management or enough hopes and dreams, that’s going to magically change their situation.”

The only solution, she said, is to create affordable homes — by building them and by expanding federal rental assistance, which only reaches a quarter of eligible families today because of limited funding.

Williams is still looking for a solution. His mom said that, because of her efforts, he’s now working with the California Department of Rehabilitation to sort out job prospects.

He’s hoping he might be able to get another job as a security guard, he said, but “I don’t know when my body is going to be back to not hurting.”

As for his apartment, he said, “I haven’t heard anything good to help me out.”