Accessible Housing

The Office of Supportive Housing intends to reduce instances of formerly homeless households returning to homelessness, contributing to its goal of making homelessness rare, brief, and nonrecurring in the County of Santa Clara. This measure is tracked using the Homelessness Management Information System (HMIS). Data is entered into the system by participating community partners and County departments that provide services to homeless households throughout the County.

This measure looks at individuals and households that exited outreach, emergency shelter, transitional housing, and permanent housing to permanently housed destinations two years prior to the reporting period. It measures the rate at which those households return to shelters and other programs that serve people who are homeless over the two-year period. It provides one indicator of the County’s effort to reduce homelessness in our community by measuring rates of recidivism for recently housed homeless individuals and families.

The Office of Supportive Housing (OSH) intends to measure the number of households experiencing homelessness who have a successful housing placement.  

This measure is tracked using the Homelessness Management Information System (HMIS). Data is input into the system by participating community partners and County departments that provide services to homeless households throughout the County. This measure counts homeless individuals and homeless households that experienced homelessness within the reporting period and exited to a permanent housing destination. 

The Office of Supportive Housing (OSH) intends to reduce the number of sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons on a given night (mid-January) in Santa Clara County.  

The OSH coordinates the community’s point-in-time counts. Each year, the community uses the Homeless Management Information System (and reports from some agencies) to report on the number of sheltered homeless persons on a given night in Santa Clara County. Every other year, the community augments the “sheltered count” with an unsheltered count and a survey of homeless persons. The biannual count is known as the Biennial Homeless Census and Survey, and often referred to simply as the “Point-in-Time (PIT) Count.” 

 It provides one indicator of the County’s effort to reduce homelessness in our community by measuring the number of individuals experiencing homelessness at a given point-in-time.