San José Reduces Homelessness by 32% in 18 Months
The City of San José developed a new, independently verified model to measure street homelessness more frequently — providing a model that could be replicated in other cities nationwide
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 14, 2026
Media Contact:
Tasha Dean, Chief Communications Officer, Office of Mayor Matt Mahan
SAN JOSÉ, CA — New data shows that unsheltered homelessness has fallen 32% in the City of San José in just 18 months, according to an independently verified model developed in partnership with UrbanLogiq. The algorithm uses 15+ different data points, including the Point-in-Time (PIT) Count, to track changes in San José’s unsheltered population more frequently and with higher accuracy.
“We’re reducing homelessness faster than ever before — and showing our progress as we do,” said Mayor Matt Mahan. “No doctor would prescribe a treatment and wait two years to find out whether it worked, yet that's effectively how cities have been measuring homelessness. We need a real feedback loop — measure more often, learn what’s working and change what isn’t. That’s how we turn homelessness from a crisis we count into something we can actually solve.”
The 32% decline coincided with a major shift in San José’s homelessness strategy and amidst a national and statewide rise. Since 2019, unsheltered homelessness has increased nearly 7% across California and 26% nationwide. In 2025, the City added more than 1,000 shelter beds, established No Encampment Zones in the areas surrounding shelters and environmental sensitive waterways and created the Neighborhood Quality of Life Unit within the Police Department to enforce an updated code of conduct aimed at managing on-street conditions – increasing the collective quality of life for housed and unhoused San Joseans. As a result, between January 2025 and August 2026, San José moved more than 1,700 people off the streets.
To properly track progress, the City of San José’s Housing Department, led by Erik L. Solivan, worked with UrbanLogiq to develop the new model with a goal of answering three deceptively difficult questions: how many people are living unsheltered in San José, where are they, and how is that changing over time. The PIT Count remains an important federally required measure of homelessness, but it captures conditions during a limited period once every two years. People experiencing homelessness move, no single agency encounters everyone living outside and no individual dataset provides a complete picture — these are the nuances that San José’s model aims to capture.
Rather than relying on any single source, the model brings together information the City and its partners already collect, including the PIT Count, Homeless Management Information System data, outreach encounters, Police and Fire Department interactions, targeted field counts and observations along waterways and other locations. The model considers what each source can reliably reveal and looks for population estimates that best explain all of the available evidence together, weighing each data source in a formula based on accuracy.
As new information becomes available, the model can be rerun and refined, creating an ongoing feedback loop rather than forcing policymakers to wait for the next biennial PIT Count. The goal is not to replace the PIT Count, which is federally mandated. It is to give cities another tool to determine, much more regularly, whether the policies and programs they are investing millions of dollars in are actually reducing street homelessness.
Under the framework coming before Council, the City will regularly apply the new methodology to track its unsheltered baseline, improve its understanding of inflow and outflow over time, identify different pathways needed by segments of the remaining unsheltered population and clarify where progress depends on action from the City, Santa Clara County, the state or other regional partners.
San José also sees an opportunity beyond its own borders. Because the methodology is built around information many local governments already collect, the City believes the approach could be replicated by other jurisdictions with sufficiently consistent and high-quality data. San José is not aware of another U.S. city currently using the same approach to regularly estimate its unsheltered population between PIT Counts.
The San José City Council will receive an overview of this new tool, an update on the Functional Zero Model and consider amendments to the Fiscal Year 2026-2027 Reducing Unsheltered Homelessness Focus Area Work Plan on Tuesday, September 15.
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About the City of San José
With nearly one million residents, San José is the largest city in the Bay Area and one of the nation's most diverse and creative. San José’s transformation into a global innovation center in the heart of Silicon Valley has resulted in the world's greatest concentration of technology talent and development.