A Silicon Valley Program Helped 44,000 People Avoid Homelessness

Jennifer Loving recalls Tanya arriving at a Silicon Valley shelter about 20 years ago with her newborn. Tanya had been working a minimum-wage job and renting a room in San Jose. When pregnancy complications forced her to stop working, she lost her job and then her home. After the hospital discharged her, she had no savings, family to call, or place to go—only a list of shelters and a bus token.

Tanya rode Hotel 22, the area’s only 24-hour bus line, for two days with her baby. For people with nowhere else to go, the bus served as a moving shelter. Loving says Tanya’s experience was not exceptional. It reflects a broader failure of timing: help arrived, if at all, after a crisis had already cost someone their home.

In 2024, more than 771,000 people in the United States were without homes, the highest level recorded. Loving says that was an 18 percent increase in one year. For every person on the streets, she adds, thousands more live paycheck to paycheck, one unexpected bill or crisis away from losing their housing.

Loving argues that homelessness should not be treated as inevitable or addressed only once someone has lost housing. Like other crises, housing insecurity can have warning signs: a lost job, a death in the family, or a medical emergency. Because those patterns are predictable, she says, communities can intervene before a person has to seek shelter.

Loving’s approach identifies people at high risk, looks at what is making their housing unstable, and provides support quickly enough to keep a crisis from becoming homelessness.

In 2017, Destination: Home and its partners launched a homelessness prevention system in Silicon Valley, which Loving describes as one of the highest-cost regions in the world. Since then, she says, the organization has helped more than 44,000 people remain in their homes. Rather than making a shelter the first point of intervention, the system offers fast, targeted, flexible support to people who are still housed but at risk of losing that housing.

The assessment looks beyond a person’s finances to other conditions contributing to housing insecurity. Its purpose is to identify people in severe danger of becoming homeless who are also likely to remain housed with a limited amount of support. That distinction shapes what happens next: help is directed to people for whom timely assistance can make a difference.

Loving illustrates the process with Rose, a single mother who loses her job, falls behind on rent, and faces eviction. An assessment finds that Rose is at severe risk of homelessness but could likely stay housed with support. The response is specific to her situation: pay her back rent, work with her landlord, and help her avoid eviction. With that assistance, Rose and her son remain stably housed.

The intervention continues beyond the immediate rent shortfall. A caseworker stays with Rose as she navigates a new job, benefits, and child care. Loving says, “We’re not just a check. We’re a partner in rebuilding.” Financial help addresses the immediate threat; casework continues as Rose manages her new circumstances.

Loving says the model has been rigorously evaluated by researchers at the University of Notre Dame. She reports that the approach has a statistically significant effect on keeping people housed in both the short and longer term. For every dollar invested in prevention, she says, the evaluation found $2.47 in public savings.

Those savings are one part of the case for acting early. Loving says shelter stays, emergency-room visits, and arrests of people simply for being poor cost more than prevention. She also stresses the human consequences: one mother, one child, one family who did not fall through the cracks. When a family stays housed, she says, children can remain in school.

Loving says prevention has been missing from the homelessness services she has seen across shelters, streets, camps, and housing programs. Her experience began in childhood, when her family ran a shelter out of a church, and continued through her professional work in the field.

With support from the Audacious community, Destination: Home has launched Right at Home to replicate the prevention model across ten diverse communities. The map shown in the presentation names nine: San Mateo County, Alaska, Denver–Adams County, Austin–Travis County, the Minnesota Tribal Collaborative, Atlanta, Miami-Dade, the Asheville region, and Philadelphia. It notes that one more community is still to come. Loving describes the effort as spanning rural, urban, and tribal communities, with the aim of showing that prevention is possible across them.

For Loving, acting before a housing crisis reaches its worst point means families need not face the immediate uncertainty of where they or their children will sleep. She calls for a system that offers support before that becomes the question.