Every week, Santa Monica Next publishes an article from City Manager Oliver Chi’s newsletter. This week, we’re doing two.
For years, the only regular data point on homelessness in Santa Monica has been the annual Point-in-Time Count, which is a federally required one-night snapshot taken each year. Certainly, the data we glean from the yearly Point-in-Time Count serves as a useful indicator of what’s happening locally. For instance, this year’s count showed encouraging movement for Santa Monica, as homelessness was found to be down 11.6% from 2025, with unsheltered homelessness down 18.7%.
However, given our overarching Homelessness Strategic Plan, coupled with our build-out of a Santa Monica Housing Focused System of Care, the City has worked to develop a partnership with RAND Corporation to collect more data more regularly on homelessness in Santa Monica.
Notably, RAND’s own research has found that the regional count has significantly undercounted the unsheltered population in recent years.
Based on that partnership, starting this month, RAND will begin conducting an independent count of unsheltered homelessness in Santa Monica every month, using the same rigorous methodology RAND has applied for several years in Hollywood, Venice, and Skid Row. Alongside the counts, RAND will also be conducting 50 voluntary, anonymous demographic surveys each quarter (for a total of 200 per year) to help us understand things the count alone can’t tell us, such as how long people have lived in Santa Monica, which services they’re using, and what barriers are keeping them from housing.
As this partnership matures and the data starts coming in, RAND will be delivering monthly activity reports, quarterly analyses, and a year-end summary of the overarching picture related to homelessness in Santa Monica. Here at the City, we’ll be working to feed that data directly into the Housing Focused System of Care’s data framework and the City’s Scorecard data dashboard.
More to come on this front in the coming months, and we’ll be sure to keep everyone informed as to our progress moving ahead!
