When homeless service providers in Bakersfield, California, were working their way down the list of people experiencing chronic homelessness in the area, trying to find housing units for each one, the groups had to solve for a variety of challenges, says Anna Laven, executive director of the Bakersfield Kern Regional Homeless Collaborative. The groups began meeting regularly after joining the Built for Zero campaign to end homelessness in 2015. The cornerstone of the Built for Zero approach is a by-name list of every person experiencing homelessness in different categories — chronically homeless, veterans, youth, families, and so on. The collaborative worked to find housing for every person on the list through case conferencing, regularly meeting to discuss individual cases and figure out what it would take to get that person into an apartment.
Bakersfield, California, seat of Kern County, is a city of some 350,000 people. The collaborative first established a by-name list of chronically homeless people, those who have experienced homelessness repeatedly or for more than a year while struggling with a disabling condition such as a serious mental illness, substance use disorder, or physical disability, in 2017. Between that time and the beginning of 2020, it reduced the number of chronically homeless people from 72 to 2, achieving “functional zero” for chronic homelessness, according to the definition provided by Community Solutions, the group that coordinates the Built for Zero campaign. As the pandemic began, the number of chronically homeless people began to creep back up, Laven says. But thanks to an established collaboration between service providers and housing providers in the area, and a well-timed investment from California’s Project Homekey, the community was able to reduce the number again. In January of 2021, Bakersfield announced that it was the first city in California to end chronic homelessness.
Bakersfield is the first city in California to achieve functional zero for any category, and Maguire says that’s an important milestone in a state with an infamously tough housing crisis.
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