The number of people sleeping on California’s streets dropped in 2026 for the second year in a row, according to preliminary data from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office.
Unsheltered homelessness — people living in tents, vehicles, abandoned buildings or other places that aren’t official shelters — fell 6.5% in January 2026 compared to January 2025. Total homelessness dropped 3.4% to an estimated 175,836 people.
Since 2024, unsheltered homelessness is down nearly 13%, and overall homelessness is down 6%.
Still, about 24,600 more Californians are believed to be homeless today than when Newsom took office in 2019.
Newsom credits the recent progress to his investments in homelessness programs. Since he’s taken office, he created a new program to funnel homeless funds to cities and counties ($900 million in the current budget), launched grants to help cities clean up encampments and doled out money to turn hotels into homeless housing.
- Newsom: “California is proving that homelessness is not inevitable.”
When interviewed by CalMatters earlier this year, officials in counties that were making progress on homelessness said it was because of those new state funds.
But advocates also cautioned that those numbers may not be as rosy as they seem. Cities have ramped up enforcement against unhoused people in recent years, causing people to scatter from encampments and become harder to count. And recent federal cuts to Medi-Cal and social services will make it more challenging to fight homelessness.
The data Newsom cited comes from the federally mandated point-in-time count that tallies the number of people sleeping outside and in shelters in each county. Some counties count every January, while some count every other January.
The data is not exact. Counties use different methodologies and may change their methods between counts. Some counties also use estimates in their counts, and volunteers tasked with tallying unhoused residents are likely to miss people resulting in an undercount.