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By Marisa Kendall, CalMatters

Maybe the way out of California’s homelessness crisis is to prevent it in the first place,  rather than focusing only on people who have already lost their housing. 

That’s the thinking behind a program in Santa Clara County — and others like it around the state — that has gained traction and will soon test its strategy beyond California. 

These prevention programs have found that with a payment of several thousand dollars, aid organizations can head off someone’s homelessness. That both prevents the trauma that comes with losing a home, and saves the state or local government the potentially tens of thousands of dollars it takes to help someone after they become homeless. 

The Santa Clara County program by nonprofit Destination: Home recently inspired the launch of 10 more pilot projects throughout the country, marking the first large-scale, multi-state test of this strategy. If it works in those test counties, advocates will push for a nationwide program. 

Meanwhile, a bill introduced this year in California would require the state to come up with a broad homelessness prevention strategy. 

“The single most obvious answer to homelessness is to not let it happen in the first place,” said Jennifer Loving, CEO of Destination: Home.

Focusing on prevention marks a significant shift in thinking. Traditionally, cities, counties and the state reserve their resources for helping the people in most dire need — those currently living on the street — get back on their feet. The problem with that strategy is that for every one person they move into housing, multiple other people fall into homelessness. That leaves cities spinning their wheels without meaningfully lessening the problem. 

But prevention has its own challenges: The aid is most effective when it goes to people imminently at risk of losing their housing, and determining exactly who that is can be tricky. Several Bay Area communities use a questionnaire to evaluate how likely someone is to wind up homeless unless they get help. A Los Angeles County program uses artificial intelligence. 

“The risk is you give out a lot of precious resources to people who otherwise would be able to prevent homelessness on their own, and that takes away from things like emergency shelters or transitional shelters or permanent supportive housing,” said Jim Sullivan, director of the University of Notre Dame’s Lab for Economic Opportunities. His team evaluated Santa Clara County’s prevention program and found that people who received prevention funds were 78% less likely to become homeless than people in similar situations who got no funds. 

Even among the people who didn’t get prevention funds, the overall rate of homelessness in these studies tends to be small (in Santa Clara County, 4.1% of people who didn’t get help became homeless, compared to 0.9% who did get help). That’s because, despite the very visible humanitarian crisis on the streets of California, statistically speaking, homelessness is still extremely rare, said Janey Rountree, executive director of the California Policy Lab at UCLA, which helped develop a similar program in Los Angeles County. The vast majority of people are able to keep a roof over their head by getting help from family or friends.

How homelessness prevention works

Destination: Home helped launch Santa Clara County’s first homelessness prevention program in 2017. At the time, there wasn’t much help available for people on the brink of homelessness. Families staring down looming evictions were told to call back once they actually ended up on the street. 

With a budget of $1 million secured through donations, the program helped 200 households that first year. Over the following years, the nonprofit got results — and buy-in from county officials. Now, the program has an annual budget of $30 million (most of which is publicly funded) and serves 2,500 households per year.

The program appears to be making a dent. Prior to its existence, for every homeless person who got housing, another three lost their homes. Now, for every one person housed, the math works out to 1.7 people losing their homes, according to Destination: Home.

People who apply to the program hear about it in different ways, including through food banks and other service providers, by word of mouth and through outreach workers in eviction court. Then they fill out a questionnaire designed to assess how likely they are to become homeless. Multiple factors could put them at greater risk: if they have experienced domestic violence, have been homeless before or are disabled, for example. If they check off enough risk factors, they qualify for aid.

Over the past year, people accepted into the program received an average of about $6,500 (including if they returned multiple times for help), most of which went directly to rent, security deposits and other housing expenses. Participants can use the money to address whatever problem is threatening their housing, including fixing their car so they can get to work, paying for a hotel while they are between apartments, covering medical expenses or paying down a credit card debt if the large monthly payment is hurting their ability to pay rent. 

Participants can come back for help multiple times if they need, and many do. 

“We’re providing temporary assistance to folks that are facing long-term, systemic problems, and we don’t expect that hanging out with us for a few months is all of a sudden going to increase the supply of affordable housing or living-wage jobs,” said Erin Stanton, director of family assistance at Sacred Heart Community Service, which coordinates the aid.

Now, Destination: Home is expanding its prevention model to 10 new places across the country, including San Mateo County in California, as well as Miami-Dade County, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; Austin-Travis County, Texas; communities in Alaska and multiple tribal communities in Minnesota. The idea is to see if the model can be successful outside of Santa Clara County and to see how it might be tweaked depending on the community it is serving. The needs in an economically depressed community, or one saturated by addiction, will be different from those in a rapidly gentrying area, for example. 

Destination: Home, which raised nearly $80 million for this effort from private donors, is giving each community $500,000 to plan their own homelessness prevention program modeled after Santa Clara County’s, and then at least $5 million to run the program for three years. The first programs are expected to launch this fall. 

The University of Notre Dame will evaluate the programs to see if they work. If they do, Destination: Home plans to push for a nationwide prevention strategy. 

San Mateo County signed on to be a test community because it’s an “exciting opportunity,” said Amy Davidson, director of the county’s Center on Homelessness. The county already runs an emergency financial assistance program, but it doesn’t screen participants to determine who is most likely to end up on the street. With Destination: Home’s help, the county will launch a second program that more specifically targets people at risk of homelessness. 

“It seemed like a really great learning experience for us to try to learn what works really well, and what haven’t we done that we could consider doing,” Davidson said.

Lower rates of homelessness

Five other Bay Area communities, including San Francisco and Oakland, already have similar prevention programs, which together have served more than 30,000 people. They’re supported by the organizations All Home and Bay Area Community Services, which helped fund the programs and developed a standardized online form that evaluates each applicant’s risk of homelessness. A sixth program in Marin County is set to launch later this year. 

In San Francisco, participants were 40% less likely to end up homeless than those in similar circumstances who didn’t get help. Between March 2023 and February 2025, less than 5% of program participants became homeless within a year of receiving prevention funds, compared with 8% of similarly situated people who didn’t receive funds.

In Los Angeles County, people helped by the Homelessness Prevention Unit were 71% less likely to later end up in a homeless shelter or use street outreach services. As in Santa Clara County, the overall rates of homelessness are still small: Less than 2% of people enrolled in the program became homeless and used street or shelter services within 18 months, compared to a little more than 6% of people in similar circumstances but not enrolled in the program.

Los Angeles County’s tool is unique because it uses AI to predict who is most likely to become homeless. Participants don’t apply to the program. If the AI model picks them out, program staff cold-call them and invite them to participate. 

The county is still testing the program, and a detailed analysis is expected next year. In the meantime, local leaders have thrown their support behind it. The county recently poured additional Measure A funding into the program, and is launching a new prevention program focused on young people. 

Feeding off the momentum generated by these efforts, a bill introduced this year would require the state to establish a statewide homelessness prevention strategy by July 2027. The state is expecting a budget deficit this year, and Assembly Bill 1924 doesn’t come with funding. But supporters say it’s still a step forward.

“Now that we have proven models from the Bay Area and LA, we believe that it’s time for the state to be doing more to articulate goals and strategies for having a prevention program, with the hope that in the future if there’s more budget surplus those strategies could get better funding,” said Irene Farnsworth, director of regional homelessness prevention for All Home, which is co-sponsoring the bill by Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat from Encino. 

‘They won’t just leave you hanging’

Desiré Campusano knows how to hustle. She’s crashed with relatives when she couldn’t afford rent and worked multiple jobs at once. But in 2021, something unexpected happened: She became an emergency foster parent to two of her young relatives. She felt herself foundering.

That’s when she found Santa Clara County’s homelessness prevention program. It helped her stay afloat as she navigated moving into her own apartment in Milpitas, changing jobs and suddenly becoming a single guardian to two children. 

She asked for help twice that year, once receiving her full rent payment of $1,575, and once receiving $1,000 to help her get by. The next year, her rent increased and she asked for help each time she couldn’t quite make the payment — for example when the kids got COVID and couldn’t go to day care, so she had to miss work and not get paid. She got help four times that year.

“I’d be fine for a month or two, and then I’d need it again,” Campusano said. 

In 2023, her rent went up again and she had to move out. She went to stay with her godfather in Hollister, but that meant a grueling commute to San Jose for work every day. Then, at the start of 2025, Campusano moved into a subsidized apartment in San Jose. The county’s homelessness prevention program helped her secure the apartment by paying her first and last month’s rent.

That ongoing support was a gamechanger for Campusano, who finally feels like she’s back on her feet. She’s now teaching sociology and Mexican-American history at San Jose City College.

“They won’t just leave you hanging,” she said. “They’ll make sure you feel stable.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A 23-year-old U.S. Marine formerly stationed at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County is in custody after federal investigators claim he was stealing weapons of war, transporting them to Arizona and selling them.

A Glendale, Arizona native, Corporal Andrew Paul Amarillas, was working as an ammunition technician specialist at the School Infantry-West at Camp Pendleton, where he had access to restricted military weapons, explosives and ammunition.

In a complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona last week, a grand jury indicted the 23-year-old, alleging he stole a Javelin missile system and cans of ammunition that he then sold to a network of co-conspirators, the news outlet AZFamily first reported.

Court documents referenced text messages Amarillas reportedly sent to his unindicted co-conspirators.

“[J]ust got some javs and some other ones,” he allegedly wrote in an August text. “Have 2 launchers that [I] think you’d like, if you want to take a look tomorrow.”

Undercover officers were able to buy some of the ammunition from the middlemen and trace some of it back to Camp Pendleton, where they said some of the lot numbers were signed out by the corporal.

While investigators said that at least one of the Javelin Missile Systems Amarillas planned to sell was recovered, along with some of the stolen ammunition, prosecutors noted in paperwork to keep the corporal in custody that as many as “2 million rounds of M855” ammunition could be unaccounted for, AZFamily reported.

Portable anti-tank weapons designed exclusively for the U.S. military by Lockheed Martin and RTX Corp, Javelin Missile Systems are also used to target low flying helicopters and other fortifications.

Unless demilitarized, the weapons cannot be legally possessed by or sold to the public, which in this case, they weren’t, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The 23-year-old was arrested ahead of completing an eight-week training course in Quantico, Virginia that would have then deployed him to protect the U.S. Embassy in Myanmar.

He pleaded not guilty to charges that included conspiracy to commit theft and embezzlement of government property and possession and sale of stolen ammunition at a federal courthouse in Phoenix on March 26, The Times reported.

The judge said that because he presented a flight risk and had the potential to tamper with evidence and possibly interfere with witnesses at Camp Pendleton that he should be held without bail.

Fifteen years after she lost her first baby to a rare and devastating birth defect, Andrea Lopez takes comfort in knowing that other Latina mothers might finally avoid the same pain.

In January, California became the first state to require food makers to add folic acid, a crucial vitamin, to corn masa flour used to make tortillas and other traditional foods widely used in her community.

It’s a long-delayed move aimed at reducing Hispanic infants’ disproportionately high rates of serious conditions called neural tube defects, which claimed Lopez’s son, Gabriel Cude, when he was 10 days old.

“It’s such a small effort for such a tremendous impact,” said Lopez, 44, who lives in Bakersfield and is now a lawyer with two young daughters. “There is very little that I wouldn’t do to spare anybody this heartache.”

A similar law takes effect in Alabama in June, and legislation is pending or being considered in Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma and Oregon. Four more states — Texas, Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania — have expressed “active interest” in the issue, according to the Food Fortification Initiative, an advocacy group that focuses on addressing micronutrient deficiencies.

“All women and children in the United States should have access to folic acid and have healthy babies,” said Scott Montgomery, the group’s director.

Corn masa was excluded from a national mandate

For nearly 30 years, folic acid, a key B vitamin, has been required to be added to enriched wheat and white breads, cereals and pastas in the U.S.

Decades of research show the 1998 requirement cut rates of serious defects such as spina bifida and anencephaly by about 30%, preventing about 1,300 cases a year. It is regarded as one of the top public health triumphs of the 20th century.

But corn masa flour, a staple used in Latino diets, was left out of the original fortification requirement — and rates of conditions such as spina bifida and anencephaly in that community have remained stubbornly high.

In 2016, federal regulators allowed, but did not require, folic acid to be added to corn masa products. By 2023, only about 1 in 7 corn masa flour products and no corn tortillas contained folic acid, a review found.

Higher rates of birth defects among Hispanic moms

Nationwide, Hispanic women have the highest rates of having those defects during pregnancy. In California, the rate among Hispanic mothers is twice as high as for white or Black women, state data show.

California’s new law — and the state’s huge buying power — could help expand its adoption nationwide, said state Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula, who sponsored the legislation passed in 2024.

“You have to be the first oftentimes to get the ball rolling,” he said. “So, I’m glad other states have taken up that mantle.”

California’s action and pressure from advocates have already spurred changes.

Gruma Corp., the parent company of Mission Foods and Azteca Milling, has been involved in the fortification issue for nearly two decades. Azteca began selling some — but not all — varieties of Maseca, its largest brand of corn masa flour, with folic acid in 2016.

As of this year, 97% of the company’s retail sales in the U.S. include folic acid. The rest are expected to be fortified before July, Gruma said in a statement.

Mission Foods began fortification in 2024. It now adds folic acid to all of its branded and private label corn tortillas in the U.S.

Such actions by large producers have helped pave the way for smaller manufacturers to follow suit, according to a recent report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group that has pushed for fortification.

Initially, the industry was concerned folic acid could affect flavor and the cost of changing labels, said Jim Kabbani, head of the Tortilla Industry Association. But he now expects tortilla makers will start selling fortified products on a broader scale.

“I think overall the train has left the station and it will be more and more states,” he said.

Public health experts cheer the growing momentum.

“The science is clear: Folic acid fortification works,” said Vijaya Kancherla, an Emory University epidemiology professor and director of the Center for Spina Bifida Prevention. “It’s safe. It’s proven. And it’s cost-effective.”

RFK Jr. calls corn masa fortification ‘insanity’

That view contrasts sharply with critics — including some at the highest level of government — who regard fortification of the food supply as a form of government overreach.

Late last year, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticized California’s new law in a post on X: “This is insanity. California is waging war against her children — targeting the poor and communities of color,” he wrote.

A spokesman for Kennedy declined to explain the comments.

Social media feeds are rife with people claiming that folic acid fortification is “toxic” or that people with a certain gene variation known as MTHFR can’t properly process the vitamin.

None of those claims is accurate, according to advocates and medical experts.

“What’s truly insane is that our nation’s top health official is spreading false claims and frightening people into avoiding a nutrient that’s proven to prevent birth defects and save babies’ lives,” said Eva Greenthal, CSPI’s senior policy scientist.

At fortification doses, folic acid “has never been shown to harm individuals or populations,” said Dr. Jeffery Blount, a pediatric neurosurgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who works to prevent neural tube defects in the U.S. and globally.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention emphasizes that “people with the MTHFR gene variant can process all types of folate, including folic acid.”

Even Kennedy’s new federal dietary guidelines support fortification. Documents backing the guidelines advise pregnant women to eat folate-rich foods, such as leafy green vegetables, beans and lentils. But they also acknowledge that folic acid from fortified foods or supplements is “critical” before conception and during early pregnancy to prevent neural tube defects.

“Folic acid fortification of corn masa flour could help prevent” neural tube defects, the CDC website adds.

Without fortification, ‘It’s just too late’

Neural tube defects, which affect about 2,000 babies each year in the U.S., occur in the first weeks after conception, when the tube that forms the spine and brain fails to develop properly.

That’s often before many women realize they’re pregnant. More than 40% of U.S. pregnancies are unintended. In those cases, many women won’t have been preparing for pregnancy, noted Dr. Kimberly BeDell, medical director of a rehabilitation clinic that helps children with spina bifida at Miller Children’s Hospital in Long Beach, California.

“Even women’s best efforts in going to an OB right away and starting prenatal vitamins, it’s just too late,” BeDell said.

Adding folic acid to corn masa, the way it is added to other grains, is a way to ensure the nutrient reaches the wider population that needs it, she added.

At age 28, pregnant with her first child, Andrea Lopez didn’t know about the importance of folic acid or that the vitamin might be missing from her diet.

Then, an ultrasound mid-way through pregnancy showed that her baby had anencephaly, a fatal condition in which the skull fails to develop properly.

Lopez carried the pregnancy to term and Gabriel lived for 10 days. The pain of his loss never goes away, she said, adding that Gabriel would have been a high school freshman this year. She supports California’s law requiring folic acid fortification of corn masa and finds it “mind-boggling” that the action took so long to enforce.

“Trust me, you don’t want to go through this,” she said. “He’s the love of my life. I have two little girls that survived, but he’s my first born. He is my only son.”

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