San Jose says unsheltered homelessness fell 30%. The county hasn’t seen its model

San Jose officials say a new city-commissioned data model estimates that unsheltered homelessness has fallen 30% in 18 months, a dramatic result that would bolster Mayor Matt Mahan’s embrace of temporary shelters for residents priced out of the notorious Silicon Valley housing market.

However, Santa Clara County has not reviewed the model, and the finding has not been confirmed by the region’s official homelessness count, which isn’t slated until early next year. Some advocates for unhoused people said they haven’t witnessed a major decline in the number of residents living in vehicles, tents or structures.

City officials this week touted their new modeling as evidence that Mahan’s aggressive approach to encampments and his rapid buildout of shelters for unhoused residents is bearing fruit. Housing Director Erik Solivan told council members on Tuesday the model produced by a third-party data analysis company showed a 30% decline in unsheltered homelessness between February 2025 and this August, from 5,477 to 3,702 people.

Mahan, Solivan and other city officials held a press conference Wednesday along the Guadalupe River in downtown San Jose, where the mayor took aim at critics and defended his strategy.

“Naysayers will call this a ‘bridge to nowhere,’” he said, invoking the derisive label popularized during Sarah Palin’s 2008 vice presidential campaign. “I would challenge them, however, to explain how living beside the river is better than what we’ve accomplished in recent years.”

Shaunn Cartwright, an advocate and fierce critic of Mahan who is a fixture in San Jose homeless encampments, said the city-commissioned estimate gave the mayor “the numbers that he wants.” She said she routinely sees residents become homeless after short stays in the city’s temporary shelters, or try unsuccessfully to access shelter in the first place.

Officials at Santa Clara County, which manages the region’s official data system, said they hadn’t reviewed the model.

“The county cannot comment on the city’s model, as it has not been shared with us, so we cannot speak to its validity or accuracy,” the county Office of Supportive Housing wrote in an email.

However, the officials wrote that countywide data shows the number of people coming into San Jose homeless service providers “remains high, with nearly 3,000 households becoming homeless last year.”

The city’s own annual report, released in July, offered a mixed assessment of San Jose’s campaign under Mahan’s leadership to close encampments and funnel residents into its expanded shelter network.

A report prepared for city officials in July found that San Jose had met its goal of bringing 705 more shelter units online by the end of 2025, as part of the increase of shelter capacity overseen by Mahan.

City staff had a tougher time maintaining no-encampment zones: areas deemed off-limits to unhoused residents, often after city workers have dismantled a camp. During the final quarter of 2025-26, city workers cleared 64 of 181 reported re-encampments within two business days, or 35.4%, against an 80% target.

The next official tally of homelessness in San Jose, the federally required point-in-time count, is slated for early 2027. Mahan said Wednesday that the tally is a chronic undercount — a view widely shared among housing experts — and he noted that the tally takes place only every two years.

The mayor said the city government, “in San Jose fashion,” decided not to wait for the federal government’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the point-in-time counts, to design better methodology.

The most recent counts of unhoused residents in San Jose showed the number of homeless people in the city had stayed largely flat, at above 6,000 residents, from 2023 to January 2025.

However, the city did see a 10% decline in the number of homeless residents who were “unsheltered” — those living in tents, structures or vehicles. It’s a key metric for Mahan, who has overseen the diversion of funding for permanent housing toward an expansion of temporary shelter options, like tiny homes or motels. Residents who move into those units are still technically homeless, but Mahan has argued that these temporary housing options are the best course to quickly tackle the homelessness crisis.

Solivan, the housing director, said unsheltered homelessness is falling quickly because the city doubled the size of its shelter network in the past two years.

The data tool incorporates more than a dozen factors, including point-in-time count and federally mandated Homeless Management Information System data. Designed by UrbanLogiq, a Canada-based “AI-Powered data platform for government,” it also includes the city’s transportation department’s count of lived-in vehicles, police and fire responses, outreach teams and nonprofit partners, Mahan said.

Tallies of homeless residents are benchmarks for officials’ progress — or lack thereof — in tackling homelessness, but they are notoriously difficult to undertake.

Mahan touted the previous 10% reduction in unsheltered homelessness while on the campaign trail during the governor’s race this year, and Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is expected to run for president in 2028, has taken credit for a slight decline in unsheltered homelessness statewide as well. Point-in-time counts also help determine how much federal homelessness funding cities and counties receive.