ALAMEDA, CA — The 2026 Point-In-Time Count indicates a decrease in the number of homeless individuals in Alameda County, county officials announced Tuesday at a press conference in Oakland.
Preliminary results from the PIT Count show that the number of unhoused people in the county dropped from 9,450 in 2024 to 8,201 in 2026, representing a 13% decline. The proportion of unsheltered homeless people, who are not in any form of emergency, interim, or transitional housing, also decreased by 18%, from 6,343 in 2024 to 5,202 this year.
The PIT count is a census of people experiencing homelessness that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development mandates. The exercise takes place every two years and is led by Alameda County, with assistance from individual cities.
The 2026 PIT Count took place on Jan. 22 with the help of 1,300 volunteers, county officials said.
Jonathan Russell, director of Housing and Homelessness Services for the county, said that the PIT Count is not a perfect measure, given that it is a manual, volunteer-run process that takes place over just one day.
But he said that it is a useful data point for an "apples to apples" analysis against the 2024 PIT numbers, as both censuses used the same methodology.
"Let's not be Pollyannaish about it: 8,201 individuals experiencing homelessness is 8,201 people too many experiencing that injustice," Russell said on Tuesday. "But we are hopeful that driving down both the overall [homeless] and the unsheltered numbers and increasing the proportion of people that are in shelter and receiving services... is a good sign."
In 2022, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors adopted Home Together, a strategic plan to build a coordinated homelessness response system in Alameda County.
Russell said that county officials are currently updating the Home Together plan for 2030, and that it calls for concurrent investments in homelessness prevention, expanding housing, and providing services to make housing more accessible to people.
Oakland showed a reduction of almost 20% in its numbers, from 5,485 in 2024 to 4,410 in 2026.
But the city still has more than half of the county's homeless population, despite representing only 22% of the county's total population.
Mayor Barbara Lee said that the homelessness crisis in Oakland is born out of racial inequity, pointing out that the city also accounts for a majority of the county's unhoused Black population.
"It's a product of decades -- and I mean decades -- of redlining, disinvestment, and displacement. We can't sweep this under the rug," said Lee. "The work cannot be race neutral."
Hayward, Union City, Albany, and Alameda also showed a marked decrease in the number of homeless individuals, while the figures rose in Berkeley, Dublin, Fremont, Livermore, and Pleasanton.
Supervisor Nate Miley described the county's approach to fighting homelessness as reducing the inflow of people becoming homeless and increasing the outflow of people transitioning into some form of housing.
Homeless prevention, he said, is a key part of the solution.
"Preventing homelessness avoids trauma, instability, and the grief that people experience when losing their housing," Miley said. "I'm thrilled that through Measure W, for the first time, we're going to provide some deep investments in homeless prevention."
Measure W is a 2020 sales tax that county voters passed to fund homelessness and other critical services in the county. The sales tax is expected to raise $1.8 billion over ten years, of which $1.4 billion has been earmarked to tackle the housing issue.
In March, the county announced the allocation of $53 million in Measure W funds towards 10 housing projects, which will generate 900 permanently affordable homes, 346 of which will be for unhoused people.
Construction on these projects is expected to begin before March 2027.
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