CARE Court was created to help California’s toughest homeless cases. Why that’s been so hard
J.M., who prefers to use his initials for privacy, looks out at the San Francisco Bay at Jack London Square, where he walks almost daily for exercise and because he enjoys looking at the water in Oakland on Dec. 1, 2025. JM received housing support through CARE Court and now lives within walking distance of Jack London. Photo by Florence Middleton for CalMatters/CatchlightEvery time Jennifer Farrell got close to her brother, he slipped through her fingers.
As she walked the railroad tracks on the border of San Lorenzo and Hayward last month, searching for signs of her homeless younger sibling, she thought she caught a glimpse of him on a discarded mattress. But it turned out to be someone else.
Store clerks in a nearby strip mall and the groundskeeper at a local park all knew her brother. They told Farrell they’d seen him recently lying on the sidewalk outside a Jack in the Box. Another time, he was walking down the street, dragging a blanket behind him. He was spotted outside a church just that morning, someone said.
But he remained a phantom. Everywhere Farrell looked, it seemed like her brother had just left.
Farrell wasn’t supposed to have to do this anymore. Last Christmas Eve, she’d jumped at the chance to get her 59-year-old brother, who has been homeless off and on since 2017 and struggles with schizophrenia and meth use, into a new program called CARE Court. It was supposed to help people like him stabilize their mental health and get off the streets.
For a short time, it did. Her brother moved into a converted hotel in Oakland in late April, Farrell said, but five months later, he fled the hotel and disappeared.
“We’re coming up on a year (since he enrolled in CARE Court),” Farrell said. “And we are nowhere … we’re probably in the same place we were when I filed. And maybe even worse off.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom introduced CARE Court in 2022 in part as a way to bring people with serious mental illnesses off of California’s streets. He continues to tout it as part of his homelessness strategy, as recently as this month in a news release.
But data from the state and counties, as well as interviews with service providers, CARE Court participants and their family members, highlight the ways in which the program is struggling to help homeless Californians.
More than two years after the program first launched, most people starting the CARE Court process aren’t homeless, and those who are homeless aren’t always getting what they need most: housing.
CalMatters requested housing information from the 25 largest counties and the ones that first launched the program. Counties may define homelessness differently. Sometimes multiple petitions may be filed for the same person.To assess the program, CalMatters requested housing information from California’s 25 largest counties, as well as all of the ones that first launched the program. Of the 2,362 CARE Court petitions filed in those counties, fewer than a third were for people who were homeless.
When asked how many people were housed through CARE Court, even the most successful counties reported just a few dozen.
Six of the counties polled by CalMatters either did not track housing status or total number of petitions, or did not disclose that data.
The state has not made detailed, up-to-date data about CARE Court performance public. Tracking housing status by county is difficult, as counties collect that data in different ways. Some count people as homeless if they are incarcerated or hospitalized, and some don’t. In some cases, counties don’t know the housing status of the client when a petition is filed. CalMatters asked each county included in this report for its most up-to-date CARE Court data, and most provided data through October or November. A handful only provided data that ended in August.
Most people who start the CARE Court process are not homeless
In the 21 counties whose behavioral health departments provided data, 31% of the 2,362 petitions filed were for people who were homeless.
CARE Court began rolling out in California in October 2023 as a court-based treatment program for people with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. People enter it through a petition, which can be filed by their family members, first responders or mental health clinicians. Almost all of the agreements are voluntary, and even court-ordered treatment plans can’t force compliance.
“You know what it’s like? It’s like the Wizard of Oz,” Rebekah Cooke said earlier this year, when her 36-year-old daughter was enrolled in CARE Court while living in a Marin County homeless encampment. “You go through all this and you think there’s hope at the end. And when you get to the end, you realize it’s all smoke and mirrors. And there’s really nothing at the end.”
CARE Court’s efforts to move her daughter indoors failed for eight months. Her daughter finally got housing that worked for her after leaving CARE Court.
How CARE Court functions varies greatly by location, and depends on how many and what kind of beds a county has available, and how it allocates housing resources.
“The most common unmet need for CARE participants was securing and maintaining permanent housing,” according to the most recent detailed state data on the program — more than a year old — which found 28 percent of people receiving CARE Court services were unhoused for at least part of the time they were in the program.
