San Jose builds homelessness data dashboard to track city shelter performance

San Jose, California, is building a new data infrastructure for its homelessness response and launched a dashboard designed to track shelter performance and identify gaps in the system. 

The city’s Housing Department introduced an internal version of its Shelter System Dashboard this month after City Council directives called for more comprehensive performance reporting in 2024. 

The tool pulls information from San Jose’s Homeless Management Information System and contract reports. It tracks shelter use, length of stay, demographics, people housed, program exits and destinations, exits without notice, and participant deaths. The dashboard will be updated monthly to give staff time to validate information and address any data-quality issues. 

According to the Office of the City Manager, San José, which has 6,503 homeless residents, wants to reach a point where homelessness is rare and brief — a goal known as “functional zero.” 

The dashboard comes as California continues to account for a disproportionate share of the nation’s homeless population. More than 187,000 people were counted as homeless in the state in 2024, according to the Point-In-Time count, a count of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness nationwide on a single night in January. That figure fell 2.8% to 181,934 people in 2025, according to federal data.

In 2024, California Gov. Gavin Newsom invited AI developers to present products to help address California’s homelessness crisis and housing shortage, exploring ways the technology could help connect treatment centers and real-time housing development data, while improving the efficacy of state spending.

The effort builds on the city’s broader push to improve how city agencies collect and use data. Last year, the city adopted a three-year data strategy focused on improving data quality, standardization and evidence-based decision making practices. 

However, the new dashboard also highlights the limitations of data systems. 

In a memorandum released Tuesday, Erik L. Soliván, director of the Housing Department, said the city cannot reliably determine whether people remain housed or sheltered 18 months after leaving its programs because post-exit information is split between city and Santa Clara county systems. 

“As a result, this measure cannot currently be reported reliably,” Soliván wrote. “The Housing [Department] has begun preliminary discussions with its partners about opportunities to improve longitudinal tracking.”

A public-facing version of the city’s internal dashboard is expected this fall that will display the same information — shelter use, demographics, length of stay, and exits — without identifying sensitive information to protect participant privacy.