The 2024 Point in Time (PIT) Count for West County and SOS Richmond's count for the broader Richmond area reveal a significant discrepancy in the number of recorded unsheltered residents. (Source: Contra Costa County, Point in Time Count, 2024; SOS Richmond, 2024 Homeless Count)
This dispersion makes the true scale of unsheltered homelessness easy to undercount, and helps explain the discrepancy between the various homeless counts in the city. In April 2025, the city identified approximately 70 encampment locations, while the SOS Richmond outreach workers estimate the number of such sites is closer to 200 that same year. According to the 2025 Point in Time (PIT) Count, of those living unsheltered in the County, 27% were in a tent/outdoors and 33% were in a vehicle.
The people experiencing homelessness in Richmond are, by and large, longtime members of the community. While city-level PIT data is not available for Richmond specifically, county-wide figures demonstrate how about 72% of Contra Costa County’s unhoused residents have lived in the county for 10 years or more. In Richmond, over 60% of unhoused people lost their housing within Richmond itself, according to city officials. Black residents make up 18% of the general population but 57% of those experiencing homelessness, while Indigenous people make up just 1% of the general population but 11% of the unhoused population.
RICHMOND’S
GENERAL POPULATION:
GENERAL POPULATION:
18% Black
RICHMOND’S
UNHOUSED POPULATION:
UNHOUSED POPULATION:
57% Black
However, despite a 34% increase in temporary and permanent beds countywide over the past two years, available capacity remains far short of what Richmond residents need. Emergency shelter beds are competitive and often located in the other parts of the county, making them difficult for Richmond residents to reach. Within the city itself, options are limited. For example, the Bay Area Rescue Mission, one of Richmond's primary emergency drop-in shelters, offers 30-day stays but requires residents to return each night to maintain their place. Its congregate layout, no-pet policy, personal property storage limits, and faith-based model also create barriers for some. Other emergency shelters—like Brookside Shelter—are noncongregate, and offer more services like case management and greater flexibility for length of stay, but are more competitive and do not accept drop-ins. Altogether, Richmond's housing and shelter infrastructure can accommodate only an estimated third of its unhoused residents on any given night.
Richmond receives significant state funding for homelessness, such as from programs like Project Homekey and the Encampment Resolution Fund (ERF). Since 2021, the city has received over $22 million in ERF grants to close local encampments and connect residents to the housing pipeline. The city has also received $14.5 million in 2024 from Project Homekey funding to convert a Motel 6 into 48-units of permanent supportive housing for the chronically homeless.
State dollars have been supplemented by local sources. Chevron’s oil refinery is the city's largest employer and single largest taxpayer. They contribute in taxes, utilities and settlement payments. In the 2024–2025 fiscal year, these contributions equated to 23.6% of the budgeted revenue in the city’s general fund. In the 2025-2026 fiscal year, local funds supported a range of homelessness-related expenditures, including $8.3 million toward the Motel 6 project, and $3.8 million for the city's Rent Program, which includes rental assistance and rent adjustment petitions (RAPs) to create more affordable housing.
However, that funding has yet to close the gap between Richmond's unhoused population and the shelter beds available to them. In the absence of enough shelter, Richmond has developed a distinct approach to managing encampments.
WHO’S IN CHARGE?
CITY OF RICHMOND
Services flow primarily through the Community Development Department, which works to manage contracts with organizations including SOS Richmond, Hope Solutions, Beautiful Gate, and GRIP to deliver services such as emergency shelter, street outreach, hygiene support, and employment programs for unhoused residents. For outreach at encampments, it contracts with two main organizations: SOS Richmond— a local nonprofit that hires unhoused individuals to provide services to Richmond’s unhoused community — and CORE, a Contra Costa County-wide program that is intended to streamline unsheltered individuals' access to consistent services and shelter.
SOS Richmond is responsible for regular peer-based outreach. They coordinate with CORE on sending and receiving referrals, and offering laundry and transportation services. The CORE team acts as a gateway to Contra Costa's Coordinated Entry System, linking unhoused people to the County’s available services and shelters. Their outreach teams are tasked with locating unsheltered people, evaluate their housing and service needs, and help connect them to the appropriate resources. The Richmond CORE team only goes out 3 times a week and in 2024, they made 1,490 unduplicated contacts with people who were unhoused in the City of Richmond.
SOS Richmond is also contracted to provide maintenance to the city's encampment communities alongside the City’s Public Works department. Their Mobile Streets Team also visits encampments weekly to remove debris and dumped materials. Public Works conducts cleanings at encampments as well.
Closures are handled by multiple departments. Public Works sends crews to physically remove tents and other forms of shelter and property from encampment sites. The Police Department responds to 911 calls, and is responsible for red-tagging and towing vehicles. When needed, the Fire Department responds to encampment-related emergencies, including fires.
These city departments, county programs, and nonprofit contractors are loosely coordinated through a monthly community task force meeting called The Richmond Homeless Taskforce. Since 2017, the group has convened to facilitate ideas, updates, and recommendations about the city’s response to homelessness. The meeting is facilitated by Michelle Milam, who works in the Richmond Police Department as the city's Crime Prevention Manager. Milam serves as the primary public-facing city employee on homelessness-related community engagement, compiling an encampment report that tracks the sites where services are being provided each week.
However, decision-making around encampment management, particularly around when and where to conduct closures, is decentralized in Richmond. When determining when and how to take action, city departments largely operate independently and apply their own departmental priorities. Public Works, for example, maintains its own scheduling and prioritization system for when to abate an encampment, focusing on health and safety concerns and monitoring encampments on general right-of-way areas. The Police Department, on the other hand, prioritizes vehicles that cluster in groups of one or more or are in the public right of way.
In the absence of a specific office or body governing Richmond’s homeless response, these departments rely heavily on monthly meetings and informal relationships between departments and contractors, rather than on shared policy or centralized oversight.
GUIDING POLICY
The city’s response to these encampments is guided by a patchwork of municipal code provisions for enforcement and maintenance at encampments.
CLOSURES
Unlike other Bay Area cities, Richmond officials say they have made a deliberate choice not to pursue aggressive encampment closures. “We do have a multi-pronged approach to dealing with [encampments], but we have not instituted the unilateral sweep-everything, push-everybody-out approach that some other cities have,” Public Information Officer Donald Patchin of the Richmond Police Department told Richmond Confidential. That restraint is due in part to legal limits in the Richmond Municipal Code that state that encampments cannot be closed before residents are first offered notice and an alternative place to stay.
The city's standard process is to post a 72-hour notice before any abatement—though that window may be shortened if the encampment is in the public right of way or in a danger area. However, the camping ordinance does not apply in some emergency situations like public health crises or fires, or on private property, where property owners work with the city to abate encampments. If someone returns to a previously abated site, the process starts over again.
The situation is different for Richmond residents living in vehicles. Municipal Code 11.96.050 says that a person may sleep in a vehicle and store belongings within city limits for no more than 72 hours in any three-month period, except “upon a showing of necessity” (Code 11.96.050). State Vehicle Code adds a parallel constraint, limiting how long a car can remain parked in any one spot to 72 hours.
In practice, city officials say they try to follow the spirit of the camping ordinance when it comes to vehicles. If the vehicle hasn't moved after the notice period, it is red-tagged, and if it still isn't moved, it is towed or impounded. As with tent encampments, Milam says the city's goal is to make a shelter offer before escalating to that point, but there is nothing in the Municipal Code requiring officials to do so.
Storage of personal property in Richmond is managed by Public Works. Notices posted at encampments say that “personal property collected by the city shall be stored, without charge, for ninety (90) days. After ninety (90) days, any unclaimed property will be thrown away.”
In the City of Richmond, outreach efforts are primarily led by CORE, as well as SOS Richmond. Outreach takes place on a continual basis, as well as before and during encampment closures.
Outreach before an encampment closure typically begins when CORE is contacted about an encampment—whether by county residents, the city, or SOS itself—and their outreach team visits to inform residents about available shelter options. Outside of these closures, CORE’s teams visit encampments across the county to connect people to services.
SOS Richmond also assesses the housing needs of unsheltered people and connects them to CORE workers as needed. The two organizations work in close coordination, exchanging referrals, enrolling individuals in HMIS, and providing practical support like laundry and transportation services to help people take steps toward stable housing.
The city works with nonprofit contractor SOS Richmond to provide cleanup, and sanitation services at encampment sites. The SOS Streets Team employs unsheltered individuals to provide debris removal, clean up illegal dumping and provide general waste removal across the City of Richmond. This happens in addition to the regular illegal dumping clean up performed by the Department of Public Works.
Alongside the Local Camping Ordinance that deals directly with homelessness, there are several other laws that dictate the use of Richmond’s public spaces.
Of the 41 municipal codes we identified as relevant to homelessness in Richmond, we organized them into two broad frameworks: Behavioral Laws and Sanitation Laws.
The 36 laws governing public space behavior can be organized into four broad categories:
- Laws governing where vehicles may be parked and for how long (12)
- Laws regulating the location and quantity of personal property in public spaces (7)
- Laws regulating standing, sitting, resting, sleeping, and lodging in public places (5)
- Laws restricting or prescribing specific activities within public spaces (12)
The five laws concerning sanitation, environmental hazards, and waste disposal can be organized into three broad categories:
- Laws regulating rodent control (1)
- Laws regulating health and safety (3)
- Laws regulating dumping (1)
HISTORY OF
POLICYMAKING
- In April 2017, the City of Richmond established a Homelessness Taskforce “to focus on the identification and implementation of annual policy priorities to impact homelessness in Richmond.”
- In June 2018 Richmond declared homelessness a public health crisis, which lasted until 2024.
- In September 2018, the Martin v. Boise decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily constrained local governments’ ability to clear encampments without first offering adequate shelter, framing such actions as potential violations of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
- In October 2018, Richmond declared a shelter crisis, finding that “the health and safety of unhoused people is threatened by a lack of shelter.” This declaration facilitated the creation of shelters more quickly by using alternative minimum standards and bypassing some regulatory requirements, and remains in effect.
- In 2019, the City of Richmond began working with Contra Costa County’s CORE (Community Outreach and Reentry Empowerment) Team. The City of Richmond and San Pablo Police Department initiated a joint outreach team for the Richmond/San Pablo area to engage with unhoused individuals.
- In 2020, the Reimagining Public Safety Community Taskforce was formed following the Black Lives Matter movement and youth-led protests. The Taskforce met to discuss how to allocate funds away from the police department to non-policing alternatives. Local organization SOS Richmond began getting $1,800,000 from the General Fund as a result to provide services to the unsheltered.
- In 2021, A Safe Parking Plan pilot plan, an initiative to create a place where vehicles dwellers can park legally, was proposed but never initiated after difficulties in finding a location.
- In 2022, The City of Richmond received $4.88 million from the Encampment Resolution Fund (ERF) to close major vehicle encampments on Rydin Road and Castro Street and move residents into housing.
- In 2023, Richmond published its Homelessness Strategic Plan, outlining the city's comprehensive approach to addressing homelessness.
- In June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson overturned the protections established by Martin v. Boise, reauthorizing cities to enforce anti-camping and related ordinances regardless of shelter availability.
- In 2024, the city received $8.6 million to connect at least 115 unhoused residents living in encampments along the I-80 and I-580 corridors with essential services and housing pathways. additional $9.3 million of state Encampment Resolution Funding (ERF).
- In April 2024, the city contracted with SOS Richmond under a 15-month, $1.56 million city contract that began in April 2024 to provide unhoused residents a range of services including laundry, work-force training, showers, trash-pick up, towing, and shelter outreach
- In June 2025, the city approved contracts with eight vendors to provide on-call homeless services on an as-needed basis, at up to $3 million per vendor, through June 2026.
- In July 2026, Tiny Village Spirit is projected to open—a grassroots project that is projected to create 12 new tiny homes specifically for unhoused youth, doubling the number of beds for youth under 25 in Contra Costa County.
DISCUSSION
This framework, in practice, is fragile, especially with shelter capacity sufficient to serve only an estimated third of Richmond's unhoused population on any given night. Beyond that, Richmond has a notably high share of undocumented unhoused residents, and their immigration status often limits how far they can move through the county's formal housing pipeline.
Without a governing framework beyond the camping ordinance, the city's homeless response can default to a complaint-based structure. And without formal policy requiring shelter offers before enforcing parking laws or towing vehicle homes, meaningful protections depend on discretion and informal coordination rather than consistent practice and systematic planning.
That inconsistency gap is, in part, a staffing problem. Because Richmond has no dedicated homelessness office or staff, responding to encampments falls within the broader job descriptions of departments whose primary mandates lie elsewhere.
Without a governing framework beyond the camping ordinance, the city's homeless response can default to a complaint-based structure. And without formal policy requiring shelter offers before enforcing parking laws or towing vehicle homes, meaningful protections depend on discretion and informal coordination rather than consistent practice and systematic planning.
That inconsistency gap is, in part, a staffing problem. Because Richmond has no dedicated homelessness office or staff, responding to encampments falls within the broader job descriptions of departments whose primary mandates lie elsewhere.