How Two California Lakeside Communities Are Ending Chronic Homelessness—at Jet-Ski Speed

In the Pandemic, South Lake Tahoe and Lake Elsinore Are Showing Other Cities Ways to Support All Their Unhoused Neighbors

Have you given up hope that California will ever get its 150,000-person homeless population off the streets? Are you dubious that your hometown could ever reduce its homelessness to zero?

If so, then you should go jump in a lake.

Either Tahoe or Elsinore will do.

South Lake Tahoe and Lake Elsinore—separated by 460 miles, 5,000 feet in elevation, and 25 degrees in average temperature—have built such supportive housing infrastructures that within two years both could achieve “functional zero.” That’s the term for communities that have solved homelessness for a …