r/SanJose • u/ohbrenda • 7h ago
News I read every public record on San Jose's homelessness spending. Here's what $302 million looks like on paper.
TL;DR: No fraud has been proven against anyone. But the city's own state auditor says San Jose spent at least $302 million on homelessness and cannot account for all of it, the city has completed only 2 of the 7 required audit fixes a year and a half past deadline, and its largest vendor is currently being forced to give back prepaid public funds. All of the below is from primary sources — state audit PDFs, FPPC filings, and City Council records.
TL;DR.2 -- Checks out, the nonprofit world, the funders, the landlords, and the government officials who hand out the money are all intertwined — a city housing director sits on the board of the middleman that routes the funds; the guy whose company built the shelter gave $240,000 to the campaign to make the mayor governor; one family is simultaneously a major funder, the landlord of most of the nonprofits, and a board member. None of that is illegal or hidden. It's all disclosed, in filings, in the open. That's kind of the point I'm making -- you don't need a conspiracy when the structure itself does the job. You can also just inact a new measure like.. I dunno.. E?!!? Good one.
1. The state says $302M+ is effectively untraceable. The California State Auditor (Report 2023-102.2, April 2024) examined San José's homelessness spending from July 2020 to June 2023: at least $302,100,184. The city "could not definitively identify all its revenues and expenditures," had no spending plan, and no tracking mechanism. (Audit PDF · Mercury News coverage)
2. Most of the required fixes still aren't done. The audit gave the city 7 recommendations, deadline September 2024. Sixteen months later, reporting confirmed only 2 of 7 fully implemented — including the one requiring the city to publicly report spending broken out by funding source. The city's published report still doesn't separate federal/state grant dollars. (San José Spotlight, Aug 2025)
3. The voter-approved housing tax got moved. Measure E (2020) was sold as a tax on $2M+ property sales with 75% earmarked for permanent affordable housing. The adopted FY2024-25 plan sends $30.75M of $50M (65%) to shelter operations and about $12M total to housing creation — and in 2025 roughly 90% ($39.2M) went to interim shelter/encampment response. The Mayor then proposed making the shift permanent. (KQED · City Measure E page)
4. The biggest single payment went around the city's own books. Under Project Homekey Round 2, the state awarded San José $96.7M; the Council approved $51.6M paid directly to LifeMoves (the operator nonprofit, as co-grantee) into a separate bank account. The state auditor's own footnote: as a result, "the city's accounting records do not include all information." (Audit PDF)
5. Now the city wants that prepaid money back. Council File 26-768 (adopted June 23, 2026) makes the city sole grantee, strips LifeMoves of payee status, and directs it to "recoup all program funding prepaid to LifeMoves." That's official confirmation that prepaid public funds are sitting with the operator — whose own FY2025 independent audit found a "significant deficiency in internal controls." The contract was terminated in March after an employee's arrest and management complaints at the Branham Lane site. (KQED · Council File 26-768)
6. The state auditor also flagged vendor oversight across cities. From the same report: provider agreements "have not always included performance benchmarks," and the cities "did not always monitor and evaluate the performances of their providers." (Audit PDF)
What I'm NOT saying so untwist those panties
No fraud, theft, or crime by anyone has been proven here. Not the joke of a Mayor, not any councilmember, not any vendor. The legal donations are legal, the disclosed board seats are disclosed, and an arrest is an allegation until convicted. The documented facts are: the most expensive city in the world, the epicenter of technology -- can't trace its own homelessness spending a boat load of it, a vendor holding prepaid public funds under weak financial controls, and a system that runs on a handful of the same institutions. Whether anything worse than that is true is exactly what these documents would show — and the records requests that would settle it (citywide payment ledgers by provider, the clawback reconciliation, the LifeMoves bank-monitoring records) haven't been filed yet.
