Through a combination of public generosity, a change in the law and ruthlessness on the part of some public officials, San Bernardino County in 2025 saw a 10.2 percent decrease in homeless from what was the case last year, at least in terms of the numbers that were officially counted in the ’s 2025 Point-In-Time Count conducted on January 23.
Data from the 2025 Point-In-Time Count identified a total of 3,821 homeless individuals countywide. That figure reflects a decrease of 434 individuals, or 14.2 percent, compared to 2024.
In January 2024, there were 4,237 adults and children counted as homeless during the 2024 24-hour long survey. In January 2023, 4,194 people were located and tallied as homeless.
In this way, the 434 person or 14.2 percent decrease represents a change from the pattern going back until 2017, the last year a decrease in the homeless was registered in the county. The increase in 2024 over 2023 had been 42, an increase of 1.02527 percent.
The survey data breaks those recorded as homeless into multiple categories. An important distinction in that breakdown is the one between sheltered and unsheltered homeless. According to this year’s data, the number of sheltered homeless stood at 1,201 and the number of those unsheltered was 2,620. In 2024, the number of sheltered homeless was 1,200, one less numerically than this year. In 2024, the number of unsheltered was 3,055. In this way, while the increase in the actual number of those sheltered increased only marginally, the percentage of the homeless who have no roof over their head went down by 435 or 14.2 percent.
The homeless count and subpopulation survey has been commissioned, i.e., mandated, by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) since 2003. HUD has required local homeless continuum of care systems to count homeless individuals and families during the last 10 days of January in order to receive Housing and Urban Development grant funds. This year’s effort was carried out jointly by the San Bernardino County Homeless Partnership, the San Bernardino County Office of Homeless Services, and the Institute for Urban Initiatives, using approximately 554 community volunteers serve as counters.
Annual Point-In-Time Count provides a snapshot of the county’s homeless population, which enables officials to track progress toward reducing homelessness and ensure resources are being directed to areas that need it most. The annual count is crucial for securing grant funding to assist individuals who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless.
In Adelanto there were 38 total homeless counted, nine more than the 29 counted in 2024.
In Apple Valley there were 18 total homeless counted, 13 fewer than the 31 counted last year.
In the unincorporated county area of Arrowbear, one homeless person was found, an increase of one since last year.
In Barstow there were 96 total homeless counted, 17 fewer than the 113 counted last year.
In the unincorporated county area of Big Bear City/Sugarloaf there were 13 homeless, five fewer than the 18 counted last year.
In the municipality of Big Bear Lake there were 32 total homeless counted, no change from the number last year.
In the unincorporated county areas of Bloomington/Crestmore there were 33 total homeless counted, a 17 more than the 16 total homeless in Bloomington/Crestmore last year.
In the unincorporated county areas of Blue Jay and Cajon Canyon there were no homeless counted, no change from last year.
In the unincorporated county area of Cedarpines Park there was one homeless individual, no change from last year.
In Chino there were 15 total homeless counted, 28 fewer than the 43 counted in Chino last year.
In Chino Hills there were three total homeless counted, four fewer than the three counted last year.
In Colton there were 348 total homeless counted, 170 fewer than 348 homeless in Colton last year.
In the unincorporated county area of Crestline there were six total homeless counted, 14 fewer homeless in Crestline than the 20 counted last year.
In the unincorporated county area of Devore there were no homeless counted, three fewer than last year.
In Fontana there were 364 total homeless counted, 63 more than the 301 counted in Fontana last year.
In Grand Terrace there were four total homeless counted, no change from the four counted in Grand Terrace last year.
In Hesperia there were 70 total homeless counted, three more than the 67 counted last year.
In Highland there were 90 total homeless counted, 35 fewer than the 125 counted last year.
In Joshua Tree there were 22 total homeless counted, 17 fewer than were counted last year.
In Lake Arrowhead there were no homeless, five fewer than last year.
In the unincorporated community of Lenwood there were no homeless counted, one fewer than last year.
In Loma Linda there were nineteen total homeless counted, five more than the 14 counted last year.
In the unincorporated community of Lucerne Valley there were no homeless counted, two fewer than last year.
In the unincorporated community of Lytle Creek there were no homeless counted, reflecting no change from the zero homeless found there last year.
In the unincorporated communities of Mentone/Crafton there were no homeless, six fewer than last year.
In Montclair there were 38 total homeless counted, 36 fewer than the 74 in Montclair last year.
In the unincorporated community of Morongo Valley there were no homeless, one fewer than last year.
In the unincorporated community of Muscoy there were 11 homeless present, one more than the ten total homeless there last year.
In Needles there were 12 total homeless counted, three fewer than the 15 tallied in 2024.
In Ontario there were 297 total homeless counted, 100 more than the 197 counted last year.
In the unincorporated communities of Phelan and Piñon Hills there were two homeless, five fewer than the seven counted last year.
In Rancho Cucamonga there were 120 total homeless counted, 37 more than the 83 counted last year.
In Redlands there were 146 homeless counted, 67 fewer than the 213 counted in 2024.
In Rialto there were 54 homeless within its city limits, 19 fewer than the 73 homeless counted last year.
In the unincorporated community of Running Springs there were four total homeless counted, one fewer than the five there last year.
In the county seat, the City of San Bernardino, there were 1,535, an increase of 118 over the 1,417 total homeless counted last year
In the unincorporated community of Skyforest there was one homeless person, one more than the previous year.
In Twentynine Palms there were 86 homeless, 21 fewer than the 107 counted in 2024.
In the unincorporated community of Twin Peaks there were no homeless counted, representing no change from last year.
In Upland there were 67 homeless tallied, 29 fewer than the 96 homeless in the City of Gracious Living last year.
In the unincorporated community of Valley of Enchantment, where there were three homeless counted in 2024, the number of destitute increased by seven to ten this year.
In Victorville, the number of homeless in the city fell from 611 counted in 2024 to 448, a drop of 163.
In the unincorporated community of West Cajon Valley there were no homeless, as was the case last year.
In the unincorporated community of Wonder Valley, the four homeless there last year were gone this year.
In the unincorporated community of Yermo there were no homeless counted, as was the circumstance last year.
In Yucaipa there were 16 homeless counted, down by eight from the 24 there last year.
In Yucca Valley the number of homeless there dropped by 55, from the 97 total homeless counted in 2024 to 42 on January 23 of this year.
Remarkably, the three other homeless who were living in the county at no designated spot had left by the time of this year’s survey.
There were multiple factors contributing to the reduction in the number of those counted this year.
In a tight timeframe last summer, a legal and then a governmental procedural development allowed local officials to declare open season on the homeless, particularly in California.
On June 28, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court entered a ruling in the case of City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, which essentially erased the protections under the law that the homeless had enjoyed as a consequence of the 1962 case of Robinson v. California and the 2018 case Martin v. Boise. In Robinson v. California, the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits criminalization of a status, as opposed to criminalizing criminal acts, in striking down a California law that criminalized being addicted to narcotics. By extension, this applied to being homeless, such that it made applying traditional vagrancy laws difficult, problematic or even impossible, such that someone could not be prosecuted for being homeless. In Martin v. Boise, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that city officials in Boise, Idaho, could not enforce an anti-camping ordinance whenever its homeless population exceeds the number of available beds in its homeless shelters. Since the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal to that case in 2019, it became binding precedent within the Ninth Circuit.
With its ruling in the matter of the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court in one fell swoop undid the restrictions that had applied in the Western States as a consequence of Robinson v. California and Martin v. Boise, making a finding that the punishments of fines, temporary bans from entering public property, and one-month jail sentences were neither cruel nor unusual and are therefore constitutional and that the Grants Pass’s anti-camping ordinances were neutrally applied against both the homeless and those who are not homeless. This cleared the way for other cities to ban sleeping and overnight camping in parks. The upshot was that local governments can ban the homeless from public areas.
On July 25, 2024, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing state agencies to “urgently address homeless encampments,” which he said should be accomplished “while respecting the dignity and safety of Californians experiencing homelessness. Referencing the Supreme Court’s decision in Grants Pass in announcing the order, Newsom, who had been perhaps the strongest advocate for the homeless within government, indicated he would not prohibit local governments from ousting the homeless from public lands, including parks, as long as there was no threat to life, health and safety and an effort was made to collect, label, and store for at least 60 days the personal property of those evicted.
At once, public officials wanting to clear out those areas locally where the homeless were residing and the police officers and sheriff’s deputies given the assignments to deal with the homeless adopted a swagger even more pronounced than the one they had before and began to push San Bernardino County’s homeless around with newfound relish.
In San Bernardino, the city with far and away the largest number of homeless throughout the county, officials moved rapidly, or relatively so, and by October it began the wholesale removal of well over 500 and perhaps as many as 600 people who were living in Seccombe Lake Park, Perris Hill Park Meadowbrook Park. This did not, however, cure the problem, and those displaced merely shifted their living quarters to the Santa Ana or Lytle Creek riverbeds or around them, under railroad trestles or freeway overpasses, into the chaparral or landscaping along the freeways as well as into alleyways and vacant and/or abandoned buildings. Ironically, despite San Bernardino stepping up its efforts to dislodge the homeless, by the end of 2024, the city had over 100 more homeless within its confines than when the year had begun.
Over the last several years, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department has become increasingly draconian in dealing with the homeless, under the guise of its Project HOPE Operation Inroads and SOP programs, which have been extant at least since 2021. HOPE is an acronym for Homeless Outreach Proactive Enforcement and SOP is an acronym standing for solution-oriented policing.
In its effort to “help” the homeless, deputies assigned to Project HOPE, Operation Inroads or the SOP team arrive at homeless encampments and shanty towns, where they insist that layers of cardboard used as insulation from the ground as well as blankets, bedding, sleeping bags and tents which those who are destitute use to make it through the night are declared, in their words, “debris,” and discarded. If the denizens of the encampments resist or insist that the items in question are not trash or “debris,” they are given a physical thrashing and the items are taken from them.
Some of those who make no show of resistance are in certain cases told that some form of assistance or shelter is available to them. These offers of help occasionally succeed in having the targeted population willingly or of their own accord allow their possessions to be discarded. Occasionally, the deputies will follow up with delivering the homeless to an actual shelter or homeless assistance facility where they can make an application for inclusion in some type of program aimed at assistance. More often these are empty assurances that have no meaning but are useful in getting the homeless to cooperate in giving up their belongings.
In those circumstances where the target population proves uncooperative and is unwilling to part with bedding, tents or cooking/eating utensils, cookware and the like, the deputies will engage in a heavy-handed showing of force in which they will set hands upon the homeless, rough them up or beat them, ultimately seizing their property, which is then thrown away.
The ground is an excellent conductor of heat. As such, those who must sleep on it without a layer or two or three of cardboard, blankets or sleeping bags can be very cold and very uncomfortable at night. Being subjected to such sleeping arrangements can go a good way toward convincing the homeless to move on to some other location.
The department has over the decades evolved a strategy of assigning generally young and physically fit deputies to deal with the homeless, ones who engage in body building practices involving the use of anabolic steroids. The reason for this is three-fold. The overt physicality of the deputies serves as an intimidation factor which heightens their command presence and in most cases results in compliance with their demands. The second reason is that one of the side-effects of anabolic steroid use is “roid rage,” which is a state of irritability that accompanies the prolonged use of steroids and will manifest in an outburst of anger, aggression, or violence on the part of the user if he encounters a challenge or any difficult situation. In this way, a homeless individual’s refusal to depart with, for example, his sleeping bag or blanket or tent, might trigger an act of aggression on the part of the deputy that is then normally resolved with the homeless person being convinced or forced to part with his or her possessions or, as the department terms it, “debris.” The third reason is that by utilizing young deputies who utilize anabolic steroids for assignments in which they deal with the homeless as opposed to more economically and socially well-adapted individuals, the department can minimize the liability risk that can arise from the aggression of those deputies and the excessive force they are prone to using, given that the homeless generally do not possess the wherewithal to retain, hire or obtain an attorney to make a legal issue over their treatment by a member of the department.
The department in particular applies the Project HOPE, Operation Inroads, and SOP programs and the application of physical force against the homeless in Rancho Cucamonga, Chino Hills and Yucaipa, three of the 14 cities or towns in San Bernadino County in which the sheriff’s department serves as the contract police department. This is done out of a belief that the political leadership in those cities fully supports employing harsh measures to drive the homeless out. In Yucaipa, in particular, where the current mayor, Jon Thorp, is a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy and the immediate past mayor, Justin Beaver, is a former San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy, the deputies working out of the Yucaipa sheriff’s station consider themselves to have especial license to aggressively deal with the homeless, incorporating gratuitous violence into that protocol.
The sheriff’s department’s approach appears to be effective in Chino Hills and Yucaipa, which have seen their homeless numbers diminish in recent years. That is not the case in Rancho Cucamonga, which has seen an uptick in the number of dispossessed. Nevertheless, it is the belief of many that the homelessness population in Rancho Cucamonga would be far greater than it is were it not for the deputies there taking every opportunity they can to let the indigent know they are not welcome in what is San Bernardino County’s second most affluent city.
