Team awarded $3.4 million NIH grant to research effectiveness of strategies dealing with homelessness in Los Angeles County

A team led by UCLA Fielding School of Public Health researchers has received a $3.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to expand their study of Los Angeles County’s unhoused population.

The project - “Health and Housing Impacts of Unsheltered Homeless Encampment Resolution Programs” - is a joint research effort led by the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. Under this grant, the research team will focus on Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the nation with approximately 10 million residents; the county also has the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population some 47,000 people, according to official estimates.

The grant, awarded in September by the NIH’s National Institute of Nursing Research, will support expansion of an existing study, known as the Periodic Assessment of Trajectories of Housing, Health and Homelessness Study, or PATHS. The new project will study the impacts of California’s Encampment Resolution Fund (ERF), a competitive grant program designed to ensure that an encampment resolution strategy includes person-centered street engagement and supported transition to stable housing with services, while restoring public spaces and protecting community health and safety.

“The PATHS survey has proven to be a valuable resource for representing the always-changing housing trajectories that homeless people experience and providing real-time assessment of the many risks facing unhoused people, from policing to discrimination to extreme heat” said Dr. Randall Kuhn, professor in UCLA Fielding’s Department of Community Health Sciences and principal investigator on the NIH grant. “What we also need are rigorous evaluations of major housing and health care initiatives that aim to improve lives, and now we have a chance to evaluate encampment resolution programs.”

With the new funding, the team will use PATHS to examine the impact of “encampment resolution programs” (ERPs) in Los Angeles. A California model, ERPs offer a multidisciplinary approach to serving the needs of people living in encampments by connecting them to interim housing solutions like hotel rooms, with extensive social and institutional support and a pathway to permanent housing. ERPs offer an alternative to encampment sweeps and cleanups, which PATHS research has shown to be ineffective.Through its competitive ERF grant program, the State of California has already invested almost $1 billion in ERPs. Los Angeles has multiple ERPs, including the City of Los Angeles’ Inside Safe and Los Angeles County’s Pathway Home. While ERPs hold promise based on quarterly outcome data collected from ERF grantees, the NIH project will evaluate the effectiveness of ERPs in providing durable improvements in housing and health outcomes.

“As cities across the county continue to struggle with how best to address the growing issue of unsheltered homelessness and encampments, this study offers a rare opportunity to use rigorous research methods to provide sound empirical data to inform this discussion,” said USC’s Dr. Ben Henwood, a principal investigator on the project and director of the USC Homelessness Policy Research Institute.

California Interagency Council on Homelessness (Cal ICH) Executive Officer Meghan Marshall added, “Research like this helps the state share what works, refine policy, and strengthen how we deliver programs that resolve encampments. By focusing on what research shows truly works, we can build lasting solutions that restore dignity, stability, and well-being for everyone.”

The new project will complement the PATHS team’s current work, which includes 2025 recent reports on:

• The Impact of the Wildfires on Los Angeles’ Unhoused Community, and
• The Impact of Immigration Raids on Los Angeles’ Unhoused Community.

The new NIH grant will enable the recruitment of 400 ERP enrollees into the PATHS survey. The team will compare the ERP group’s long-term housing trajectories and health outcomes to the existing representative group from PATHS. The analysts will document the overall effects of the ERP program on health, including the key points of whether individuals progress to permanent housing, remain in interim housing, or return to the streets. To enroll this group, the PATHS team of researchers and students will work closely with housing and health agencies at the city, county and state level.

“Our recent tracking data for 2025 shows an alarming rise in encampment sweeps and other anti-homeless policing operations that do not offer the pathway to housing offered by encampment resolution programs and have been proven to be harmful,” said Dr. Jessie Chien, the lead analyst on the study. “Through this new research, we hope to develop concrete housing policy guidelines for policymakers and practitioners and actually improve the health and well-being of people experiencing homelessness.”

FUNDING

The grant was awarded competitively. The research is supported by the National Institute of Nursing Research of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01NR021986. The content of any peer-reviewed research published stemming from this funding will be solely the responsibility of the authors and not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.