For hundreds of students in the Lucia Mar Unified School District, the reality of “home” is a rotation of hotel rooms, crowded living spaces, or the backseat of a car.
While San Luis Obispo County’s most recent homelessness Point-in-Time Count, released in late July, reported a 22 percent decline in overall homelessness, the number of homeless South County students is trending in the opposite direction.
Nearly 1 out of 5 students in the Lucia Mar Unified School District were identified as homeless in the 2024-25 school year, according to the California Department of Education, higher than any other district in the county. A gap, driven in part by conflicting federal- and school-level definitions of homelessness, is leaving “doubled-up” families without the funding they need to find stability.
Lucia Mar identifies students’ homelessness status using the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, which includes doubled-up families sharing housing with others. But service providers typically follow the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s threshold, which doesn’t count families that are doubled up as homeless. According to providers from the Community Action Partnership of SLO County (CAPSLO) and the Five Cities Homeless Coalition, this discrepancy leaves their organizations without enough funding for every family.
“There’s a hyper-limitation on the amount of family beds we have for shelter in this community,” said Jack Lahey, Homeless Services Director of CAPSLO.
Currently, there are no dedicated family shelters in South County, which Lahey said makes stability a “constant moving target” for families. Families seeking a bed are often forced to look to 40 Prado in SLO or the ECHO shelter in Atascadero, making transportation complicated for students trying to remain in Lucia Mar.
Although the McKinney-Vento Act requires transportation options to be available to students, Lahey said that many students are “probably not going to make that commute every day.”
Only eight to 10 families can be supported at 40 Prado at any given time, with another two or three in hotels, according to Lahey. To address the gap, CAPSLO proposed a “family campus” next to 40 Prado that would provide a stable home base for families bouncing between regions.
The family campus, backed by a $5 million grant from the Bezos Day 1 Families Fund and state environmental cleanup funds, is still in the site-preparation phase, according to Lahey.
“Right now, it’s still dirt,” Lahey said.
Mariana Gutierrez, CAPSLO’s Family and Community Support Services manager, said the CalWorks Housing Support Program provides small aid packages to families in need, funding temporary hotel stays. However, these vouchers typically cover only about half of a month’s stay in SLO County, causing families to live in their cars or shelters after their funds are exhausted.
“Yes, we recognize there’s gaps across the board,” Gutierrez said. “But our responsibility is to address our community needs when we can.”
‘Trying to build an affordable house is like trying to put together a puzzle piece with Jenga blocks that are missing.’
—Linda Belch, county deputy director of homeless services
Devon McQuade, executive director of the Five Cities Homeless Coalition (5CHC), sees the impact of these gaps daily. 5CHC works closely with Lucia Mar’s Families in Transition program—a SLO County Office of Education program operated in each local school district—to provide case management and “welcome home packages” for families, but she said that many struggle to find housing they can actually afford.
“We see a large number of single-parent households where they’re dependent on one income,” McQuade said. “Finding a place that is affordable for them is really challenging.”
McQuade said the result is a rise in doubling up, often risking lease violations or over-occupancy issues that can lead to sudden eviction.
“If it’s a financial concern, the utilities haven’t been paid or the rent is late, then [the tenants] can bring us in,” McQuade said. “We can help mediate and quickly resolve the situation so that they’re not ending up back in a situation where there’s a tenuous relationship and [they’re] being asked to leave.”
Homelessness is particularly high among the region’s farmworker population, according to McQuade. While housing developers like People’s Self-Help Housing have dedicated units specifically for farmworkers, accessing that housing has become increasingly difficult due to the national political atmosphere and fear of immigration enforcement and deportation.
While 5CHC can support households regardless of citizenship status through flexible funding, McQuade said there has been a noticeable decline in undocumented individuals seeking services.
“We do have funding available. We are able to support that community,” McQuade said. “But it has been more challenging to identify [undocumented individuals] who are in need of services.”
The county’s most recent Point-in-Time Count totals included 40 homeless families, but those numbers don’t include those who are doubled-up, according to Linda Belch, the deputy director of Homeless Services in SLO County. That, in turn, impacts how much state and federal funding is available to tackle issues like building more affordable housing in the county.
She explained that developers must “braid” together various local and state funding sources, such as Community Development Block Grants, to bring to fruition projects like the recently opened Cleaver and Clark Commons in Grover Beach, an affordable apartment complex built by People’s Self-Help Housing.
“Trying to build an affordable house is like trying to put together a puzzle piece with Jenga blocks that are missing,” Belch said. ∆
Reach Intern Sam Fickett at intern@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Education Today 2026.
