California passed the Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment (CARE) Act in 2022 to provide behavioral health and housing services to individuals with psychotic spectrum and schizophrenia disorders who are deemed unable to care for themselves. This policy brief from the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at UCSF and the California Policy Lab uses anonymized data to estimate how many San Franciscans in a database of individuals who have contact with the urgent and emergent care system may be eligible for referral to CARE Court and describe their service needs.

People with multiple, complex health and housing needs frequently receive fragmented care because the providing systems operate independently. The California Policy Lab at UC Berkeley and the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative worked with partners in San Francisco’s public health and criminal legal systems to link together ten years of data from the physical health, behavioral health, housing, and criminal legal sectors.