I doubt this is much different from other states' spending, but it's illustrative

welcome in san diego

No Wonder Gavin Newsom Didn't Want an Audit to Track $24 Billion in Homeless Spending

Victoria Taft, PJ Media:

…. California spent $24 billion to tackle homelessness over the past five years but didn’t consistently track whether the huge outlay of public money actually improved the situation."

… The audit found that the California Interagency Council on Homelessness "stopped tracking spending on programs and whether programs were working in 2021. It also failed to collect and evaluate outcome data for these programs."

Taft:

Worse, so much money is being given out and combined with lax drug laws and even more lax prosecutions that the state has now attracted 32% more homeless. Kiley says, "half the nation's unsheltered homeless now live in our state. In short: California is spending more and more on homelessness and the problem continues to get worse worse and worse."

…

Meanwhile, back at the audit, the bean counters looked at two cities to determine how they spent the money. San Diego and San José (they're putting the accent over the 'e' these days — equity, you understand) accounts were examined:

[N]either city could definitively identify all its revenues and expenditures related to its homelessness efforts because neither has an established mechanism, such as a spending plan, to track and report its spending. 

Although both cities provide tens of millions of dollars for homelessness programs and services through agreements with external service providers, such as nonprofits, neither city evaluated the effectiveness of its agreements.

So, the town once known for Naval efficiency and now run by leftists, and the HQ for Silicon Valley, also run by leftists, can't count.

Moreover, they established no mechanism to measure if any of the cash was doing any good. 

San Diego has generally established clear performance measures, such as specifying the number of people the service provider will assist, to enable it to assess whether the providers’ efforts are an effective use of funds. However, San José has not consistently done so. Furthermore, neither city has evaluated the effectiveness of the programs it provides to address the profound health and safety risks associated with unsheltered homelessness. [emphasis added].

California [also] biffed COVID spending — losing $30 billion in unemployment payments to criminals, Nigerian princes, and state prisoners. The woman who was supposed to oversee these expenditures, Julie Su, failed up to Joe Biden's labor department. Though she's so awful that she's never been confirmed, she was able to paper over her malfeasance by new rule-making at the federal level. I wrote about that in my recent West Coast, Messed Coast™ column at PJ Media.