BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — The Bakersfield Kern Regional Homeless Collaborative released a new homelessness report over the weekend. We brought in executive director Carlos Baldovinos from The Mission at Kern County to help us give context to the numbers.
Baldovinos says that while the report found a 3.2% increase from last year, the data over the last few years shows a flattening curve. That means that the homelessness counts were steadily rising each year since 2018, but since 2024 the counts began to remain steady. The report also identified three groups of special interest: veterans, transitional youth, and chronically homeless people.
The reasons that people fell into homelessness remained similar, the report found. Baldovinos said that the most critical point was inflow…