A year into living in Santa Barbara County through a pandemic, people unable to make their rent payments continue to experience difficult choices amid ongoing expenses.
“Many of our neighbors continue to stress over the inability to pay rent and live in fear not knowing how they will pay the months of back rent they have incurred or owe,” Rep. Salud Carbajal said during a webinar this past week. “Others have spent the past few weeks concerned that unemployment benefits might run out and worry that they won’t be able to cover the basic necessities of food or having a roof over their head.”
A webinar hosted by PATH (People Assisting The Homeless) outlined what local federal and state elected officials are doing to address issues around unemployment benefits triggered by the pandemic, housing and homelessness in Santa Barbara.
Carbajal was joined in the webinar by state Sen. Monique Limón and Assemblyman Steve Bennett.
Santa Barbara County’s unemployment rates skyrocketed amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The jobless rate hit a peak of 13.9% in April 2020, well above the 2019 estimate of 3.4%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The latest preliminary job figures show the county faced a 7.6% unemployment rate in December 2020, compared with 3.6% in December 2019.
Unemployment assistance is a critical funding source for many people amid the pandemic, Bennett said.
“These checks are essential for many of these people,” Bennett said during Tuesday’s webinar.
Nearly one in five adult renters are not caught up on rent, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ data collection from Feb. 17 to March 1. The center estimated that 13.5 million adults are living in rental housing.
Limón acknowledged that receiving unemployment assistance “has not been easy in California.”
“When you hear the voices and when you see the emails of what our constituents, what Californians and what folks in Santa Barbara are going through,” she said, “it is very difficult.”
Data from the annual federally mandated point-in-time count found nearly 1,900 homeless people in Santa Barbara County in January 2020, a 5% increase compared with the 2019 tally.
The Santa Barbara County Continuum of Care received a waiver from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development not to conduct this year’s annual point-in-time count of people who are unsheltered because of the potential health risks amid the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the county.
It’s estimated that there are about 1,662 “unsheltered” people in the county. The number is based on a data model since no physical count was completed in 2021, and it includes people living in vehicles.
“The issues facing members of our community experiencing homelessness during COVID-19 have become complicated and daunting given the problems they face day to day,” Carbajal said. “If we expect to resolve the current issues affecting homelessness, housing and unemployment, our first step must be to get a handle on this pandemic.”
He advocated for a “coordinated national strategy to make it possible for everyone to get a (COVID-19) vaccine as soon as possible,” mentioning President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which could boost the United States’ recovery from the economic impacts of the pandemic. Biden signed the stimulus package into law on March 11.
The pandemic has caused immense financial strain on people locally and across the country, Carbajal said, adding, “Constituents have told me and my staff about their inability to pay rent or mortgage since the pandemic started. It is upsetting and disheartening to hear that people are living in fear of losing their home due to circumstances outside of their control.”
In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic.
Homeowners across the country are still struggling to pay their mortgage due to the pandemic, Carbajal said.
“Homeowners are another group that has been overlooked,” Carbajal said, mentioning that funding in the American Rescue Plan will assist struggling homeowners with mortgage payments.
On homelessness, Santa Barbara County will receive about $3.12 million to acquire an office building to convert into permanent housing with wraparound services as part of the third round of funding for California’s Homekey.
According to the state, Homekey is a program to purchase and rehabilitate housing, including motels, hotels, vacant apartment buildings and other properties, and convert those into permanent, long-term housing for the homeless population or people at risk of experiencing homelessness.
“We can take existing structures and create a way for those to become housing opportunities, particularly for the unsheltered,” Limón said. “That’s something important.”
In addition to a range of unemployment topics, speakers at the webinar also discussed affordable housing in California and Santa Barbara County.
“We have to find a way to afford to build affordable housing … that’s what all the other First World countries did that have done a much better job at this than we have,” Bennett said. “You don’t see the homeless crisis that we are seeing, particularly on the West Coast, in other countries because they have committed their resources at the national level.”
Bennett recalled a “major commitment” in the 1960s to building “the affordable housing that we needed to have built, and that funding level continued into the ’70s, and by the ’80s, that funding level has been cut.”
He called for committing resources to homelessness at the national level.
Bennett added: “If we can come up with trillions of dollars for these long wars in Afghanistan, etc., and we can’t come up with trillions of dollars for homelessness, we are going to be always trying to catch up until we get this country recommitted to trying to say, ‘Reasonably priced affordable housing is a right,’ and that’s what it is in so many other countries.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Brooke Holland can be reached at bholland@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
