Santa Barbara is beautiful in many ways — its beaches, its architecture, its year-round sunshine.
But in recent years its streets and creek beds have told another story: a sharp rise in deaths among people experiencing homelessness.
That rise is not an abstract statistic. It is an ongoing tragedy unfolding in our community’s margins — one that demands not reassurance, but reckoning.
In 2017, Santa Barbara County reported 44 deaths of people experiencing homelessness. By 2019-2020, that number had jumped to 143 over a two-year period — nearly double the rate of just two years prior.
That rise occurred even as overall homelessness counts fluctuated only modestly. A rise of this magnitude, absent a comparable rise in homelessness itself, is not simply a humanitarian crisis. It is an institutional outcome.
These are not distant deaths. They are local. Santa Barbara. Goleta. Carpinteria. The creek beds and underpasses where people try to survive while the rest of us move through our days.
The causes are familiar — overdose, untreated illness, exposure — but the pattern is unmistakable.
Lives are being lost not at the margins of care, but within systems that repeatedly touch them and then release them back into danger.
I admit this with some difficulty: I have been part of what we might call the machinery of homelessness response. I have worked inside the very systems that, however well-intentioned, have helped produce these outcomes.
The people doing this work are not villains. Many are deeply committed, compassionate and skilled.
They carry harm-reduction kits and lunches. They sit for hours helping people navigate benefits systems. They argue at county meetings for more beds, more housing, more services.
And yet, despite enormous effort, the death toll has climbed.
This paradox — effort without prevention — is the defining feature of our current response.
Death does not signal failure. It registers as an unfortunate but expected outcome — administratively ordinary.
It is not the result of indifference. It is the result of systems organized around crisis management rather than survival.
Outreach without housing. Detox without continuity. Emergency rooms without aftercare.
Paper pathways that move people from one threshold to the next without ever delivering stability.
I have watched this happen in real time. I think of one man I knew well — someone I checked on regularly downtown.
He was taken to the emergency room after an overdose, stabilized, and discharged late at night. There was no shelter bed available. No placement. No follow-up.
He returned to his tent less than a mile away. He died there the next evening.
Nothing about this sequence was anomalous. Every step followed policy. Every decision met protocol.
The outcome — death — was treated as tragic but unsurprising. Each actor in the chain — the ER nurse, the discharge planner, the outreach worker — could account for their actions as reasonable, professional, appropriate.
The death fell between accountabilities. No one’s failure, therefore no one’s responsibility.
This is how systems fail without malice, how ordinary institutional competence accomplishes abandonment.
Over the past decade, several structural forces have converged to intensify this danger: the expiration of eviction moratoria, the proliferation of fentanyl in the drug supply and Santa Barbara’s chronic shortage of affordable housing.
The result is not chaos, but triage — continuous, normalized triage.
Point-in-time counts show year-to-year variation in homelessness, but they also show something else: a persistently high number of people living unsheltered, in precisely the conditions where overdose, illness, violence and exposure are most likely.
When outreach teams are stretched thin, shelter beds are full and housing wait lists run years long, care becomes maintenance. And maintenance, under these conditions, can be lethal.
This is not a condemnation of service providers.
Many people in shelters, outreach, behavioral health and harm reduction act with integrity every day. But they operate within structures defined by limited capacity, rigid eligibility criteria, and funding models that reward throughput rather than stabilization.
In such systems, death does not signal failure. It registers as an unfortunate but expected outcome — administratively ordinary.
So the question before us is not whether we care; we clearly do.
The question is whether we are willing to confront the possibility that our current way of organizing care has made death among people experiencing homelessness administratively ordinary.
Whether we have come to accept a rising body count as the cost of doing business in a constrained system.
Santa Barbara can do better. But “better” cannot mean more outreach without housing, more coordination without capacity, or more meetings to manage what we have quietly learned to tolerate.
It must mean refusing to accept premature death as an expected outcome of homelessness.
We must stop building systems that manage decline.
We must stop treating survival as an aspirational goal.
We must stop allowing the prevention of death to fall outside the scope of responsibility.
If we cannot do that — clearly, honestly and without euphemism — then we are not merely witnessing this tragic reality.
We are maintaining it.