Our current approach to homelessness is not working very well. Since I became active as an advocate in local homeless issues in 2007, our population of unhoused people has stayed relatively constant at around 2,000 in Santa Barbara County.
In the ensuing 15 years our community has learned a great deal about how to better manage our homeless issues.
We previously knew little about evidence-based “best practices,” failed to gather high quality information, had county departments that operated largely as silos, with little coordinated effort between different agencies.
Today all homeless service agencies in the county use a “coordinated entry” system based on the successful Housing First philosophy, and collect a lot of data about those on the streets in a state-of-the-art Homeless Management Information System.
County staff is well trained and efforts are highly coordinated through the Housing and Urban Development Department-mandated Santa Barbara County Continuum of Care, whose membership includes prominent housing professionals, service providers and concerned citizens from all sectors of our community. The county Housing and Community Development plays a lead role in staffing these coordination efforts.
Moreover, the people of Santa Barbara truly care about the plight of the poorest segment of our community, often reaching deep into their pockets to fund a smorgasbord of nonprofit organizations.
And our citizens roll up their sleeves and actively participate in serving our neighbors on the streets, volunteering in numerous ways, including feeding the hungry in our parks, washing towels for c, and mentoring recovering clients in the Santa Barbara Rescue Mission’s rehabilitation programs.
Because there are still far too few shelter beds for even half of our homeless population, and because the waiting lists for affordable housing are so long, outreach workers must increasingly find creative solutions to help people meet their needs.
Many other communities across the United States that use “Housing First” principles have stocks of affordable housing units in which unhoused people can be immediately placed.
Unfortunately, our community has an extreme shortage of affordable housing units and people often must wait five to seven years. Thehe Housing Authority of the City of Santa Barbara has a waiting list of 9,000 households, for example.
For a long time the county has not kept up with our needs for affordable housing.
The 2021 “Santa Barbara County Affordable Housing Needs Report” states that 15,744 low-income rental households do not have access to an affordable home. Our financing of affordable housing construction has been timid and piecemeal.
This trend holds true for most California communities, largely explaining why our state has 150,000 people living on the streets.
Because of the recent efforts of Gov. Gavin Newsom and the federal funds coming into our community for the COVID-19 pandemic, at this moment there is a lot of building going on. This is an exciting time and my hope is that our community will continue this intensive building spree and not return to our usual slower pace of construction.
Our community has invested just enough in affordable housing and homeless services to keep the population of unhoused people from increasing significantly. This in itself is no small feat as many other cities in the state have seen significant increases in the numbers of people on their streets.
It is no fault of the outstanding professionals running these housing programs, as they have had to do the best they could given the limited housing that is available.
Our current approach has come a quite a cost to our community. As the number of homeless in our county remains high, so do the costs for medical emergency services, police, code enforcement, camp clean-up and fire services.
HUD estimates it costs about $40,000 a year for a homeless person to live on the streets. For Santa Barbara County, that amounts to $80 million a year!
While homeless individuals are a very visible presence in the community, the costs to taxpayers tend to be hidden.
Some communities, such as Bakersfield, have found that placing people in permanent supportive housing amounts to $28,000 in savings per person annually. If we housed all of Santa Barbara County’s currently unhoused we would save $56 million a year!
According to the 2021 Affordable Housing Needs Report, renters in the county must earn $35.81 per hour — 2.6 times the state minimum wage — to afford the average monthly asking rent of $1,862.
The newly approved Regional Housing Needs Assessment Report, issued every eight years, says between 2023 and 2031, the county must create close to 25,000 units.
Of that, the City of Santa Barbara has to create 8,000 units. Santa Barbara currently has 72 affordable housing properties totaling almost 1,400 units, but it’s by far not enough.
Insufficient funding means that most of those 8,000 units will never be built. And because jurisdictions are not delivering, the state is now attempting to take matters into its own hands by passing new housing laws that essentially bypass local jurisdictions.
To truly reduce the numbers of unhoused people in Santa Barbara County we need a “Marshall Plan” in which we build a significant amount of the affordable housing we will need.
This massive upfront investment of funds to build affordable housing would ultimately save us a lot of money because, as noted above, housing people costs less than allowing them to stay homeless.
In 2016, 80% of Los Angeles voters passed Proposition HHH, which enabled Los Angeles officials to issue $1.2 billion in bonds for the development of up to 10,000 permanent supportive housing units for people experiencing homelessness.
While this program has been poorly managed by city officials, leading to enormous cost overruns, it had significant support from the public. One barrier to the success of the programs has been NIMBY attitudes in which citizens don’t want any of “those people” living in their neighborhoods.
Being poor does not make people homeless, but being very poor where housing is unaffordable does. By expanding the amount of affordable housing in our community we address a central root cause of homelessness.
Only when our community has the amount of affordable housing we need will we come close to ending homelessness.
— Wayne Mellinger Ph.D. is a social justice educator, writer and activist. He works with Santa Barbara County’s Behavioral Wellness Commission and its Continuum of Care Program, and is a board member of the Committee for Social Justice, Clergy & Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), and Showers of Blessing Santa Barbara. The opinions expressed are his own.