Quick Take
Lookout politics columnist and former five-time mayor of Santa Cruz Mike Rotkin is a bit annoyed by what he is reading in Lookout and other publications about homelessness. He thinks the city is doing a good job overall, but says it could tend more carefully to needed repairs in shelters, particularly showers. The homeless problem in Santa Cruz is not a lack of beds or affordable housing, he writes. It’s bigger.
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I want to drill down a bit on the homeless situation in Santa Cruz. While I have written on this topic before, I continue to be disturbed by letters to the editor and some public voices in Lookout and other local publications that deeply misrepresent the situation we are in and the city’s response to the problem.
I don’t have a solution for the problem, but I do have some insights about what I think the City of Santa Cruz is doing right and what the city might do to better address this frustrating issue.
First of all, I think the city has the moral high ground and is doing the right thing with its general approach, which is to break up large homeless campsites and move campers who are camping in dangerous areas with fire risk like the Pogonip and creek beds and close to people’s homes and businesses. City streets are also not an appropriate place for people to camp in cars or recreational vehicles.
The choice to continue to do this – despite the recent Grants Pass Supreme Court decision – only when the city can offer people an alternative, legal place to sleep, is what makes this a morally acceptable policy. It may occasionally happen that a camper was not around when city or county workers came in and offered alternative places to sleep. This does not mean the city is not doing its best to follow this policy.
What troubles me the most are the constant drumbeat of progressive voices who focus on the reality that there are more homeless people than available beds in the City of Santa Cruz. The fact is that only about one-third of the campers being moved accept any of the alternatives the city offers them.
This means that essentially, the homeless problem is not a lack of shelter beds.
The reasons for this vary greatly, but basically, it comes down to people not wanting to move to somewhere where there are rules – any rules. Of course the rules need to be reasonable, but they often include no in-and-out-privileges at night, which means, of course, someone with a drug or alcohol addiction can’t go out and look for a connection during the night. The alternatives also don’t allow predatory drug dealers access to the housing facility or the surrounding area.
Residents cannot bring weapons into the facility and have to not be a threat to the other residents.
It’s important that these facilities include reasonable transportation services to downtown so they are not seen as concentration camps keeping people away from the rest of the community. I believe these services do currently exist. For example, the Armory at the DeLaveaga facility has shuttles to downtown every half hour during the day.
It’s also important that the alternative sleeping arrangements are clean and safe for participants and quiet during the night. Provisions exist for residents to work swing shifts and be able to come into the facility after the general curfew hour if they can demonstrate a need for a work arrangement.
It should be one of the responsibilities of councilmembers, including newly elected members who are about to take their seats in Santa Cruz, to visit the city’s homeless shelters and confirm for themselves by direct experience and by talking with the residents of shelters that reasonable rules and conditions exist there.
One current problem that needs attention is that we need adequate shower facilities at shelters.
When I wrote his piece (about two weeks before its publication), the main shower at the DeLaveaga facility had been out of operation for over a week. Then it got fixed and since then has broken down twice. Apparently, the shower was built with custom parts that are difficult to replace once the shower stops functioning. This was an outrage during the heatwave at the beginning of September.
The city needs to fix problems like this immediately – first with temporary shower facilities if it takes more than one day, and then permanently and without excuses, just like any homeowner would do if their shower were broken. And if we need more showers, then let’s make that happen.
I am told by a good friend who lives at the shelter that the food is pretty good and the shelter workers are sympathetic to clients and treat them with respect. I think the city and its contractors are doing a good job of running the shelters and parking programs, but ongoing oversight is a significant part of the councilmembers’ responsibility.
No doubt the city’s progressive critics will point out that the two-thirds of the unhoused people who don’t accept the alternative legal sleeping arrangements offered still have no place to go.
The big picture is the enforcement of these policies resulted in a reduction of the homeless numbers in Santa Cruz last year. I know many of those refusing to accept the city’s alternatives get caught in a “whack-a-mole” situation, where they keep being moved. Still, I don’t think homeless individuals who refuse the city’s shelter alternatives have much to complain about.
This is an unfortunate result of the overall homeless crisis in California and the rest of the United States. Of course, part of the problem is the lack of affordable housing, and not all of the homeless have social problems. Some of them work, have no mental health, drug or alcohol problems and just cannot find an affordable place to live.
But for at least 70% of the homeless – according to the past three homeless counts – the lack of housing is not the essential issue.
And this is a bigger problem than the City of Santa Cruz can solve on its own. The failures of our school systems nationally (when compared with many other industrialized societies), including among other issues the lack of adequate vocational education preparing students who are not going to go to college for work, contribute. So do the failures of the foster care program that releases 18-year olds into the world without work and life skills necessary for survival other than as homeless, uneducated or undereducated individuals.
All of this is exacerbated by the lack of adequate drug, alcohol and mental health programs in our community and the rest of California and the nation.
Imagine a homeless person who wakes up one morning and recognizes they have an addiction or a mental health problem and is willing to do something about it. Say they would even be willing to go into a locked rehab program. A social worker will likely tell them how great that is and add them to a yearlong waiting list for the alcohol program at Janus or some other drug or mental health program.
By that time, we can imagine the result.
The city council needs to continue its strong lobbying for significant state and federal funding for mental health, drug, and alcohol rehabilitation programs funded through the county. Our city is among the communities in the United States that spends the most on the homeless problem, yet we cannot be expected to solve this problem on our own.
So, I think the Santa Cruz City Council and staff are doing about as good a job as can be done to address the homeless issue, but they do need the support of our residents to press them to continue what they are doing and address the few significant gaps in the services they do provide.