Finger-pointing at Coral Street – here’s why a homeless encampment lasted for so long in Santa Cruz

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.

Several weeks ago, Santa Cruz Metro did something unusual: It removed a Santa Cruz bus stop. The stop was on the sidewalk in front of Housing Matters and the Homeless Persons Health Project, (a homeless services hub) on Coral and River streets in Santa Cruz and had been there for decades. 

As a volunteer and board member at Housing Matters, I visit Coral Street quite often and I suspect Metro removed the stop because of the situation “on the ground” on that block. I’m talking about a patchwork encampment of about 40 to 60 unhoused people gathering in groups of five to 10. 

Many of us perhaps drove past in April and May and caught at least a glimpse of the encampment, which lasted for months before police cleared it on June 3. (They issued warnings beforehand.)

The scene on Coral Street could, from various perspectives, be described as unhealthy and unsafe. It was unsafe for those camped there, for families actively seeking and receiving assistance at the shelter, and for those who work there or nearby. Many in the broader community considered it unhealthy and unsafe because of the presence of so much trash accumulation and widespread behavioral health problems.

So why did this persist for months – and who is responsible?

Don’t worry. This won’t be a long dissertation on why there is so much homelessness in Santa Cruz and in California. Today, I want to zoom in on why a patchwork encampment blocking public sidewalks and roadway persisted and who is making decisions about it.  

Let’s look at players and the bind each one is in. 

Despite incorrect assumptions otherwise, most unhoused people make lots of rational decisions. One of those is to decide where the best place to spend the night is when they have no viable housing or shelter options.

 High on that list is picking a spot that is:

• not likely to be disturbed by law enforcement officers.
• near people they know (for safety and human connection). 
• close to some of the things they need day to day (food, health care, a place to plug in a cheap cellphone).

Recently, Coral Street has been seen as a good choice. (The river levee or San Lorenzo Park benchlands, downtown or a public park have also, at times, served this purpose.)  

These folks are not going to simply disappear. They will be sleeping somewhere each night and they will be present somewhere every day. Their “bind” is that they have to sleep somewhere and there isn’t a formally designated place for too many of them.

Coral Street service providers (Housing Matters and the county’s Homeless Persons Health Project) are in a different bind. They have to deal with emergencies on the street, even among folks who are not their clients. These workers – most of whom are office, maintenance and service workers, not medical professionals –  have to walk through this environment to get to work.  

In addition, because this encampment is adjacent to Housing Matters – which provides housing navigation, emergency shelter, case management and services to people experiencing homelessness – many incorrectly assume that Housing Matters is failing in its work – failing to house the unhoused. 

Most people in the community seem to think Housing Matters has the ability and authority to keep this area in better shape. But it is public property, and Housing Matters has no more authority than the hundreds of Costco shoppers who drive past every day.  

To top this off, the presence of encampments on Coral Street are quite intimidating to many homeless folks who simply want to approach Housing Matters or the clinic. (If you were a newly homeless family and would need to walk through this area to seek assistance, would you? The services staff at Housing Matters have been coming up against this problem and they are deeply troubled that potential clients are avoiding services because of encampment activity on Coral.)

The Santa Cruz police have other challenges in such an instance. The department is understaffed with a whole city to cover. While officers do visit Coral Street and have periodically cleared the area this year and even cited people, the effort has had little effect. People keep returning. 

And, it’s essential to remember that setting up to sleep in a public place is not illegal if the city is short on short-term shelter — and Santa Cruz is always way short on short-term shelter. (This is federal law.) 

Finally, even if police made some arrests of folks that repeatedly ignore citations, the Santa Cruz Main Jail would not hold these folks for any length of time and they would return to the street (and Coral Street, for instance, is just a few blocks away from the jail exit).

Another entity in a tough spot is the city government, which has its own homelessness response team, which plans and completes encampment abatements. Remembering that the law (and, to my mind, good practice) is to not penalize a person for simply being without an indoor place to sleep, the city can clear an encampment and move the folks in it only if it has some other legal place for those folks to go.  

Sadly, there simply aren’t nearly enough shelter spots and legal campsites to meet the existing need. And there isn’t enough city government funding to create adequate legal shelter and camping sites. (It would require somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 – $20 million more each year to operate enough decent shelter to meet the need. The city is already spending millions on this right now.) 

Most important, except for plans underway to build a permanent navigation center with shelter at 125 Coral St. with county support longer-term, the city has no sense as to where all this additional shelter could be located tomorrow or in the next few months, even if it had the funding right now.  

Which brings us to the final bind: the bind we are in as a community. The community is definitely not of one mind when it comes to our response to encampments in public spaces. Some favor leaving people be wherever they are. Some favor a “get tough” approach. Others favor an expanded shelter effort. 

My sense is that most residents very much favor having additional shelter opportunities in the community. The bind comes when we begin to talk about where those sheltering facilities would be located. 

There is almost universal consensus on this: “not near me.” Not near my home. Not near my business. Not near my kids’ school. Not in or near the park I go to. Not near natural areas I like to visit. Not in a place I walk through regularly.  

When we add this all up, it’s quite easy to see why the city hasn’t moved quickly to create more shelter. There simply aren’t many places where a half-decent shelter facility can be sited.

This is a long way of saying that we all have to take some responsibility for the recent encampment situation on Coral Street … and each encampment that will subsequently pop up somewhere else in town. 

Those who object to particular site proposals have some responsibility because they impede progress. Those who advocate for more sites have some responsibility because they have not found sites that gain acceptance among community members who live/work/play adjacent to those sites — and those advocates (I count myself among the members of this group) have not found a way to overcome strong objections to sites.  

Those who push for the get-tough approach have some responsibility because they don’t address recidivism – those sanctioned by the justice system still return to encampments. Public officials have some responsibility because they haven’t found a fair and balanced way to distribute the burden of dealing with these challenges across the community. And the unhoused living in encampments have some responsibility when they don’t manage the space they occupy in a safe and healthy manner.

So go ahead and shake your head the next time you see an unhealthy encampment situation. But before you point your finger or blame someone or some group,  please ask yourself if you are contributing to a more positive outcome yourself.  

As someone who’s been thrown under the blame bus more than a few times when it comes to homelessness issues, I invite you to help lift up the bus so we can all work together on ending homelessness.

Former Santa Cruz mayor Don Lane is a co-founder of Housing Matters and currently serves on the governing board there. He is also a past chair of the Homeless Action Partnership board and past chair of Housing Santa Cruz County. He teaches a class on homelessness each year at UC Santa Cruz.