Wide, bald, and barrel chested with a thick dark mustache wrapped around the top of an almost always half-cracked grin, Lompoc Police Sgt. Mauricio Calderon exudes friendliness and calm as he takes long strides toward the first makeshift shelter in the Santa Ynez Riverbed.
Calderon became the department’s liason to the city’s homeless population earlier this year. It’s a role he relishes, he says, because he gets to work with and help a lot of people who are down on their luck.
A young man and woman emerge from a tent behind a pile of rubbish and shopping carts bursting with crumpled soda cans and old bottles. Stacks of used spray paint cans gleam in the early morning sunlight, just beginning to peak through the clouds. Calderon greets the two by first name, quickly snaps a couple photos, and geotags the location on his cellphone.
The exchange is routine for the liaison officer and other patrolmen assigned to the herculean task of removing the 60-plus camps with roughly twice as many people out of the riverbed beginning Sept. 10. Officers began alerting residents in the area the second week of August, 30 days before the official evictions occur. Police plan to return to the riverbed consistently in the interim to make sure that everyone has fair warning of what is to come.
Calderon is handing out eviction notices today, Aug. 20, as part of that systematic countdown conducted by the Lompoc Police Department to inform the homeless in the area that by that September date, no one will be allowed to stay. About half of the folks living in the camps have already packed up their personal belongings and left, Calderon explains. But he can’t say for sure where they went.
Anthony Gordon, 47, greets the officers along with his three dogs, Emma, Jake, and Tyrion, in front of a tree with several tarps lashed against it by loose string and paracord. A pile of clothes is strewn across a dirty mattress leaning against the tree’s base.
Anthony’s been homeless for a little more than a year, ever since his mom died. He’s lived in Lompoc for most of his life.
He’s only been in the riverbed for a couple of days, he says.
“You can’t stay here come a couple weeks,” Calderon responds, adding that folks can either move on or head to the triage center in River Park starting the second week of September.
The center will be run by the city, county, and a group of nonprofits, including Americorps, United Way of Northern Santa Barbara County, and the Good Samaritan Shelter, Bridge House. The social workers hope to offer services like housing, health care, and a chance for the homeless to connect with any friends or relatives. Currently, the emergency shelter is largely unfunded and is expected to cost $40,000.
“Can we bring our animals,” Anthony asks, as he picks up pieces of scattered trash. Calderon confirms that of course people can bring their pets.
“Are you offering lodging? Like immediate lodging, or just the triage?”
No immediate housing, Calderon explains, but the social workers on site at the emergency shelter will be able to connect people to different services, and in some cases, a place to stay.
“Everything has to start somewhere,” Calderon says. “It’s not like they’re gonna keep you there forever.”
And for Anthony, that’s the point. He says that he’s worried the triage center won’t give him the help he needs. In the end, he fears that all of this is just going to end with someone else telling him to move along.
“I didn’t want to come down here,” he says. “People are dying down here. But it seems everywhere I go, there’s always somebody, somewhere, saying I have to leave.”
Emily Allen is a program director at Northern Santa Barbara County United Way. She said that while the triage center and riverbed cleanup were good short-term fixes, more would be needed in the future to help people like Anthony and communities tackle a problem that may never go completely away.
It’s not a situation unique to Lompoc; both Santa Barbara and Santa Maria have large homeless populations, with the former possessing the highest number. Since 2011, the Point in Time count of homeless in Santa Barbara County has been static at roughly 1,500. To put it simply, the amount of homeless people isn’t really growing, but it’s also not getting any smaller.
Compound this homelessness with the current available affordable housing in the county, and you have the makings of a systemic issue, Allen said.
For example, according to the Santa Barbara County’s Housing Authority, there are more than 1,300 affordable housing units in its jurisdiction. However, at least that many families, most of which are defined as “extremely low income,” are on wait lists. These families are on the cusp of being homeless, Allen said, and the longer they stay without proper housing, the greater risk of falling into irreparable poverty.
Likewise, transients like those in Lompoc must wait their turn to be sheltered, if they ever are at all.
Allen told the Sun that preventing wide-scale homelessness really comes down to one thing: an availability of housing.
“A concern certainly is we do need the long-term solution,” she said. “You can move people out of an encampment but you really need housing to keep people from moving back into another encampment.”
Mitigating risk
Moving homeless populations around metropolitan areas is nothing new on the Central Coast. In 2016, Grover Beach in San Luis Obispo County cleared out two camps with the help of their police department and California State Parks. Nonprofits say the effort disrupted the region’s homeless count and threw the transient population into disarray.
The region’s largest city, Santa Maria, has three beat officers who spend around half their time dealing with homeless-related issues, according to police Sgt. Eligio Lara. Those officers are trained to seek out signs of homeless camps and find ways to either connect them to services, get the people to leave, or arrest them. It’s a method that’s considered proactive in terms of dealing with homeless and limiting their ability to set up extensive ad-hoc shelters like the ones scheduled to be dismantled in Lompoc.
For years, the population living in the riverbed on the edge of Lompoc has proved to be a source of concern, consternation, and risk for the Central Coast community and its leaders. Health officials have warned of sanitation issues stemming from human waste, while scientists caution of the unknown ecological impacts from such unregulated settlements.
And that was before the problem “exploded” over the past five years, according to Lompoc Police Chief Pat Walsh.
“There’s decades of debris down there,” he said.
And recently, it’s gotten worse.
In mid August, the riverbed caught on fire four times in one week. In the past year, three people died.
On Aug. 7, the Lompoc City Council authorized a plan to clean up the riverbed and transition the homeless formerly living there to social services, housing where available, and in some cases, rehabilitation. The plan sent $20,000 to the police department to cover overtime expenses from the city’s general fund.
However, staff documents presented that night to council members warned that the cost for the overall project could balloon to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most of that money will go to staffing and contractors, the few selected to clean up thousands of pounds of trash and human waste.
Walsh said the City Council’s decision to authorize a plan was a long time coming.
“I think we should’ve never let the riverbed get this bad,” he said.
But the question mark price tag coming with the cleanup will be an elephant in the room for city and county officials for the foreseeable future.
“This cost of this project [is] gonna impact this whole community,” Councilmember Dirk Starbuck said at the Aug. 7 meeting. “It’s gonna impact public safety, it’s gonna impact our ability to put our money into parks, our streets–everything is going to suffer because of this–and so I think as a council we have to do it, but I think we have to be very careful when we do it.”
And even though the effort may help connect some people with their families and services they need, a lack of housing continues to be a bugaboo for social workers and nonprofits trying to provide aid.
“The availability of permanent supportive housing does not meet the need of the people who need it,” United Way’s Allen said. “I mean, that’s the problem in Lompoc; there really isn’t any immediate housing options.”
Building out of a problem
According to a combination of federal, state, and local data compiled by United Way and its partners, around 300 people in Santa Barbara County qualify for permanent supportive housing through United Way programs, such as Home for Good. That means a home for higher need individuals or families that require onsite care and sometimes monitoring. Of that 300, almost 70 are what social workers call “priority one,” which means they need housing as soon as possible.
“But we only have turnover of two units a month sometimes,” Allen said.
The result is that a lot of people in need of a home don’t get one.
It’s something the state, county, and nonprofits such as United Way hope to improve upon after November, when California voters will decide on two bond measures that could bring millions of dollars to Santa Barbara County for homelessness aid.
Proposition 1, the Housing Programs and Veterans’ Loans Bond, would authorize $4 billion in general obligation bonds for housing-related programs, loans, grants, and projects statewide. Proposition 2 would use revenue from the 1 percent tax generated on incomes of more than $1 million to spend $2 billion in bonds for homelessness prevention housing for persons in need of mental health services.
Allen said, if passed, the two measures could result in millions of dollars being funneled into the county for its own housing projects and support programs.
“The hope is with this new state funding we can really make an impact,” Allen said. “But we’re definitely not going to be able to build enough units.”
According to Allen, beyond building, the county could consider looking into Ventura County’s HomeShare program, which allows people to rent rooms in their houses to low-income and at-risk residents in exchange for tax incentives and other benefits. Allen said Santa Barbara County’s recent ruling to allow accessory dwelling units on ag preserves and cities like Santa Maria warming up to secondary unit housing options were trends in the right direction.
Another piece of state funding the county plans to utilize in the coming years comes from the newly enacted Homeless Emergency Aid Program, according to Dinah Lockhart, the Santa Barbara County’s deputy director of Housing and Community Development. Established by statute in June to help assist communities with homelessness, the program could bring more than $9 million to Santa Barbara County over the next two years.
Participating cities and counties must declare an emergency shelter crisis in order to receive funding.
Santa Barbara supervisors are expected to declare a crisis on Sept. 11, Lockhart said.
“Lompoc is not alone,” she told the Lompoc City Council the night they enacted their cleanup plan. “Pretty much every city is dealing with some aspect of homelessness.”
Whether or not Lompoc will follow the county’s lead in declaring a crisis remains to be seen, and the thorny question of just how the city will fund its current endeavor at this time is unanswered.
When the Sun asked for additional details involving the city’s triage center and how it will be funded, Lompoc Public Information Officer Samantha Scroggin said a press release would be issued soon “around that fund that’s been created to help the homeless during this transition.” Scroggin referred all other questions to Police Chief Walsh.
Walsh said that details on those developments, as well as how the project on the whole would be funded, were still being hammered out.
“You gotta be patient, my goodness,” he said. “We probably should’ve worked it out ahead of time but it’s really complex. It’s not as easy as people think, but we’re gonna get it done.
“You know the old saying, ‘You eat an elephant one bite at time?’ We’re just starting with people, and then we’ll start with the trash,” Walsh added, “One piece at a time … .”
Striking camp
Sgt. Calderon, Lompoc’s homeless liaison, notes how many people have left the riverbed compared to just a few weeks before. It seems to be a growing trend as he walks deeper and deeper into the woods and brush hiding one abandoned camp after another.
While most here in the riverbed seem to have accepted the reality of their situation, some like Anthony are still left grasping for answers.
“Why, if you’re gonna be there to help us, why do this? You know people are going to sleep in parking lots,” Anthony says. “I can understand this shit right here,” pointing to a pile of trash. “But what about the rest of us?”
“I don’t know what happens after the triage, or what happens after that,” Anthony says. He motions to Sgt. Calderon. “He says there’s a lot of programs out there but …” he pauses, and leans down to pet Emma, curled against his foot. “It’s hard.”
Every source interviewed for this story agreed that the triage center and the riverbed cleanup were the best available options for Lompoc. The effort is set to be led by Northern Santa Barbara County United Way and its partners, and should provide a place for a large number of people to get access to the help they need, according to Regional Director Dorothy Mogavero.
However, questions still remain. Currently, the triage center is set to be open for 90 days after Sept. 10.
“I’m not sure at this point how long the triage center is going to even exist,” Mogavero said, “so what’s our timeline? How long will we be able to sit with them and do all that’s needed to get them going forward?”
It’s part of a larger issue that comes with these large-scale relocations of homeless populations: Some people simply are either going to, for one reason or another, not get access to needed services. And in the end, no matter how many times homeless people are moved from one area, the problem of illegal, unregulated, transient communities is bound to repeat itself elsewhere.
“We know triaging them, some of them we are going to be able to get into shelter services,” Northern Santa Barbara County United Way CEO Eddie Taylor said. “Some will go into detox. Some will go into treatment. Some can be reunited with families or with programs in other areas where they came from. A few will be housed because there are some housing opportunities.
“The rest are at least going to be in the system so that we have a relationship with them, we have their data, and their prioritized housing opportunities when they present,” he added. “And that’s the best we can hope for right now.”
Contact Staff Writer Spencer Cole at scole@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 6, 2018.