Hafsa Kaka, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s senior advisor on homelessness, was scheduled to visit Hedges House of Hope in Isla Vista, Buena Tierra in Goleta, DignityMoves in Santa Barbara, and a future housing project, La Posada, in unincorporated Santa Barbara on Aug. 2, after the Sun went to press.
Lucille Boss, Santa Barbara County’s encampment response coordinator, told the Sun that Newsom appointed Kaka in May after she led San Diego’s Homelessness Strategies and Solutions Department since 2021. During her orientation into the role, Boss said state housing representatives recommended she connect with Santa Barbara County to see what it’s been doing with state funding.
“The state secretary of business, consumer services, and housing agency recommended she visit south Santa Barbara to learn more about encampment resolution and encampment response protocol … and it became a bit more broad. She wanted to learn about everything we’re doing,” Boss said.
All of the South County sites the group is scheduled to visit have been developed in part by state funding sources, she said. While this visit primarily focuses on South County services, Boss said they are planning to do future visits to look at Hope Village, a DignityMoves interim housing facility in Santa Maria, and highlight the $6 million in state funding to address encampments in riverbeds—with 50 percent of funding going toward the Santa Maria Riverbed and 30 percent to the Lompoc Riverbed.
“I think it’s really cool, we’ve heard loud and clear that we need more behavioral health and medical care out in the field. … This funding will provide case managers, substance use disorder specialists out in the field every day, providing care,” Boss said. “That’s a huge shift, it’s a huge undertaking so people don’t have to leave their encampment, spend their day on the bus, and worry about their belongings while they are gone.”
Sylvia Barnard, Good Samaritan’s executive director, said that this waterways grant will be important because it helps get more state funding and services to North County unsheltered residents.
“The county coordinated the visit to focus on South County, but I think it’s important to know the county is diverse and very large. Santa Maria is completely different from Santa Barbara. When we’re looking at providing more beds, the next project is Hope Village,” Barnard said.
She added that she thinks it’s a matter of having new projects in North County and hopefully with Hope Village on board, North County will get more attention from the state.
“We have been in a homeless crisis for a long time and we have a serious housing crisis, but we are making a dent in the issue with creative solutions. Our Point In Time Count was down for the first time in years, which was shocking, but interventions and funding opportunities helped,” Barnard said.
Santa Barbara County’s Boss said that the county housed 1,050 people during the calendar year, and 889 people have exited into permanent solutions—whether that’s housing, reuniting with a family member, or entering a treatment program—so far in 2023, according to the county’s community data dashboard on homelessness.
“We have a collective community action plan to address homelessness that the cities adopted, they’ve all adopted this community action plan together so we are all working together on a daily basis to move people into housing,” Boss said. “That’s from encampment resolutions, to interim and permanent housing. We’re working together every single day and that’s something.”
This article appears in Aug 3-13, 2023.