Recently the county Board of Supervisors declined $17.9 million in grant funding and then later reinstated part of a request by the Housing Authority of Santa Barbara to purchase an old motel in Santa Maria and operate it as housing for the homeless. In the process, they reserved the right to deny the project at a later date.
Why would they do this, you ask, when so many homeless folks are scattered all over the Santa Maria and Lompoc valleys?
A local news report indicated that Supervisor Larry Lavagnino said that Santa Maria city officials raised some legitimate concerns, noting a couple of Housing Authority projects in the city are “not performing as we envisioned they would perform” (Santa Maira Times, Jan. 25). Santa Maria Mayor Alice Patino said that crime increases in Housing Authority-managed low-income projects are a significant issue, and some residents of those projects have expressed concern for their safety.
The article also indicated that several elected officials in Santa Maria objected to the project because the Housing Authority had not brought the project to the City Council first to get local input and support.
As a former Lompoc planning commissioner, I attended several meetings where the Housing Authority presented its plans for new low-income projects in our city. The impression I got was, “We are doing you a favor by offering this presentation, but you can’t stop us anyway.” And they were right; when the City Council tried to stop one project because the city had been saturated with these low-income projects that were creating crime problems, the state intervened and the developer built the project anyway.
The news report went on to add: Lavagnino also said, “But the problem I see on all of these homeless issues—and we’re going to run into this as we move forward with them—is there is no solution, there is no easy answer.”
The news report indicated that Board Chair Joan Hartmann said, “It’s not an easy issue. It’s probably the most complex issue we face because it’s got so many different aspects of it. … Unless we take this positive view and embrace this while we have funds to do it—which we’ve never had before—we’re just going to have a festering problem.”
She is 100 percent correct; many of us have been saying the same thing for years. Trying to come up with the perfect solution is impossible—when one area is cleaned up and the residents moved to “temporary housing,” another one springs up with a new crop of homeless camps. But just continuing to throw money at it won’t solve it either; the perfect example is President Lyndon Jonson’s “war on poverty”—how did that go?
The big elephant in the room was Lavagnino’s statement that shelters were “not performing as we envisioned they would perform.” Is it because the nonprofits hired by local government to run these places don’t have the skills necessary to do it, or is it because the residents, who have lived without any rules for so long, simply refuse to accept the rules of the house?
Maybe the press or the grand jury needs to investigate how the shelters are managed and let the public know how their money is being used. Millions of dollars have been thrown at the homeless problem, and even though there are some success stories, apparently the Board of Supervisors is aware of issues that were serious enough for the majority to initially deny funding for the latest Housing Authority project.
Homeless people have cluttered the landscape for generations. Some are temporarily between homes and moving to a different locale to find work; others are simply societal dropouts addicted to a variety of intoxicating substances; and still others are mentally ill and need both physical and mental health treatment.
We should pull out all the stops to help those who need physical and mental health treatment. Most don’t have the means to acquire needed treatment even if it was readily available. Others are veterans traumatized by what they saw in recent political wars who need help coping with life and the physical injuries they suffered.
To his credit, the governor recently committed more than a billion dollars to try and address the treatment issue; we’ll have to see if it works. However, if it doesn’t include treatment/rehabilitation as the primary goal of the program and instead only temporarily houses those folks with mental illness, will it help?
Simply providing beds won’t fix the problem; what’s needed is a coordinated approach that produces a population that has been rehabilitated through programs designed to educate the homeless on how to survive in real life, how to become employable in the community, how to locate housing and mental/physical health services, and how to become productive citizens in a world full of opportunities.
It seems that the only thing government can do is create “plans” and hold meetings to express concern while the problem continues to grow. While some nonprofit groups have good intentions, many are clearly unable to handle the task they are paid to do. These well-meaning people aren’t equipped to deal with folks who have literally lived without a structured environment for several years prior to arriving at their shelters.
Clearly something needs to be done, but so far, the great thinkers of today, just like those in the Lyndon Johnson “war on poverty” era, have come up empty.
Ron Fink writes to the Sun from Lompoc. Send a letter for publication to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 10-17, 2022.