No Way Home

The Crisis of Homelessness and How to Fix It with Intelligence and Humanity

Wayne Garden, Joseph Tartakovsky

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781641771658
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Organizaciones sin ánimo de lucro y benéficas

In San Diego, not far from the gates of the fantasy world at Disneyland, tent cities lining the freewaysremind us of an ugly reality. Homeless individuals are slowing rail travel between Sacramento and theBay Area, and swarming subway trains in Los Angeles in search of a place to sleep when they're notlanguishing on Skid Row. Drug use among the homeless is plaguing communities, with discardedneedles threatening children playing at public parks. And every day across California, thousands ofhomeless youth who lack safe and stable housing struggle to stay in school, to perform wellacademically, and to form meaningful connections with their teachers and peers. Since the 1980s, countless research studies have been published on the topic of homelessness in America. Too often, however, social science research on homelessness is narrow in scope, mired in politics, and reliant on questionable assumptions about the root causes of the problem. The severity of the homeless crises plaguing cities requires innovative solutions backed by credible data and objective research. This book examines the causes of homelessness with a focus on unaffordable housing, poverty, mental illness, substance addiction and legal reform. It examines the state and local policy environment to determine ways in which housing policy, social service programs, employment opportunities interact to exacerbate, perpetuate, or reduce homelessness. The book also evaluates different strategies being used at the state, county, and local levels to prevent or reduce homelessness. Finally, the book provides a mix of long-term policy solutions based on the authors' findings that have the greatest potential to reduce homelessness.

PART I

LIFE ON THE STREETS

Documenting California’s Growing Homeless Crisis

POSTCARDS FROM THE EPICENTER Just How Bad Is Homelessness in California? KERRY JACKSON

1

CALIFORNIA HAS THE worst homelessness crisis in the country. The precise number of homeless Californians is hard to quantify. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that more than 151,000 were homeless in California in 2019, a 16 percent increase over the previous year.¹ Between 2016 and 2017, California’s homeless population jumped 13.7 percent.²

The state has a disproportionate share of the nation’s homeless population. While accounting for only 12 percent of the US total population, California accounts for 27 percent of all homeless people.³ The portion of unsheltered homeless, at 71.7 percent, is nearly twice the national figure of 37.2 percent.⁴

Tragically, far too many of California’s homeless are considered “chronically” homeless, that is, a person with a disabling condition who has been continuously homeless for one year or more. More than 39,000, or 40.6 percent, of the nation’s more than 96,000 chronically homeless are located in California.⁵ Of that number, 32,792, or 83.5 percent, are unsheltered. Only in Hawaii (85.8 percent) does a higher portion of the chronically homeless go unsheltered.⁶

Visitors to San Francisco sometimes don’t know if what they’re seeing on the streets is typical of the city or if they simply wandered into a bad part of town. In 2019, the estimated count was 17,595 homeless, a 30 percent increase from the previous year.⁷ It “was by far,” the New York Times reported, “the largest increase of the last eight years, according to the city’s data.”⁸

Following a decade of a stable homeless population that began in 2004, San Francisco’s homeless population expanded by 17 percent between 2013 and 2017.⁹

In Southern California, the 2020 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count found “66,436 people in Los Angeles County experiencing homelessness,” the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported. “This represents a 12.7 percent rise from last year’s point-in-time count. The city of Los Angeles saw a 14.2 percent rise to 41,290.”¹⁰

The 2019 count found 58,936 homeless in the county, 36,300 in the city.¹¹ Over a six-year period, through roughly the end of 2017, “the number of those living in the streets and shelters of the city of L.A. and most of the county surged 75 percent – to roughly 55,000 from about 32,000,” according to the Los Angeles Times.¹² In 2019, more than 1,000 homeless people died in Los Angeles County, an average of about three a day.

While the homeless populations are swelling in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the city of San Diego saw improvement in 2020. Its total fell to 4,887, a 4 percent decrease from the 5,082 counted in 2019.¹³ The homeless count for San Diego County fell 6 percent in 2020, to 7,619.¹⁴

Visitors to San Francisco sometimes don’t know if what they’re seeing on the streets is typical of the city or if they simply wandered into a bad part of town.

The homeless population in San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley, has grown to more than 6,000 people, according to the most recent point-in-time (PIT) count in 2019. The 2017 count found 4,350 homeless individuals, whereas the 2015 count found a little more than 4,000, indicating a spike of roughly 50 percent over four years. Growing along with the totals has been the proportion of unsheltered homeless, a figure that has grown from 69 percent in 2015, to 74 percent in 2017, to 84 percent in 2019.¹⁵

In Santa Clara County, the homeless population grew 31 percent from 2017 (7,394 individuals) to 2019 (9,706).¹⁶

In California’s state capital, the county’s homeless population has more than doubled since 2013. The Sacramento Bee reported in 2017 that there was “a daily fight for cleanliness and safety as homelessness surges” in the city’s midtown section. The Midtown Association, funded by property owners, was “doubling down on its Clean and Safe program, in which workers walk the streets to scrub graffiti, pick up trash, clean up human waste, and help connect homeless people with social services and medical care.”¹⁷ Even then, before the doubling of the homeless count, there was a concern that the capital was becoming too much like San Francisco.¹⁸

Homelessness in California is not confined to its big cities. Suburbs and rural towns have also become “homes” to the homeless.

“California housing costs are spiraling so high that they are pushing the state’s homelessness crisis into places it’s never been before – sparsely populated rural counties,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2017. “A Chronicle analysis of biennial homeless counts taken early this year across California shows the sharpest increases occurred not in San Francisco and other urban centers but in out-of-the-way places such as the thickly forested Sierra Nevada and the dusty flatlands and low hills of the northern Sacramento Valley.”¹⁹

In January 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom said homelessness “is now a dominant issue in rural California as well.”²⁰ A month later, Sharon Rapport, director of California Policy for the Corporation for Supportive Housing, said, “We see homelessness in every part of our state…. It’s not just in our urban centers, it’s in our suburban areas, it’s in our rural areas.”²¹

The homeless population outside urban centers is difficult to pin down, particularly regarding the rural homeless. These populations tend to be more spread out, as shelters, soup kitchens, and other places where the homeless would gather are less centralized than they are in large cities.

The Cost of Homelessness

As this book documents in great detail, homelessness in California produces profound difficulties for both the homeless themselves and the communities they inhabit.

The homeless suffer from chronic and acute diseases, as well as threatening health conditions due to a lack of care and treatment from health professionals and family members. One study has determined that 85 percent of homeless individuals have chronic health conditions.²² Disorders include cardiorespiratory diseases, tuberculosis, skin problems and infections, HIV/AIDS, bronchitis, pneumonia, nutritional deficiencies, and drug dependency. The homeless are also vulnerable to physical and sexual assault, experience sleep deprivation, and have higher mortality rates than the non-homeless.

Homelessness also puts the public at risk. This is particularly true in San Francisco, where the “streets are so filthy,” reports National Public Radio, “that at least one infectious disease expert has compared the city to some of the dirtiest slums in the world.”²³ One resident who lives in the South of Market neighborhood has documented an increase in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus on the streets of San Francisco.²⁴

NBC Bay Area surveyed 153 blocks in downtown San Francisco and reported in February 2018:

The Investigate Unit spent three days assessing conditions on the streets of downtown San Francisco and discovered trash on each of the 153 blocks surveyed. While some streets were littered with items as small as a candy wrapper, the vast majority of trash found included large heaps of garbage, food, and discarded junk. The investigation also found 100 drug needles and more than 300 piles of feces throughout downtown.²⁵

Within that space were “popular tourist spots like Union Square and major hotel chains,” as well as “City Hall, schools, playgrounds, and a police station.”²⁶

Complaints made to the city about the volumes of human waste in the streets have increased as the homeless population has risen. There were 1,748 complaints made in 2008. By 2017, they had grown to 21,000. Through October 2018, there were 20,400. Complaints of discarded needles have grown sharply as well.²⁷ Addressing these problems will not come cheaply. San Francisco mayor London Breed has proposed adding an additional $13 million to the city’s current $65 million street-cleaning budget.²⁸

The homeless also tend to be addicted to alcohol and various drugs and are often mentally ill. In chapter 5, Christopher Rufo notes that San Francisco, for instance, spends $370 million a year on mental health and substance abuse programs, many of which, he says, “cater to the city’s homeless.” He also reports that the city has passed a sweeping “mental health reform” that will increase spending by $500 million a year.

Rufo also documents the hundreds of millions spent on efforts to house the homeless. Still, the homeless remain, and the numbers show no sign of retreating.

The homeless population in San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley, has grown to more than 6,000 people, according to the most recent point-in-time (PIT) count in 2019.

California’s reputation as a welcome dwelling place for the homeless has scared off prospective visitors. As Wayne Winegarden documents in chapter 2, a medical association based in Chicago announced in 2018 that it would no longer hold its convention in San Francisco after 2023 due to the “appalling street life.”²⁹ A little more than a year later, Oracle, based in nearby Redwood City, said it was moving its OpenWorld conference to Las Vegas in 2020, where it would remain for at least three years. One reason given for the change was the steep cost of hotel rooms in the city, but the email sent to the San Francisco Travel Association also cited “poor street conditions.” ³⁰

San Francisco Travel Association CEO Joe D’Alessandro told the San Francisco Chronicle that “33 percent of the 1,282 tourists questioned in a s...