CITY COUNCIL LAST TUESDAY NIGHT approved major changes in the way Santa Monica handles homelessness.
For 10 years, I’ve been writing about how City Hall deals with those living on our streets. I’ve maintained City Hall’s “continuum of care” was expensive, inefficient and ineffective. It wasn’t reducing the number of homeless, conversely, it was attracting more transients, enabling a street lifestyle and helping only a fraction re-enter productive society. City Hall’s efforts lacked goals and were unfocused.
Rampant idealism has always colored the council’s ability to make rational and common sense decisions relating to the high number of vagrants and transients in our midst. City leaders basically ignore the thousands of citizen complaints each year about antisocial behavior and criminal activity including drug dealing, thievery, assaults and even an occasional homicide — not to mention the trespassing, public drunkenness, urination and defecation. Instead, our leaders focused on helping as many as possible — resulting in a “quantity over quality” model.
This whole situation may be on the verge of a major change and that’s the good news. I’m happy to say City Hall is refocusing it’s efforts to “quality over quantity” and now has a goal to “reduce street homelessness.”
City staff, including the police department and nonprofit service providers have worked their tails off to produce an “Action Plan to Address Homelessness in Santa Monica” that promises to reduce the numbers of street people while upgrading services so they’re more effective and life changing. The bad news is that the “Action Plan” calls for concentrating resources on programs that will target primarily “at risk” homeless,while ignoring the service resistant and spending even more on public relations.
City Hall conducted an intensive survey in January and found 277 persons “sleeping outside” in Downtown, on the beaches and along Wilshire and Olympic boulevards and Colorado Avenue. A “most vulnerable list” of 110 persons with a good chance of “dying on the streets” (because of age and health factors) was formulated. Longevity in Santa Monica was also a criteria in the list that prioritizes the queue for subsidized housing.
With many Santa Monica seniors living on the edge of financial disaster (SMDP, Feb. 27, Page 3, “Elderly face financial challenges”), am I the only one to notice that while local politicians have made housing the homeless its new top priority, they have built virtually no senior housing for low income Santa Monicans since affordable housing measure, Proposition I, passed in 1998 — including in the proposed Civic Center “Village” with its projected 325 housing units?
One of the things that bothered me most about Tuesday’s council meeting was the naiveté about the issue on behalf of some council persons. Maybe it’s the reason why they don’t have a handle on the problem and have accomplished so little. City leaders act as if our homeless are unfortunate orphaned children abandoned on the city doorstep and this has guided their policies regarding transients and street people for decades.
Mayor Pro Tem Richard Bloom has been on the dais for two and a half terms and strongly advocates for homeless issues, yet “277 people sleeping on the streets” came as a surprise to him. Memo to Bloom: There are hundreds more sleeping along Interstate 10 hillsides and elsewhere in town. Other councilmembers seemed shocked that the average time those on the “vulnerable list” have been here is 11 years with 30 percent for more than 15 years — figures that don’t speak well of the city’s ability to end homelessness. Nevertheless, Bloom’s big concern was that the deeply flawed continuum of care (or “continuum of misery” as some homeless call it) “not be diminished” and that the new “Action Plan” must work so we “can take it out to other communities."
If Santa Monica is truly going to lead a regional approach to ending homelessness, when is city staff going to approach other communities and tell them how to obtain grants and funding for their own homeless programs and housing?
Many transients are adult “free spirits” who won’t be tied down by rules, jobs or appointments. They eschew services yet still demand free food, housing, clothing and other welfare. SMPD Chief Tim Jackman told the department’s Citizens Police Academy last week that transients are responsible for roughly half of the city’s crime and 30 percent of violent crime.
Many others are in need of help and assistance should be rendered to those in real need. The new “Action Plan” is a positive step to improving the quality of care and speeding up its delivery. But there are still major flaws in this plan such as dealing with “hard core”street vagrants and drunks who refuse services.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 3, 2008. Read the original PDF.