Resident telephone poll cost City Hall $28K
Residents are growing increasingly concerned about the large homeless population that lives in Santa Monica, a survey released this week shows.
Forty-five percent of 400 residents polled named homelessness as a top issue in Santa Monica, as opposed to just 33 percent in 2002, according to results from the telephone survey, which was conducted by City Hall.
The survey suggests traffic also has weighed more heavily on residents in recent years. A quarter of the residents polled last month named clogged roadways when asked to list the two most important issues facing Santa Monica. That number was up over 18 percent in 2002.
The lack of parking remained a top concern, with 16 percent of residents listing it as one of the top two issues this year, or double the number of residents who said the same when the poll was conducted three years ago.
Also listed by residents as critical issues facing Santa Monica were excessive growth and overcrowding, which together accounted for 16 percent of votes for the most important issue; education, at 12 percent; lack of affordable housing; and crime, gangs and drugs, according to the survey results, which were compiled in mid-January by Goodwin Simon Strategic Research.
In order to determine the issues most important to Santa Monica residents, pollsters asked what residents’ top concerns were, but didn’t offer multiple choice answers.
Homelessness has for at least the past five years ranked the No. 1 issue in Santa Monica polls. The fact that resident concern seems to be growing rather than shrinking despite ongoing efforts to stem the problem is cause for concern for some officials.
COUNTING VOTES
Only 24 percent of those polled gave City Hall a positive rating for “spending money in the right areas and on the right problems.”
While a third of residents said City Hall spends too little on homelessness, 17 percent countered City Hall spends too much. Roughly half of residents surveyed gave City Hall negative ratings for failing to adequately enforce laws against agg-ressive panhandling, and sleeping in parks and doorways.
Holbrook said he was hopeful the election of Bobby Shriver to the City Council would help reverse that trend. Holbrook said for years he and like-minded council members have not been able to affect change because the council has been controlled by politicians who are more tolerant of homelessness.
“With the homeless situation, I feel very encouraged, because we finally have four votes to move forward on some very meaningful stuff,” he said. “I think we’re turning the corner.”
Shriver campaigned on a platform of reducing homelessness and since taking office in December, he has pushed to create a special courtroom for homeless offenders, as well as open a sobering center for public inebriates and transform into homeless shelters three unused buildings at the Veterans Administration property in West Los Angeles.
City Councilman Richard Bloom, who sits on a regional board aiming to eliminate homelessness in 10 years, said the situation has worsened due to “years and years and years of neglect” from nearby communities, and the state and federal governments.
Bloom said he was glad Shriver has dedicated his energy to homelessness, but added it was not an entirely new venture.
“In fact, successive City Councils for many years have long been concerned about homelessness,” Bloom said Thursday. “It’s the lack of concern that’s been shown and the lack of effort that’s been shown elsewhere that’s the main problem.”
Bloom countered the contention by many in the community that the city government’s tolerance attracts more homeless people to Santa Monica.
“I don’t agree that our programs attract more homeless people to Santa Monica,” Bloom said. “I believe that an argument can be made that the feeding programs in the park, which are not city sponsored, have a tendency to do that. And I think there are a range of other reasons why homeless people come to Santa Monica.
“We tend to think only about Santa Monica, but as Santa Monicans we need to think about the big picture too,” Bloom added.
John Keaveney, founder of New Directions Inc., a social service provider that helps some 1,200 veterans and others reassemble their lives annually, called the survey results startling.
Still, Keaveney said the numbers reflect the fact that the problem of homelessness has grown more severe in recent years.
“The cost of housing has increased dramatically, where people can hardly afford to pay for an apartment,” said Keaveney, adding all of his programs are running at capacity. “Most people are still one paycheck away from being homeless.”
Keaveney also said Westside communities often receive less money, per person, than high-profile areas like Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.
That can be especially difficult for cities like Santa Monica that attract large numbers of homeless people, Keaveney added.
“In Santa Monica, they’ve always been benevolent to the homeless, and other cities are not,” he said. “They tend to push their homeless towards Santa Monica.”
SM DEMOGRAPHIC
City Hall paid Goodwin Simon Strategic Research $28,700 to conduct the survey, which included interviews with 400 residents.
The cost of the survey also covered polling an extra 150 residents in the Pico neighborhood, and officials hope to use the results from those interviews, which had not been released by Thursday, in a Feb. 26 forum on gang violence.
The community-wide survey showed that residents overall are satisfied with the job done by City Hall. More than 80 percent said they were either very or somewhat satisfied with “the job the city of Santa Monica is doing to provide city services.”
Those numbers dropped among elderly residents and those most familiar with City Hall.
“The survey finds slightly lower satisfaction among older residents, long-time residents of the city and those who have been in contact with city departments,” the report reads.
City Hall’s planning department received the lowest marks for responsiveness, while the police department was ranked as being most responsive, according to the survey. The city failed to earn a majority of positive marks in several areas, including providing youth services, arts funding, early childhood education, keeping traffic flowing, and enforcing zoning and building laws, along with airport noise limits.
Noteable differences also emerged along lines of sex and gender, and in other areas.
“Thirty-eight percent of men over 50 and 32 percent of women under 50 said city departments were not responsive, compared to 15 percent of men under 50 and 19 percent of women over 50,” the survey said.
Residents were split over whether City Hall was doing a good job of addressing neighborhood concerns, with 45 percent rating the city’s job as excellent or good, and 39 percent rating its job as fair or poor, the survey shows. Those numbers continued a downward trend over the past five years in how residents rate City Hall’s attention to neighborhood concerns.
Half of the residents polled said they held down full-time jobs and 70 percent said they did not have children living at home. More than half of those polled lived in apartments, with nearly 30 percent in single-family homes and 17 percent in condominiums.
Nearly a quarter of the people surveyed reported earning more than $100,000, with 17 percent taking home less than $20,000. However, almost a third of those polled declined to state their earnings.
The survey covered each major neighborhood in Santa Monica, with 24 percent of those polled living in the Mid-City area, 25 percent in Ocean Park or Sunset Park, 12 percent north of Montana Avenue, 30 percent in the Wilshire-Montana area and 7 percent living downtown.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 11, 2005. Read the original PDF.