By Weldon Berger Honolulu, Hawaii
RE: Response to Jon Mann’s letter in the Monday, June 16, edition: Jon Mann misreads much of what I wrote in my Santa Monica Daily Press column on homelessness when he recites the “teach a man to fish” bromide. I did not suggest and do not advocate simply providing homes to the homeless and leaving them to their own devices. Neither is his assertion that Santa Monica can easily afford the costs associated with homelessness particularly relevant; no matter how wealthy Santa Monica may be, pointless expenditures are still pointless expenditures.
A 2006 study on homelessness commissioned by the city made an attempt to identify the major costs of the problem. By far the largest single item of the roughly $5 million allocated for homeless-related activities from the general fund in fiscal year 2006 was the $2 million-plus spent by the police department on activities including patrols, ticketing, arrests and jail costs. In total, the city spent nearly $25 million that year — a bit over $1 million on agencies providing direct services, plus the $2 million worth of police and jail time, nearly $550,000 on homeless-related fire department and paramedic activities, nearly $350,000 on park maintenance and repairs, nearly $500,000 of public works maintenance and repair, and so on. The $20 million in addition to Santa Monica’s general fund contribution, which included expenditures on services such as the Samoshel shelter and Section 8 housing, came from county, state and federal budgets. Costs since then can be assumed to have risen.
Santa Monica’s homeless are far more likely than the general homeless population in the country to suffer from substance abuse or mental health problems. Of the roughly 2,800 homeless people estimated to live in Santa Monica at the time, only 6 percent were not dealing with one or the other or both of those issues. My suggestion that Santa Monica’s behavior toward the homeless might bankrupt the city was a facetious one meant to emphasize my main point, which is that placing homeless people in various forms of transitional or permanent housing not only gets us off the streets, but makes providing other services far easier and, in consequence, less expensive. Any social worker or medical professional will tell you that treating substance abuse and mental health problems is made much more simple when the recipient is in a stable situation and readily accessible than when they’re on the street. House substance abusers are exposed to fewer temptations and can be more easily monitored once they enter treatment, and housed people undergoing psychiatric treatments are much less likely to lose their medications to theft or from carelessness, and are much more likely to stay on their medications, than are the homeless.
So whether or not Santa Monica can afford to continue its current, somewhat ineffective approach to the problem, is irrelevant to the question of whether everyone’s quality of life, homeless people, respectable Santa Monicans and tourists alike, would be enhanced by getting the homeless off the streets and into situations that make keeping us off the streets and helping us develop or rediscover the skills that enable responsible living much more likely than is at present the case. The answer is clearly “yes.” This is not to say that Santa Monica’s government isn’t making a serious attempt to deal with the problem — they clearly are — or that the “housing first” approach I advocate would eradicate it; just that focusing on housing would increase the effectiveness and lower the cost of the effort.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 23, 2008. Read the original PDF.