The numbers – and the message they sent – were stark:
This spring, when asked by pollsters from UC Irvine to rank the biggest problems facing Orange County, local residents listed homelessness 71% of the time and a related issue, lack of affordable housing, 69% of the time. The next biggest problems – traffic, taxes and crime – drew just 47%, 45% and 41%, respectively.
What’s more, large majorities of locals, of all ages and political leanings, told UCI’s pollsters that if public spending would fix those top two issues they’d be willing to pay more in taxes to make it so.
Even in a county where voting patterns recently have shifted from majority conservative to Democrat-leaning purple, the polling findings represent a significant shift.
“It shows, clearly, that people in Orange County want to fix the housing crisis,” said Jon Gould, dean of UCI’s School of Social Ecology, which oversaw the poll.
Gould, who took the UCI job early last year after a long career in Washington, D.C., added:
“From what I gather, this is a new sentiment,” Gould added. “But the data isn’t ambiguous.”
It’s also part of a bigger picture, according to people working to help and house the unhoused. Experts point to several recent events that suggest new attention, if not a totally new era, is at hand in the fight to reduce homelessness.
These include:
• Early last year, California rolled out CalAIM, which streamlines state spending on Medi-Cal services in a way that makes it easier to help, among others, people experiencing homelessness. It’s a first-in-the-nation program that experts say might spread to other states if it works here.
• About a year ago, former U.S. Rep. Karen Bass turned a tight mayoral race in Los Angeles into a nine-point win with a campaign built on the promise to fix the city’s homelessness problem.
• Over the past few years, in many local cities, elected officials who once balked at using municipal money to help those who are homeless have shifted gears and voted to welcome service providers, lower-cost housing and even new shelters.
Nobody is suggesting a new attitude has, so far, done much to end homelessness. Indeed, for a variety of reasons, the ranks of the unhoused might be growing, and they’re definitely becoming more visible in communities where the problem previously was hidden.
But long-time homeless advocates say a broad shift in sentiment – one that’s less inclined to blame homeless people for their plight and more interested in solving the problem – is underway, and that it could make long-term change more possible.
“This is a window of opportunity that comes around once every 20 to 30 years, if that,” said Paul Leon, chief executive of National Healthcare and Housing Advisors, a Santa Ana-based company that works with cities, hospitals and others to provide a variety of services that help homeless people find and stay in permanent dwellings.
“To make a dent in getting people into housing, you have to have a lot of things, including … an obvious need and available funding,” added Leon, who prior to launching National Healthcare and Housing led the Illumination Foundation, a non-profit aimed at helping homeless people in Orange County.
“But to even start to make a difference, you have to have buy-in. Political will can get everything done,” he said.
“And, for the moment, I think it’s there. I think we have it.”
Minds change
Annette Bush said her husband, Robert, technically was the person in her San Clemente home who responded to the UCI poll last spring. But she said she “strongly influenced” his homelessness-centric ranking of the top issues affecting the county.
“I sat there and yelled at him what to say,” Bush said, laughing. “I wanted him to say we (care) about getting people off the damn sidewalks.”
Bush, 71, co-owns three condominium rentals in San Bernardino County. Over the years, she said, she and her partners (a sister and a cousin) resisted efforts from homeless advocates who wanted them to take on tenants who needed federal vouchers to pay their rent.
“It isn’t that we didn’t care about homeless people or anything. But we thought, ‘Why are we the ones who have to risk our money – potentially a lot of money – to help with that problem?’
“If we lose a month’s rent, it’s a big deal for us,” she said. “And we believed that’s what would happen if we rented to people on (federal housing assistance).”
That changed in early 2020, when Bush said they lost two tenants just as the COVID-19 pandemic kicked into gear. With little movement in the rental market at the time, Bush said she and her co-owners became aware of two older couples who needed places to live. Though both couples also needed federal rental assistance to supplement their Social Security checks – something Bush and her co-owners didn’t like – the landlords were out of options and they took them on as tenants.
Out of options, Bush said, also described the new tenants. Their likely next step, if they couldn’t get the one-bedroom units offered by Bush and family, was to move into shelters.
That’s increasingly common. In Orange County and other parts of Southern California the fastest growing sub-group of homeless people are age 55 and older. Many are forced out of housing because of hard-knuckled economics; their Social Security checks can’t cover the price of the average rent.
The new demography of shelters – a spike in people who are suffering more from pocketbook issues than from addiction or mental health woes – also might be sparking the new thinking about homelessness.
“It was a wake-up, for me at least,” said Bush, who described her political leanings as “traditional conservative.”
“I believe people should make their own way,” she said. “But both of those couples … they worked their whole lives. It wasn’t like they had made a lot of bad decisions, they just didn’t make a lot of money.
“They’ve been great tenants,” she added.
Politics, money, respect
In early August, the day before Gould and others at UCI went public with the result of their poll, Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley expressed mild frustration at the suggestion that homelessness and affordable housing was, somehow, a “hot” issue.
“I disagree with that premise,” Foley said. “People have been working on this for a long, long time. In the city where I was mayor (Costa Mesa), we’ve made big strides to help people get out of this cycle. So have other cities and the county.”
In early September, Foley joined other supervisors to approve a county housing plan that by 2030 could put as many as 10,406 new homes – including 5,000 priced for lower-income residents – on unincorporated county land.
Though Foley and others raised questions about the feasibility of that plan, the unanimous vote to approve it reflects a bipartisan shift in the local politics of homelessness.
As recently as a decade ago, Orange County supervisors could literally step over people sleeping on the greenbelts of the Civic Center in Santa Ana, walk up to their sixth-floor offices, and do nothing to help the homeless people without fear of voter backlash.
In some cases, voter sentiment on the issue rose to hostility. Leon describes a city meeting in Santa Ana, about 10 years ago, in which a crowd of residents followed his agency’s co-founder to his car, threatening him because of his efforts to help homeless people in that community get better health care.
“They were scared about their property values. And that wasn’t unusual,” Leon said.
“But now, I think, there’s a growing awareness that the issue is multi-faceted. The economic side of this isn’t as clearcut as people might think.”
According to a growing body of research, it’s cheaper for taxpayers to house people than it is to let them live on the streets.
Jamboree Housing, an Irvine-based company that builds communities aimed at helping the unhoused, with lower-priced dwellings and services aimed at helping tenants stay sheltered, estimates that local taxpayers spend about $100,000 a year for every chronically unhoused person, versus about $52,000 a year for providing them with a permanent home and related services.
A 2017 study from the Rand Corp. found that Los Angeles County taxpayers saved about 20% per person to house people with chronic mental illness than they spent on those same people while they lived in shelters or outdoors.
Studies around the world, too – in Australia, England, Canada – have found similar results.
In recent years, such economic data has been part of Homelessness 101, a public information campaign launched by a local division of Orange County United Way: United to End Homelessness.
Becks Heyhoe, the group’s executive director, said over the past five years about 5,000 people in Orange County have attended the two-hour Homelessness 101 classes. Everybody from advocates to homemakers to would-be politicians have taken part, with many going on to take extra training to learn how to make pro- low-cost housing presentations at city council and other public meetings.
That, she suggested, is part of why she described UCI’s poll results as more surprising than jaw-dropping.
“During the pandemic, when industry shut down, we all saw how quickly our security could be taken away,” Heyhoe said. “Even for people who didn’t see themselves as vulnerable to that situation.
“I think it really changed our perception,” she added.
“Homelessness is becoming a lot closer to people in our communities.”
That, too, was reflected in the UCI poll. A slight majority (54%) said they encounter a person experiencing homelessness every day and 1 in 4 (24%) said the encounters happen “every few days.”
At the start of the pandemic, running into Howard Kirk, a Vietnam-era war veteran, could have counted as one of those encounters.
The former business owner turned artist had moved back to California after several years in Hawaii and, as the pandemic kicked in, he couldn’t find shelter. He initially landed in a low-priced motel subsidized by the state. Early last year, through Welcome Home OC, a program created by Heyhoe’s organization, Kirk moved into a subsidized apartment in Mission Viejo.
Through his Social Security and other benefits, along with federal assistance, Kirk has enough for rent and living expenses, allowing the 70-something to paint and exercise and meditate as part of his retirement.
“I think a lot of people wouldn’t see me as homeless. I know I didn’t,” Kirk said.
“But thought is powerful,” he added.
“So if me coming out as a homeless person, if that’s what you want to call it, can help change people’s minds about homelessness, that’s a good thing.
“I hope some minds are changed.”
Source: Orange County Register
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