We’ll begin with a little exercise today, and we’re calling it, “Does this sound like your town?”
Read along and nod if any of this sounds familiar:
“Downtown businesses had long complained about people sleeping in their doorways at night. Encampments within city limits sprouted and became sanitation hazards, and some homeowners reported finding people sleeping on their front porches who were unwilling to move on.”
“A shocking 56% of (homeless) respondents reported using meth three or more times weekly.”
“(The city) cleared its largest encampment of homeless people … and the outcome of the clearing has been seen repeated in other areas of the city, over and over again — some people take shelter that is offered, but many continue to scatter about to another place in the city.”
““Right now is 10 times worse than 20 years ago. Twenty years ago, (it was) much easier to handle the homeless; now it’s much much harder.” ”
“Beyond tent encampments, nearly half of those living without shelter in February’s count were sleeping in their vehicles.”
Nodding your head “yes” yet? Congratulations. You must live in any one of 200 or more towns in California.
For the third consecutive year, this newspaper has joined with nine sister publications around the north state for our “State of Homelessness” edition.
The idea is this: By publishing stories offering a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening on the homeless front elsewhere, maybe we’ll learn a little more about what’s happening locally — and even notice we’re probably ahead of the curve in some areas and behind it in a few others.
If there’s one thing that should be obvious by now, it’s this: No one city or town or county is ever going to “solve” homelessness. It’s a multi-layered, incredibly complex crisis that didn’t start because of any one town, and no one town is ever going to end it. Until there is a concentrated, and substantial, effort that covers factors as varied as mental health and housing and addiction and, yes, crime (just to name four) on a statewide and even national level, you are never going to see this problem “go away,” regardless of how badly you want to cling to some repeatedly disproven narratives:
“They’re all from somewhere else, and they come here for the great benefits. If we kicked them out and made them go back to wherever they came from, this wouldn’t be a problem. We need to stop enabling, and the city needs to get serious about cracking down on the homeless.”
For every homeless person you see, your community probably has an equal number of people shouting this nonsense, blissfully ignorant of things like the law and restrictions on what cities are legally allowed to do. It’s stunning — especially considering the level of news coverage these issues have received.
One example: A statewide UCSF study showed 90 percent of unhomed Californians are from — wait for it — California. And 75 percent of them live in the same county where they became homeless.
In other words, while some homeless people go from town to town looking for a better deal, an overwhelming majority of them stay within five or 10 miles of where they originally became homeless. We’re guessing you haven’t seen that figure quoted in your favorite local homeless-bashing Facebook group lately.
Every year, we get a lot of feedback to this series. We always expect (and receive) some “there you go, being part of the problem again”-type comments — but we also get a growing number of “thank you for this; I learned it’s not just happening locally and that it’s more of a complex issue than I believed” responses.
We can never adequately address problems until we first acknowledge what the problem actually is, and learn to tell the difference between a fact and a narrative. For as much as our state spends on homelessness every year — nearly $10 billion in the past three years alone — it should be obvious that we’re not getting enough bang for our buck, and what we’re doing isn’t working.
Let’s be smarter. That starts with recognizing the facts.
And for the record? Those five paragraphs at the beginning of this editorial described (in order) scenes in Fort Bragg, Ukiah, Chico, Eureka and Santa Cruz, respectively, and were taken directly from the overview stories you can read today.
Bet you thought it was all from your town.
