In the past month I’ve written a couple of pieces on the homeless dilemma looking at what I call the Unholy Trinity, those inextricably intertwined maladies of homelessness, mental health afflictions, and substance abuse.
We know that in just the past six years, state government has spent about $24 billion aimed at trying to get a handle on California’s worst-in-the-nation homeless crisis. Amazingly, local governments and private charities have spent additional countless billions more. Despite those immense expenditures, the number of un-housed Californians has continued to increase to more than 181,000 in the latest federal census. California accounts for 28% of all people experiencing homelessness in the country, and 49% of all unsheltered people in the U.S.
Shockingly, the State Auditor’s Office released a report in April that found it’s impossible to figure out if California’s largest homeless programs are working because there’s almost no relevant data to be found. The same was the case with city and county programs. During that same period the state’s overall homeless population increased by 32 percent resulting in half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless now live in California.
“The lack of transparency in our current approach to homelessness is pretty frightening,” said Assemblymember Josh Hoover, who co-authored the request for the audit.
To give you an idea what’s going on, just two months ago the Assembly’s Budget Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability held a hearing that centered around the state’s Homelessness Housing and Assistance grant Program (also known as HHAP funding). Since 2019, the Legislature and Governor Newsom have agreed to dedicate between $300 million to $1 billion a year to help large cities and all counties with their homelessness response. Newsom’s staff showed up to the hearing without any data on the effectiveness of the program.
According to Hoover, when pressed, representatives from the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) and the Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH) admitted they have no data to share on existing homelessness programs and investments. In fact, ICH claimed they would need even more money to implement transparency measures recommended by the State Auditor. To say this is completely unacceptable is a gross understatement.
So if state and local governments have almost no data and lack basic programmatical information, how in the world are they going to solve this 50-plus year dilemma.
Of course, most folks familiar with the failed system here in Mendocino County know that one of the major failures is that providers of homeless services are not held accountable by local government officials through such mechanisms as performance audits and related performance provisions and standards in the myriads of provider contracts handed out over the last two decades.
Anyway, my pieces on the homeless mess triggered a number of comments from readers. Here’s what one homeless/mental health advocate, Mazie Malone, of Ukiah, had to say,
“Hi Jim, in regard to the [Supreme Court] ban on sleeping outside … people sleep outside of our shelter and across the street from it all the time, since that ruling a few weeks ago. I have not seen any arrests for camping out on the streets. Maybe they all have moved beyond the city limits? Dropping the ball on purpose? Or default because no one really gives a s***? Unbelievable the lack of oversight and accountability.”
So right off the bat Maizie demonstrates she has keen and spot-on insights into this problematical monstrosity.
The people responsible for tackling the homeless crisis have truly dropped the ball and obviously don’t give a s***. Why should they and who are they?
They’ve come to be called the Homeless-Mental Health Industrial Complex, an ever-growing collection of so-called Private-Public Partnerships that specialize in administering homeless programs across the nation and right here in this county. These outfits all share one unique characteristic: They continue to reap massive taxpayer monies even though they are held to little, if any, performance standards. Thus explaining runaway homelessness, especially here in California where it is officially and certifiably the worst by prodigious margins.
Let’s turn to Maizie’s observations on what’s happening on the streets of Ukiah subsequent to the recent Supreme Court decision dealing with one aspect of homeless dilemma.
Many folks don’t understand the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Keep in mind the scope of their order only extends to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals nine western states under their jurisdiction. All of the other nation’s Circuits of Appeals had previously ruled and/or let stand the rest of the country’s state and local government laws and ordinances, recognizing that government had the authority to enforce laws restricting homeless encampments on sidewalks and other public property.
The Supreme Court decision overturned a series of 9th Circuit opinions striking down laws and ordinances that prohibited people from sleeping or camping on sidewalks, shopping malls, residential neighborhoods, and state, city, and county public parks.
Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision, the 9th Circuit had consistently ruled that such prohibitions violated the U.S. Constitution’s 8th Amendment. The 9th Circuit ruled over the years that it was “cruel and unusual punishment” for state and local governments to prohibit the homeless from camping, sleeping, etc., on sidewalks and all other public property.
The thing I found most interesting and educational was the response and reactions of California politicians because it showed the yawing chasm between responsible public officials and those driven and motivated purely by PC baloney.
Gov. Gav Newsom, whom I frequently find obnoxious and hypocritical (let’s don’t start counting the ways), said the ruling provides state and local officials with “the definitive authority to implement and enforce policies to clear unsafe encampments from our streets. This decision removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years and limited their ability to deliver on common-sense measures to protect the safety and well-being of our communities.”
Newsom got that right. Chalk one up for Gav.
On the other hand, according to the L.A. Times, “Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass slammed the Supreme Court’s ruling, calling it ‘disappointing’ and arguing that it should not be used to jail homeless residents or drive them from city to city. Bass, who declared an emergency on homelessness on her first day in office in December, signaled the ruling will not alter her approach to the crisis, which has focused heavily on moving unhoused Angelenos out of encampments and into hotels, motels and other forms of temporary housing. ‘Arresting homeless people or pushing them out of a community and into another city is more expensive for taxpayers than actually solving the problem,’ Bass said in a statement.”
Anyway, I think the Supreme Court’s decision is a much-needed step in the right direction (even a blind pig finds a truffle every now and then), and should return a bit of sanity, reason, and responsibility to a process that has been out-of-control and not serving anyone well, including the homeless.
(Jim Shields is the Mendocino County Observer’s editor and publisher, observer@pacific.net, the long-time district manager of the Laytonville County Water District, and is also chairman of the Laytonville Area Municipal Advisory Council. Listen to his radio program “This and That” every Saturday at 12 noon on KPFN 105.1 FM, also streamed live: http://www.kpfn.org)
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