ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : We Must Stop Looking the Other Way

Orange County, with its seemingly endless procession of sunlit days, is a promised land for many. But not all share in the sense of being well off. Homeless advocates estimate that there are about 10,000 people living on the streets, many of whom have only recently fallen through the safety net.

A recent Times series showed how homelessness does indeed exist in this island of affluence. The first order of business is to acknowledge the problem. Those who work closely with the homeless caution that too many among us are willing to look the other way.

Then Orange County must get on with some very specific improvements to existing programs that are clearly inadequate to meet the real need.

The sudden arrival of the recession on California’s doorstep, with its rise in joblessness and increased competition for work, suggests that this is a problem that will not take care of itself. The Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force reports that even at this time last year, before the recession hit, about 41% of the county’s homeless had been that way for only a month and that half of the homeless were that way because they had lost their jobs.

This data suggests that homelessness is not somebody else’s problem; there are those in our midst who may be only a paycheck or a month’s rent away from the street.

Yet, even though homelessness can strike close to home, homeless advocates report that their pleas for donations are often met with indifference, or even outright hostility. Clearly, this county must come to terms more fully with the economic realities that affect many of its citizens.

Moreover, among the chronic homeless, there are persistent problems of alcohol and drug abuse. While the county has geared up to deal with these needs, existing services are insufficient to the task. For example, despite varying high estimates of the percentage of homeless who are hard-core drug users, there are not enough facilities to treat them, and there are too few recovery homes for the homeless who have gone through detoxification.

The result is predictable: Addicts end up back on the street. Better coordination is needed between programs specifically designed for the homeless and services designed to help the mentally ill, homeless or not.

Tight budgets are certain to inhibit new initiatives. But there is a place to start: with our own recognition of the depths of the problem.