Column: Homeless crisis is solvable, but won’t yield to political timidity
In government as in business, it’s easy to tell leaders from mere politicians: Leaders tend to produce results, while politicians settle for “addressing” problems, usually by spending more of somebody else’s money.
Early this month, Mayor Kevin Faulconer announced his intention to address San Diego’s homeless crisis, with details to come in a few weeks. This gives taxpayers a chance to demand that he lead instead.
“This homeless crisis did not start overnight and it will not be solved overnight,” Faulconer said Jan. 12. “But there is more that our region can do and will do. This is an unprecedented problem that demands an unprecedented level of cooperation.”
The mayor is absolutely correct in his diagnosis. Yet he failed to mention the real tragedy of San Diego’s crisis — it is entirely avoidable and readily fixable.
Don’t get me wrong. There will always be homeless people, driven outside respectable society by endless combinations of bad luck, lousy decisions and untreated mental illness.
Still, it has been our collective, very local decision to leave them there. For many, especially the 1,100 or so who’ve lived outdoors for a year or more, those mentally and physically disabled people labeled “unsheltered chronically homeless” under the federal definition, society’s neglect amounts to a death sentence.
The average chronic street camper dies somewhere between age 42 and 52, depending on which study you believe. That’s the prime of life for the rest of us, who can expect to live to 79.
Homeless deaths have more than doubled in San Diego, from 54 in 2014 (when Faulconer was elected mayor) to 117 in the fiscal year that ended in September.
And make no mistake, the survivors are suffering. Paramedics cope with conditions ranging from untreated mental illness and diabetes, to runaway staph infections and skin problems ordinarily confined to Third World countries.
Politicians would have us believe that homelessness is sad but inevitable, like some malevolent natural force.
But they are dead wrong. Homelessness is not the weather, and California is not Calcutta.
We know this because of remarkable success in other major cities. The best example is probably Houston (with Harris and Fort Bend counties), where a determined mayor, Annise Parker, built a public-private campaign that has rescued 77 percent of the region’s unsheltered homeless population, reducing their numbers from 5,194 in 2007 to 1,186 as of last January.
During the same decade, San Diego County’s overall numbers of unsheltered people soared by 58 percent, from 2,950 to 4,658 in 2016, according to a federally mandated snapshot count held each January.
When it comes to leaving thousands of people to fend outside, San Diego has traded places with Houston in dramatic fashion. We are a national disgrace.
Even Los Angeles, a basket case if ever there was one, has reduced its unsheltered population by 13 percent (about 5,000 people) to a still-shocking 30,950.
Before the social media trolls blast me, there’s no evidence that Houston or L.A. bussed large numbers of their homeless to San Diego. Besides, San Diego has shipped 1,000 out of town in recent years through a family reunification program, which many large cities operate.
City sheds 10,000 homes
Not only have we failed to pick up our homeless from the streets, but local and state politicians also have practically pushed them out.
Over the last six years, a Union-Tribune investigation found, San Diego officials have agreed to remove about 10,000 affordable units from the city’s rolls, mostly to make them available for private redevelopment. That sum canceled out the entire total the city’s housing commission helped build since 1979, despite a longstanding ordinance that requires one-for-one replacement of the cheap units used by the working poor and intermittently homeless.
As for the state, Proposition 47 and prison realignment has released tens of thousands of drug offenders and felony thieves from jail, even though politicians have broken promises to increase treatment and secure safe transitional housing for them.
The clear result: We have more addicts and other untreated mentally ill people living on the streets, and more felons available to prey on them — and the rest of society.
To me, our disgrace plows fertile ground for optimism. As we caused this crisis, so can we fix it.
Not surprisingly, effective leadership is more important than more taxpayer money.
Parker turned compassion into action as early as 1993, when she and her partner took in and raised a teen who became homeless when his grandparents kicked him out for being gay.
As Houston’s mayor from 2010 to 2016, a first step was to reframe the usual struggles over public funding.
“Homelessness is not fundamentally a resource issue, it’s about whether you can distribute those resources in an efficient way,” Parker told me last week.
“It’s pretty much the Houston way: Make the business case,” she said. “We’re not doing this because it’s the right thing to do for these poor homeless people, we’re already spending this money so let’s spend it more effectively.”
Houston starts with veterans
Parker started by accepting — and completing — a federal challenge to house 100 veterans in 100 days. After housing a second 100, and then a third, the city decided to adapt lessons from the campaign to Houston’s general homeless population.
An early analysis found the city was spending $100 million a year on the homeless, much of it on emergency medical care. Yet programs to house and support them depended exclusively on federal and philanthropic funding, so the mayor couldn’t simply redeploy homeless spending from the city’s general fund.
“The key was my ability to use my power as a convenor; to get everybody that does something with the homeless into the same room,” Parker said.
She hired a special assistant, Mandy Chapman Semple, as the city’s primary point of contact on homelessness. “One throat to choke,” as the former mayor puts it.
They spent the next couple of years identifying sources of funding and redirecting spending. This was essentially how Salt Lake City officials launched their dramatically successful effort in 2004. In Houston as in Utah, the process provoked blowback.
“What most large cities have is a lot of really good nonprofits doing great work with the homeless. But they all want to hold onto their piece of cheese. Everybody works in parallel,” Parker said. “I had to be willing to be unpopular with some great organizations.”
Houston officials found that shelters and transitional programs were used mostly by people who were homeless temporarily because of major life events, and rarely returned.
As is the case in San Diego, the big shortfall in Houston came in providing for the chronics, who by definition are so disabled that few can return to independent living.
So Houston got busy building several thousand apartment units, complete with ongoing social and medical services, to permanently house the chronically homeless. Parker replaced the head of the city’s housing commission.
Hard choices have few friends
Adding units for the homeless required pulling resources from other low-income programs, which caused heartburn among progressives. And it provoked social conservatives who didn’t like the idea of handing keys to people actively addicted to alcohol or other drugs.
“Why would you give housing to some deadbeat?” Parker said. “They are there (on the street), they aren’t going away. If you want a different result, you need to do things differently.”
Houston also created incentives for chronically homeless to accept all this new help.
“We also did some tough-love things, I got vilified from coast to coast. We passed some ordinances that limited the ability of people to feed the homeless. If you’re going to feed more than six people, you need a permit,” Parker said. “I had pastors coming down to council for weeks telling me I hated the homeless.”
To help keep her accountable, she formed a business advisory council that included an archbishop, major philanthropist, head of the downtown business group and others. Every other month, the mayor and her adviser reported their progress to this council and listened to feedback.
Once the business community started to see tangible progress, private funding increased as well as broadened beyond the usual donors. A pastor recently disclosed that Beyoncé, the music mogul, had given $7 million anonymously over the course of several years to house the homeless of Houston.
Can San Diego embrace this basic approach, of compassion combined with hard-nosed fiscal conservatism, to solve its crisis? Absolutely, if a leader will step forward.
Paradoxically, the dramatic decline in conditions for the homeless also boosts the opportunities to emerge as a great reformer.
Politically speaking, Faulconer’s greatest risk may come from doing too little.
San Diego’s latest homeless population explosion coincides almost precisely with the first three years of his term. This mayor didn’t cause the crisis by himself, but he surely owns it now.
Herbert Hoover didn’t cause the Great Depression, yet the public saw the nation’s vast homeless encampments as “Hoovervilles.” If our booming tent cities aren’t yet “Faulconervilles,” they soon will be.
The mayor seems to realize that history is calling.
His plan outlined this month would add 300 emergency shelter beds, deploy 10 more psychiatrists to an outreach unit, urge nonprofits to use an existing database, and solicit proposals for an “intake” center.
Mayor floats hotel tax hike
And, most speculatively, Faulconer said he would ask voters to raise hotel taxes to expand the convention center and fix roads, with a portion going for the homeless.
Let’s not beat around the bush. Along with being inadequate, much of the mayor’s plan so far is either naive or downright cynical.
For example, those 300 shelter beds don’t even make up for recent losses. In 2015, cheered by Faulconer, the city stopped erecting winter tents and instead funded 350 year-round shelter beds at Father Joe’s Villages.
But the city didn’t add beds somewhere else, so incoming shelter occupants simply shoved out homeless people trying to recover in Father Joe’s transitional programs. San Diego needs to triple the mayor’s number, right away.
Or consider the intake center. Great idea; a key ingredient to success in Houston and other cities.
That’s why homeless advocates in San Diego prepared a detailed plan to locate one at the edge of downtown, on 7 acres of the city’s maintenance yard at B Street and 20th Avenue. It could securely house 800 homeless people in a contained, campus setting with access to full social and medical services, nearly eliminating San Diego’s downtown problem in a matter of months.
The proposal has been on Faulconer’s desk since at least August. So why is he asking for proposals in January? Good question.
Then there’s the convention center tax hike. If voters shunned higher hotel taxes in November to keep the Chargers — after rejecting a 2004 hike for public safety — what makes Faulconer think voters will embrace the homeless and the hotel industry in 2018?
I give the mayor credit for making a beginning.
Faulconer hired a assistant, Stacie Spector, to focus on homelessness policy. His Housing Our Heroes program, in less than 10 months, has helped about 500 people secure homes using Veterans Administration vouchers.
Relief for all renters, maybe
And in the long run, the mayor’s proposal to speed permitting and increase density for private-sector developments could — if boldly expanded someday — unchain the market forces required to solve the region’s overall affordability crisis.
Some say San Diego could never build units like Houston can. It’s just not true.
Our shocking housing costs flow directly from restrictive zoning, hefty fees and neighborhood opposition that chokes supply. Like the region’s homeless population, all renters and would-be homebuyers suffer at the hands of local policy.
Yet so far, Faulconer’s efforts echo San Diego’s past: Talk up some new spending and hope the problem goes away. There is much more he could do.
First, the mayor should declare a public emergency and refocus resources on the most needy.
The city’s old library is vacant. Shelter tents can sprout quickly on empty lots. Monica Ball, a downtown Realtor, suggests a short-term lease for an empty fitness center in the East Village that offers 43,000 square feet, including showers and locker rooms.
Meanwhile, the city council should fast-track the permanent intake center on B Street and hire nonprofits to run the complex. There’s room to also build up to 400 spartan, low-cost units of permanent supportive housing for the most disabled chronics.
Every major homeless agency and nonprofit in San Diego County should be drafted to the enterprise, because every category of homeless person would pass through this and other intake centers for evaluation on their way to various programs. As incentive, the regional agency that distributes federal funding should tie grants to adoption of the existing database and participation in the intake process.
Donors ready to match?
One private estimate puts the intake cost at $6 million. I’m told that prominent business leaders are ready to donate half the amount as soon as they see action from the politicians and $3 million in matching public funds.
Such emergency measures may appeal to the tough-love crowd.
“We need to give the homeless three basic choices: Accept help, because now we have a bed for you; or here’s a bus ticket out of town; or we have a jail cell ready if you’d rather keep killing yourself out here doing drugs and urinating on sidewalks,” says Bob McElroy, who as head of Alpha Project has improved thousands of lives over 30 years.
McElroy is convinced that adding significant housing for the homeless will reduce their numbers — not attract more.
“The word will get out that if you want to come to San Diego, you’ve got to enroll in a program,” he said.
Court orders have barred local police from clearing out homeless encampments on a large scale until there is enough housing for them all.
“Giving a ticket to a person who has to sleep somewhere violates the 8th Amendment, prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment,” said Tim Cohelan, an attorney who sued to stop crackdowns.
Yet Cohelan told me this fall that he and other advocates would gladly back off once the city produced sufficient housing. They will need persuading, however, that permanent units are in the pipeline, because shelter beds can vanish as quickly as they appear.
This brings us to the harder, structural reforms that are badly overdue in San Diego, where nobody is in charge of homeless funding and nobody knows where all the money hides.
The biggest problem? The homeless have no lobby in San Diego, so they will never command a lasting share of public resources.
Heads of nonprofits don’t stick their necks out, because politicians can — and do — chop funding of those who cause trouble or embarrassment. Of all major homeless service outfits, only San Diego Rescue Mission thrives without a dime of taxpayer spending, and even Rescue has faced opposition and zoning drama when it has tried to open facilities.
Here is where San Diego’s business community is essential to solving this crisis for good. Writing checks is not enough.
If I controlled a hotel empire or tech fortune in this town, I would make it my business to replace any politician who allowed the helpless and the deranged to live on my streets.
Besides, San Diego is home to some of the world’s top developers and financiers. They can donate time and expertise as well as cash.
Plenty of money to spend
Movers and shakers should know they confront a target-rich environment.
County government, which holds $1 billion in cash reserves on its books and says it spends $158 million a year on “homelessness and homeless prevention,” clearly controls vast resources for ongoing social services and mental health care.
San Diego, where officials have said they spend $80 million a year on homelessness and prevention, has plenty of money for the relatively small population of unsheltered homeless.
For example, in 2008 the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ruled that San Diego had improperly borrowed more than $139 million of Community Development Block Grant money that was legally destined for programs to help the poor.
The purpose was to create new debt with no real intention of repaying it, so the city could shift tens of millions in extra property-tax revenue away from schools and other government entities.
Poor owed millions by city
A resulting settlement created a $215 million balance due from San Diego’s former redevelopment agency to the city’s CDBG part of the ledger, which must be used for the poor. The agency has just started to make payments, gradually. It can be bonded or redirected to homeless projects.
Then there is the city government’s Low and Moderate Income Housing Asset Fund, reported at a “restricted” balance of $319 million in 2016. Most of that staggering sum appears to be loans to developers that won’t necessarily be repaid, but there is about $36 million in cash and land held for resale that seems readily available.
Another potent example comes from the San Diego Housing Commission. The agency spends most of its energy issuing federal rent vouchers and financing construction of subsidized housing, although its broad portfolio includes management of the city’s homelessness efforts.
Sure enough, the commission helps fund housing, but the units come online slowly and generally cost between $300,000 and $500,000 apiece. Such costs, comparable to what the private sector pays to build luxury apartments, sharply reduce the total number of subsidized units.
Yet the commission struggles even to overspend. To wit, its cash equivalent reserves have grown from $76 million in 2007 to $148 million last year.
Rick Gentry, the commission’s chief executive, says nearly all the cash is being held to fund future construction, maintenance and vouchers. State bureaucracy can slow project applications, and developers need money fast when the green light appears.
But there’s no boom in public housing on the horizon to justify that level of hoarding. And in any case, the project slate for the next few years can’t explain a near-doubling in cash over the last decade.
Moving at the speed of government
And remember, this is the same housing commission that failed to offset the loss of 10,000 low-income units in just six years. The fault lies with the mayor and city council and not Gentry, yet the housing commission has manifestly failed in its central task.
“Nobody is slow walking,” Gentry said in a recent interview. “We are not sitting on money.”
To be fair, Gentry is a smart and canny administrator. Yet passionate advocacy for the homeless and forthright civic leadership is not in his job description. That’s a problem, one of many in the commission’s parastatal structure.
For openers, Gentry lacks a boss. Technically, the commission’s governing board is the entire city council. But there’s also an advisory board that is nominated by the mayor. The structure saps power from the commission’s chief executive even as it diffuses political accountability for operational and strategic failures.
Giving the mayor direct control — and accountability — over housing policy seems like a no-brainer.
Another easy reform: San Diego demands from its own subsidized housing the same fees and other public costs that market-rate developers must pay, often totaling tens of thousands of dollars per unit.
The system seems crazy, until you realize that it allows the city’s general fund to skim cash from housing projects financed mostly with federal tax credits, private donations and HUD funding. Waiving the fees would boost homeless housing production.
For those keeping score at home, this brings us to at least $400 million the city can muster in some fashion for the homeless. This is by no means an inclusive list, and doesn’t include gains from efficiency.
Poor compete with the poorest
Speaking of money, San Diego officials must stop shirking hard choices that inevitably pit the poor against the poorer.
From 2005 through 2016, the housing commission helped fund construction or purchase and rehab of 8,018 subsidized units. Just 615 of those new units were designated for the homeless, over that entire 12 years.
San Diego’s government will never produce enough subsidized housing for every low-income working family that wants or needs it.
But it can dramatically improve the lives of 1,100 or so chronically homeless. Not to mention save taxpayers tens of millions of dollars on emergency medical care, policing, jailing and other hidden costs.
It’s the fiscally rational choice, no human decency required.
Before a chilly dawn Friday, hundreds of volunteers fanned throughout the county into canyons, parks, alleys and shelters to count and interview the homeless as part of the federal government’s nationwide point-in-time count. There is no reason to believe that San Diego’s total unsheltered population — measured at 4,658 a year ago — has declined substantially.
The human suffering behind such numbers is on very public display, especially in downtown neighborhoods.
Late last month, I met with a young homeless mother who, after enduring hours of labor under a tarp tied to a restaurant fence, gave birth in an emergency room to a girl with heroin and methamphetamine in her bloodstream. Thankfully, she gave the infant the enduring gift of adoption.
Near Horton Plaza I talked with a man, sober as a judge yet unable to remember his name, who described with great precision how Prince Charles was controlling our winter weather. And I met a mostly rational sidewalk resident who was living with seizure disorder, along with the indignity of having been robbed of his prosthetic leg.
Setting aside the case for compassion, consider the growing lawlessness and disorder multiplying in our communities.
One recent day as I strolled to work, a shock of white flesh alerted me to an elderly man, naked from the waist down, changing his underwear not 10 feet away. Two blocks later, a shirtless and shoeless young man dodged office workers to scrounge obsessively through bushes against a bank building, relaxing only after he’d recovered a glass meth pipe, which he held up to the sun to inspect in plain view.
This is terrible for society. Such disorder tends to breed more serious threats to basic public safety.
Yet the experience of Houston and other cities suggests that compassion provides the fuel for significant progress. Fear is not enough.
San Diego needs a heart transplant when it comes to its homeless. Yet three years into his term, Mayor Kevin Faulconer is offering the policy equivalent of baby aspirin.
Previous columns in this series:
Street population soars after SD ups homeless spending (Aug. 21, 2016)
Back story: San Diego’s homeless problem soars (Aug. 21, 2016)
Great weather can’t explain away San Diego homeless crisis (Sept. 4, 2016)
Leniency has been hard on homeless (Sept. 18, 2016)
In failing the homeless, San Diego stands apart (Oct. 31, 2016)
In the agony of childbirth, a homeless woman finds help (Nov. 27, 2016)
Homeless for the holiday, yet joy flickers (Dec. 25, 2016)
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dan.mcswain@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1280 ▪Twitter: @McSwainUT
