I was in Santa Cruz this weekend for a family occasion and we had to walk past a large homeless encampment on the way to the hotel. Like many cities (especially those in warmer climes), Santa Cruz has a significant homeless problem. And like many cities, it tries to keep that problem under wraps as much as possible. So local authorities herd as many of the homeless as possible into a park just south of the downtown area, at the corner of River Road and Soquel Avenue. The idea, I’m guessing, is to keep the homeless away from the city’s tourist areas, but if that is the goal, Santa Cruz hasn’t been especially successful. We saw homeless people sleeping on sidewalks, in tents and even on the beach near my relative’s pricey house off East Cliff Drive. Family members who had lived in California for years say the homeless problem there has gotten markedly worse in recent years, as rocketing housing prices, job layoffs and budget cutbacks for mental health care, have left more and more people living on the streets. Part of the problem is the lack of affordable housing in California. Even dual-care millennial couples holding down two well-paying jobs can barely afford a starter home, let alone someone working at McDonald’s or on disability.
One obvious solution to the homeless problem is subsidized or affordable housing for people currently living on the street, particularly those who have been evicted from apartments they can no longer afford. Research has shown that homeless people, even those who are abusing alcohol and drugs, will move into a house or apartment as long as they can keep drinking or drugging. (Many avoid shelters for precisely this reason – they can’t drink or take drugs while staying in shelters).
But housing alone isn’t the answer; we need much more intensive mental health outreach for many homeless people, who may have started drinking or taking drugs to self-medicate serious mental health problems and are now full-blown addicts. But even if the U.S. declared a war on homelessness (like the war on cancer or the race to the moon) and made it a top federal priority, the problem won’t be easy to solve. That’s because developers have little incentive to build affordable housing – they can make a lot more money building expensive apartments and houses — and even when local officials set aside funding for such housing, restrictive zoning laws and NIMBY opposition makes it exceedingly hard to build housing for the homeless, as Ezra Klein points out in this excellent article. As he notes, you can’t build housing out in the boonies and expect homeless people to move in. They need proximity to public transportation, grocery stores and pharmacies. You also need the support of the local community. Zoning remains a local issue and while many people are theoretically in favor of housing for the homeless, they don’t want them living close by. So even when voters agree to fund a major affordable housing initiative for the homeless, as they did six years ago in Los Angeles, to the tune of $1.1 billion, it’s hard to get these units built, largely because of red tape and neighborhood opposition.
Sadly, while the Build Back Better Act contained funding for cities to update their zoning codes to allow for more affordable housing, that provision was stripped before the measure (now called the Inflation Reduction Act) was passed by Congress earlier this year. That was supposed to be the carrot — to make it easier for cities to build affordable housing. But even before that measure was cut, a housing expert told Ezra Klein that sticks are also necessary given the strength of NIMBY sentiments. One such stick would be to with-hold transportation funding from high-priced communities (like Santa Cruz) that don’t make room for new housing. Yet if the carrot can’t pass Congress, what hope for there are sticks? As my very smart niece, Katie, pointed out, the real estate industry has a very robust lobbying group in Washington — see this statistical analysis — which explains why it’s hard to get meaningful zoning reforms passed in Congress. Kind of akin to why Congress can’t seem to pass drug pricing reforms because too many of our elected officials are getting big bucks from the pharmaceutical lobby.
In addition to streamlining the construction of affordable housing, the federal government needs to be funneling a lot more money – in state and local grants – into providing mental health care for the homeless population. Homelessness first surfaced as a major issue in this country in the years after states closed their mental hospitals and left its mentally impaired denizens to roam the streets, without adequate community programs to pick up the slack. The problem has only gotten worse. As part of expanding our mental health outreach, we also need to fund more detox and rehab centers, so that people who want to sober up can get into a rehab center quickly, without having to worry about health insurance. Despite the fact that West Virginia, where I lived until recently, has the highest drug overdose death rate in the country, there are still waiting lists for beds in rehab centers throughout the Mountain State and the same holds true in other states hard-hit by the opioid epidemic. City officials in Parkersburg, West Virginia have even restricted the number of rehab centers in the city, showing an appalling lack of understanding about how to deal with the opioid epidemic and homelessness. In my opinion, we should take some of the billions our government spends on the military and law enforcement and redirect it to mental health care and community outreach.
You might ask: why bother? Why not let the homeless live in squalid outdoor encampments with no running water or sanitary bathrooms, where disease runs rampant and women get raped? There are obvious economic reasons: many tourists are uncomfortable visiting cities where they have to step around a homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk and there’s the issue of safety as well. But the more compelling reason is that it is the right thing to do, the humane thing to do, to take care of our fellow man and woman and try to help them improve their lot. After all, Jesus stressed the importance of helping the poor. And there’s a saying in the Talmud: “If you save one life, you save the world.”
This blog is also posted on medium.com.
