by Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist (read the original in Noozhawk by clicking here)
One of my husband’s all-time favorite songs is the 1969 Hollies hit “He aAin’t Heavy: He’s my Brother.” I think of it occasionally when I pass by someone on the street whom I think is homeless.
If I’m walking out of the market, I’m likely to hand them something from my grocery bag. Sometimes I ask if they know about Transition House. Often I just offer a smile to acknowledge their existence.
However we deal with people who have nowhere to go, we feel helpless.
I’m not above blaming them in my mind, especially if they seem young and capable. But when I acknowledge the many reasons people become homeless, their situations seem harder to judge.
They are likely the result of a combination of fault and no-fault factors, compounded by bad luck, NIMBY, and ineffective government policy at all levels.
Among my close friends and family, I count a father-in-law who died of alcoholism after living close to the streets for many decades; a sister who is making her umpteenth comeback from similar issues in her mid-50s, and a cousin with a disability who has so far been saved from a life on the streets by the grace of extended family.
The homeless population in Santa Barbara County, as measured by the Point in Time count last January, was 1,809. This figure fell slightly compared to 1,890 in 2017, but a larger percentage of the homeless are now unsheltered. That may be the reason we feel like we are seeing more
Over six percent are veterans and more than five percent are unaccompanied youths or young adults.
We struggle to identify a unifying cause. There are the alcoholic homeless, the oxycontin homeless, and the medical-debt homeless. There are senior women whose career was caring for kids and home, and now find themselves on the losing side of divorce.
It’s the cumulative effect of broken cultural and economic systems.
A 2016 Atlantic magazine article by Patrick Sharkey suggests an underlying cause that takes into account the fact that many social conditions have improved while homelessness rises. In his review of Evicted by Matthew Desmond Crown and Ghetto by Mitchell Duneier, Sharkey writes:
“Joblessness still remains disturbingly high in poor urban neighborhoods, but welfare receipt plummeted, then birthrate fell by half, the percentage of students who drop out of high school diminished steadily, and the homicide rate as low as it’s been in 50 years.”
Desmond forces the reader to “consider urban poverty as more than the product of bad decisions, deficient culture, or impersonal economic forces but the product of a system in which profit is derived from poverty.”
The housing assistance waitlist is years long: most who are eligible do not receive it. Welfare payments have shrunk compared to housing costs. For some landlords, it is less expensive to begin eviction proceedings than to perform basic repairs.
Desmond argues that the common thread is the “near-insurmountable hurdles to finding a decent, stable place to live.”
The city of Santa Barbara is focusing this year on assistance for the highest-need individuals. As of the end of May, the Independent’s Nick Welsh reported that a dozen of the city’s 50 most vulnerable individuals had been sheltered.
The city is coordinating a multi-agency homeless program funded by state homeless grants. Their action plan is to alleviate chronic homelessness by continuing to provide interactions, referrals, and help with housing applications, food stamps, birth-certificate applications, Social Security applications, and transportation assistance until there is success.
I believe this strategy — personal and continual — can be effective for the small percentage of chronic homeless. If we provide this for the difficult cases and simultaneously chip away at the low-hanging fruit of low-wage workers who can’t afford decent, stable housing, the two efforts can meet in the middle to provide solutions our unhoused population.
The majority of our local homeless population are locals. Sixty percent have lived in the county more than 10 years or most of their lives. They aren’t heavy: they’re our brothers and sisters.
Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist
Karen Telleen-Lawton is an eco-writer, sharing information and insights about economics and ecology, finances and the environment. Having recently retired from financial planning and advising, she spends more time exploring the outdoors — and reading and writing about it. The opinions expressed are her own.