On homelessness, focus on bringing people indoors and saving lives
Opinion editorial by myself and Elizabeth Funk
Note: This oped appeared in the San Diego Union Tribune on April 17, 2024. Elizabeth Funk is the CEO and founder of DignityMoves, a San Francisco-based nonprofit working to end unsheltered homelessness. She lives in San Francisco.
California has for years systematically neglected to build adequate shelter options for its homeless residents. The result has been the emergence of a permanent unsheltered underclass, packed into unsafe encampments and brutalized by nature, pollution, and criminal violence. We have an urgent moral necessity to re-prioritize building quality spaces for bringing people indoors and saving lives.
Senate Bill 1395 by state Sen. Joshua Becker, D-Menlo Park, can help.
Today, California provides less than four shelter beds for every 10 homeless residents compared with eight beds for every 10 in the rest of the U.S. As a result, 123,423 homeless Californians are forced to wait outside and, as they do, endure horrors beyond description.
Unsheltered homelessness is linked to drastically increased rates of chronic and infectious diseases like diabetes, coronary artery disease, typhus and hepatitis A. About 20 percent of the roughly 7,000 annual homeless deaths in California are from murders and accidents, including car accidents and hypothermia. Many of these deaths would likely have been avoided had victims simply been indoors.
Unsheltered homelessness also creates lasting trauma that makes resolution more costly — and delayed resolution more inhumane. Assaults, including sexual assaults, are endemic at many encampments, and unsheltered homeless women are known to intentionally begin using methamphetamines at night to ward off potential attackers. The longer someone lives in these conditions the more likely they are to develop a substance use and/or psychiatric disorder, at which point the cost of resolving their homelessness nearly doubles. It’s no coincidence that 39 percent of homeless Californians are considered chronically homeless (the most severe and difficult to resolve type of homelessness) compared with just 18 percent in the rest of the U.S. We’re subjecting them to years of trauma outdoors.
The solution to homelessness is a permanent home. However, building a new unit of permanent supportive housing in California costs over $600,000 on average, and closer to $1 million in cities with the largest homeless populations. Scaling permanent housing at those prices could reasonably cost over $100 billion and will ultimately require a major federal investment and a years-long building boom to provide. Californians, least of all our homelessness neighbors, can’t wait that long.
San Jose and other California cities are instead beginning to build interim supportive housing to stabilize and save lives. Interim supportive housing provided by organizations like DignityMoves and others can, when streamlined, provide residents with their own private bedroom for roughly the same cost as providing a cot in an old-school, dormitory-style shelter (about $50,000 per unit). The increased privacy and autonomy are popular among homeless residents and units are rarely turned down when offered.
SB 1395 would help California cities expand interim supportive housing and other shelter options by exempting new interim housing and shelter projects from unnecessary environmental regulations, allowing these projects to compete for existing state programs; and by eliminating and extending sunset clauses for recently passed — and popular — shelter streamlining legislation.
SB 1395 is sponsored by San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, and is strongly supported by San Francisco Mayor London Breed, Dignity Moves, the Bay Area Council, and the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association. It takes a village, and we want to see these ideas implemented from San Diego all the way to our Oregon border. Despite concerted efforts to increase housing production, California’s budget, land and zoning limitations inhibit sufficient permanent housing construction. Fresh ideas and belief in the idea that a solution is possible will put an end to ever-growing unsheltered homelessness.
By empowering local governments to act more decisively and efficiently, SB 1395 stands to significantly reduce the time it takes to transition individuals from the streets to safe, supportive environments. The practical impact of this cannot be overstated: faster construction would mean quicker relief for those suffering in the harshest conditions imaginable. It would translate into lives saved, spared from the dangers of exposure to the elements, violence and risk for chronic and life-threatening illnesses. Moreover, the act’s emphasis on relocatable, non-congregate housing options reflects a deep understanding of the dignity and privacy needed to foster recovery and reintegration into society. The proposed legislation addresses the crisis on our streets with the urgency it demands.
For too long, California policy makers have accepted unsheltered homelessness as the unfortunate but acceptable cost of business as usual. The results speak for themselves. California has a moral obligation to prioritize bringing people indoors and saving lives. SB 1395 will help.