Homelessness is not an issue that the majority of Santa Maria’s City Council seems interested in tackling, solving, or taking a bite out of.
To me, it simply sounds as if Mayor Alice Patino would simply like for it to just go away. Patino, by the way, is running for mayor, again. She doesn’t seem to believe that there’s anyone out there interested in becoming Santa Maria’s next top elected official who is more capable than she is and capable of winning an election.
“I guess I’m not a proponent of the housing first issue because I think we recognize that we have a lot of these people that are drug-addicted, they have mental health issues, and I know we have the services there, but if they’re not going to accept the services and we’re still housing them it’s like pouring bad money after bad money down the drain,” Patino said.
So, what’s the answer, Patino? Housing last? Bus them to the desert? Forced services?
Meanwhile, the only “bad” money Santa Maria seems to be pouring down the drain is the roughly $200,000 it’s spent cleaning up homeless encampments—which Assistant City Manager Chuen Wu explained during a recent City Council meeting is something that is difficult to eliminate, an “ongoing issue.”
Cleaning up encampments is a temporary relief of blight, not a permanent solution. And the permanent solutions we attempt as a society are never long-term enough to understand whether they’re effective.
Patino pointed to the tripled number of emergency calls around Hope Village since it opened in March as an area of frustration. Duh! (Not that the city of Santa Maria really helped out with that project.)
It’s absolutely frustrating, but introducing previously homeless individuals to housing, new rules and benefits, and attempting to wrap social services around their “drug-addicted” and “mental health” issues is tricky for obvious reasons.
Give the temporary shelter program a chance to iron out the kinks—rather than rallying to pooh-pooh the project before it’s had the opportunity to feel itself out. However, if homeless advocates want elected officials to do more, we need tangible, accountable goals and successes to hang hats on.
Santa Barbara County touted its transitioning of 1,400 individuals out of homelessness in 2023. Woo!
The total number of homeless individuals counted during the January 2023 annual Point-In-Time Count was almost 1,900. So, the 2024 count must be way lower, right? Wrong. Preliminary estimates have it increasing by more than 200 individuals.
I don’t understand why our statistics suck. We are spending so much money on these programs, and we don’t have numbers that are helpful for defending them, kicking them, or for understanding homelessness.
Help me understand, everyone. How many of the 1,400 folks that “transitioned out of homelessness” fell back into it? What are the expectations for the 94 folks currently residing at Hope Village in Santa Maria? Do we expect that a certain number will be lifted up and out of homelessness forever, some for a short period, and that some will quickly return to the previous lifestyle? We need both accurate and estimated statistics to understand the efficacy of programs like these. Otherwise, success is intangible. How do we measure it?
The Canary is sick of talking points. Send facts to [email protected].
