Standley is executive director of Housing 4 the Homeless and lives in Del Mar. Menashe is a civil rights attorney who lives and works in San Diego. She is co-coordinator of the San Diego Housing Emergency Alliance.
Homelessness continues to skyrocket to unprecedented levels. As of January of this year, there were 10,605 homeless people sleeping outside, in their cars, or in shelters. This number is widely acknowledged to be a significant undercount of the actual number of homeless people. For two full years, San Diego County has had more people experiencing homelessness than are housed. Our elected officials seem unable to do anything effective to address this crisis.
Who are our houseless residents? They are seniors. The number of seniors sleeping outdoors has increased by 22 percent. They now make up 30 percent of our houseless population, and for the first time, 43 percent are homeless. They are people with disabilities, often living on small fixed incomes, often less than $1,200 a month. They are working families who can no longer afford our city’s rising rents.
Politicians continue to use the same failed tactics over and over again to address this crisis: criminalization, like the anti-camping law passed last year, confining people to group shelters that deny them any privacy and spread disease, and housing them in newly approved, overcrowded and unsafe campsites on asphalt that don’t meet basic humane health and safety standards. None of this moves people into housing, and certainly nothing does it to prevent the problem from getting worse.
San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria has taken a similar proposal even further, proposing to use an estimated $32,414,285 in taxpayer money per year ($30 million in operating costs, $1.9 million in annual lease payments, and $18 million in annual conversion costs paid over 35 years) to house 1,000 homeless people on cots in another warehouse. Such a misuse of funds begs the question: why? Who benefits from this plan? Certainly not our homeless neighbors or the community at large.
The Mayor’s proposal is actually more expensive than housing 1,000 people in apartments at current market rates, including intensive support services.
Given these facts, it’s hard to make the case for a shelter. It seems like pursuing one could even be seen as a breach of fiduciary duties. San Diego has a lot of rental properties. According to Zillow, as of early June there were 458 studio or one-bedroom rentals under $1,800, 2,219 two-bedroom rentals under $3,500, and 1,437 two-bedroom rentals under $3,000 in San Diego County.
At this rate, it would cost about $29.34 million per year to convert 1,000 decentralized housing units into single-family homes, including intensive case management and administrative costs. Procurement of 1,000 units could take up to six months, far less time than it would take to convert a warehouse into a shelter. That doesn’t take into account the fact that two buildings adjacent to the shelter have documented chemical leaks into groundwater and soil, putting shelter residents at high risk of exposure to soil vapors. How many more failures are we willing to tolerate like Ash Street?
Shared housing, which gives each person their own room in a house, can reduce costs by up to 25 percent and housing stock is more readily available.
People claim Housing First doesn’t work or is too expensive. The truth is the opposite. According to a model designed by Sam Tsemberis in the 1990s, Housing First has never been implemented in San Diego and would be less expensive than the warehouse alternative proposed by the mayor. The reason for building shelters is supposed to help people find their way off the streets. San Diego has a dismal record of only around 18 percent of people in shelters actually getting housing.
If you were homeless, would you rather have your own room in a house or a cot in a giant warehouse? Why not follow best practices and make housing a reality rather than the costly shelter option?
