Seeking homeless answers at debate
Activists, authorities urge moderators to press Dems
One of the most important issues to Californians has barely been mentioned in the presidential debates: homelessness.
That may change in Tuesday’s Democratic primary debate on CNN, which starts at 5 p.m. PDT. Housing activists are pressuring the moderators online to ask about housing issues. Most of the 12 candidates on the debate stage have detailed housing plans, but questioners haven’t asked them about the top issue to those most likely to vote, according to a nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California survey out this month.
The enormity of the situation in California, where approximately 90,000 people are homeless, has shocked some candidates.
“What I saw in Oakland was unlike anything I’ve seen before,” former federal Secre
tary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro told The Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” podcast about his visit last month to an encampment in the East Bay.
“I was housing secretary. I traveled to 100 different communities in 39 different states, and I had never seen that many people in one encampment with a combination of essentially shacks — the kind you’d see down if you’d go down to Mexico — plus brokendown trailers and RVs,” Castro said. “The homeless community created its own neighborhood, its own village. It goes to the enormity of the challenge here.”
Last month, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke visited the homeless living on Skid Row in Los Angeles, shortly after President Trump promised to clamp down on encampments there.
“If ever there were a time to be with those who are marginalized or counted out or counted down, it is now,” O’Rourke said the next day during a campaign stop in Oakland. “And to elevate them and share their stories with the rest of the country.”
O’Rourke, like many of the candidates, has a housing plan. The problem, said Paul Boden, a longtime San Francisco homeless advocate, “is that all of their plans are too timid ... with the exception of (Vermont Sen.) Bernie Sanders’ plan.” Sanders proposes to spent $1.48 trillion over 10 years to rehabilitate or build 7.4 million affordable housing units.
“I think that there is a real hesitancy, even among the Democrats,” said Boden, executive director for the Western Regional Advocacy Project, who formerly was homeless.
Boden and other homeless experts and activists offered some questions they would ask the candidates at the debate:
What will you do to restore the level of federal spending on housing?
First, said Boden and other housing advocates, the candidates need to acknowledge the historical root of the homeless problem lies in the huge decrease in federal spending on housing.
In 1978, the Housing and Urban Development Department’s budget was $83 billion. By 1983, it was $18 billion, after cuts by the Reagan administration aimed at shrinking the federal bureaucracy.
The impacts are still being felt. From 1976 to 1982, the federal housing department built over 755,000 new public housing units. But it built less than half that many over the next 20 years, according to Western Regional Advocacy Project. In February, President Trump signed a government spending bill that put the department’s budget at $53 billion.
It was major government spending that helped lift 2 million people out of homelessness during the Great Depression, said Jeff Kositsky, director of San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. By the mid1960s, there was a fraction of that number of homeless people on the street and it remained that way until the cuts of the early 1980s.
Kositsky said he would love to hear candidates say that they are cutting the Defense Department budget by 10% and spending that roughly $70 billion to ensure that “everybody living below the poverty line gets a (federal) housing choice voucher.”
Should our country establish both a legal right to housing and an obligation for people to live under a roof ?
This question comes from Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, cochair of California’s Statewide Commission on Homelessness and Supportive Housing. Steinberg said he wants communities to adopt a legal “right to shelter,” which requires that municipalities provide enough shelter space or other type of housing to accommodate all homeless residents.
It is based on a program that has been run in New York City since the early 1980s. There, it costs $1 billion a year to shelter the city’s 75,000 homeless residents. It would cost at least that much in California.
Steinberg said the program he is envisioning is “like New York City but much better.” Instead of merely sheltering people indoors, he would like to see a program that integrates other health and counseling services and puts residents on “a drive for permanent housing.”
The problem now, Steinberg said, is that “we’re approaching homelessness from the bottom up. We’re doing some good getting some people off the street. But until we acknowledge that we have a public policy that tacitly says it is OK for people to live on the street, nothing will change.”
Would you work to end exclusionary lowdensity zoning?
Local zoning laws in many cities frequently ban building more affordable multifamily housing in some neighborhoods. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, Sanders and Castro are among the candidates who have called for curbing the practice.
San Francisco state Sen. Scott Wiener called such laws a “driver of homelessness.”
“I would ask them, ‘Are you willing to expand federal fair housing laws so they can be used to end exclusionary zoning?’ ” Wiener said.
What do you think causes homelessness?
Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness, would ask this to find out whether the candidates acknowledge that the decrease in federal funding has a role in increasing homelessness.
“If they blame the individual, then it gives us the idea that they’re not interested in doing anything at the federal level to address the problem,” Friedenbach said.
When federal housing chief Ben Carson visited a public housing project in San Francisco last month, he said that “the places that have the most regulation also have the highest prices and the most homelessness,” he said. “Therefore it would only seem logical to attack those things that seem to be driving the crisis.”
Carson rejected Gov. Gavin Newsom’s demand that the federal government invest in more Section 8 lowincome housing vouchers. Instead, Carson said that Washington could offer help to local municipalities to better use the vouchers they had.
“That’s ridiculous,” Friedenbach said. “Local government doesn’t have the resources to take care of (homelessness). What’s happened is that the federal government just washed their hands. And it’s not just a Republican thing. Democrats have done it, too.”