A ‘tiny home village’ will only waste funds, make things horrendously worse for all
“If you build it, they will come.” But the “they” you wish to remove from the streets will not be the ones who will come and destructively occupy the tiny homes. Please don’t shoot the messenger, but I’m afraid to say that the homelessness problem isn’t going to go away; and a “tiny home village” will only waste a lot of money and make things horrendously worse.
Huge city and county management, maintenance and repair, policing, personal and public safety and a miscellany of serious other liability and risk-management issues will attach. It’ll become a magnet for penny-ante nuisance-settlement lawsuits. If we have unused shelter beds, those still wandering the streets are there because they for their own reasons have forgone shelter.
We are spending millions providing services for the homeless believing that our streets will at some time be cleared. Some of these homeless are the non-dangerous mentally ill who formerly would have been hospitalized but for two pieces of well-intentioned legislation (the ShortDoyle and the Lanterman-Petris-Short Acts) that proved the adage that no good deed goes unpunished. The other group of homeless are permanent vagrants showing no signs of mental illness who simply prefer the life of vagabondry. Neither group will be tempted into shelters. They may from time to time come out of the cold (or heat or rain) for “three hots and a cot” and a shower but will quickly return to open spaces and places.
Homeless individuals trying to eke out an existence on the streets are health and safety hazards to themselves and us alike.
■■ They dine and salvage from dumpsters.
■■ By their panhandling and doorway and sidewalk sleeping they drive customers away from downtown businesses.
■■ Their efforts to stay warm start fires in abandoned buildings that spread to adjacent structures endangering others and putting people out of business.
■■ Their campsites with their litter and rotting food and other offal are magnets for feral critters who propagate and spread disease.
■■ The homeless and their companion pets drop excrement that must be picked up.
■■ Sexual needs get met, but not always in the best of ways. STDs proliferate.
■■ Complicated pregnancies sans prenatal care resulting from such unions and drug and alcohol exposed fetuses and newborns place serious demands on our health care system and often require lifelong medical and public welfare support.
■■ Their encampments and gatherings are often open-air markets for drug trafficking and use.
Two options remain:
1. For the non-mentally ill homeless, put sufficient money into beefing up our law enforcement departments (cities and county) so they can adequately respond — which entails building out more jail capacity and standing up more custodial staff and probation officers. After two or more arrests for violating vagrancy laws the non-mentally ill homeless will face incarceration and a growing rap sheet. They will quickly learn that Kern County is not for them.
2. For the mentally ill homeless put sufficient money into rehabbing our shuttered mental hospitals, or building new ones, and revisiting all laws that resulted in the release of the hospitalized mentally ill. We already have Laura’s Law and its cousin the CARE Act, such as they are, to deal with these mentally ill.
Sound expensive? It is. Mental hospitals are costly. As are jails, where the mentally ill do not belong. But what’s the alternative? Let’s stop pouring money into known failed ideas.
The two well-meaning pieces of legislation that started this whole mess (ShortDoyle and LPS) offered a continuum of half-measures for the soon to be released hospitalized mentally ill that failed from the gate.
We are now and have been for 50 years bearing the brunt of their failures. We psychologist old-timers watched the trainwreck all play out from day one. Now we need to deeply rethink what got us here, where we are, where we need to go, and how to get there.