A long road to a longer-term outcome
I don’t think it depends much on who you talk to these days — 2021 was a year full of surprises and missteps in Chico city government. When this council first took their seats in December 2021, however, it wasn’t too surprising to see the stark contrast between their approach to the housing and homelessness crisis and their predecessors’. They made swift work of tightening restrictions regarding camping in parks and waterways and making punishment for acts of living in public spaces more severe. They ramped up encampment sweeps to take charge of “cleaning up our city” — actions that resulted in amplifying human suffering and making no substantive impact on the problem of homelessness itself. They delivered heavy-handed press conferences, misinterpreting scattered data about housing and homelessness to mean that the shelter and affordable housing we have adequately addresses the need for impoverished people with or without roofs over their heads.
They rescinded a shelter crisis declaration, rejected several proposals to create safe camping/parking areas for the unhoused, directed staff not to work on the BMX site as a potential location for people to camp or rest, admonished the county and service providers for not doing enough to address homelessness, mental health, and addiction. The list goes on. The City of Chico underwent a full-fledged rebranding as a “zero tolerance” community for people who have nothing. They branded the impoverished primarily as “criminals” and “vagrants” who want to live on the streets.
But what happens when the law doesn’t agree with this kind of individualistic bootstraps thinking? In the case of Chico, the law intervenes. A year or more, dozens of closed session meetings and settlement conferences, $650,000 in taxpayer dollars toward legal fees, over a million dollars in taxpayer monies dedicated to a shelter solution so far (with millions more to come, according to our city manager), and a whole lot of broken promises later, the city has reached a settlement that places us squarely in what several of my colleagues refer to as “the homeless services business.”
We’re in it for the long haul, folks, so hold on to your bootstraps.
After years of questioning the legality of Chico’s web of antihomeless ordinances, advocating for safe, clean and managed alternatives to people living in public spaces, and working toward any evidence-informed progress on this issue, I imagine many in our community are struggling not to say, “I told you so.” I don’t blame you.
Regardless of where you land on the issue, and regardless of the painful process that got us here … here we are, Chico. We are implementing a Pallet shelter community with capacity to house every person experiencing homelessness in Chico, per the last Point in Time Survey. People living in this community will receive meals, laundry services, showers, on-site resources, and other facilities that allow them to live with dignity and stability. Enforcement of our updated ordinances can take place, and the processes and parameters for that enforcement are clearer than they have ever been — not to mention that outreach and supervision by a licensed clinical social worker are part of that puzzle.
Where we are is both leaps and bounds better than where we were a year ago, and far and above what was likely to happen in this city without legal intervention to facilitate it. True to form, your city leaders are already taking credit for the positive impacts of this arduous process and assigning blame for the perceived negatives. Still, I hope they at least have the humility to learn from the mistakes of the past year…
Homelessness is a complex problem that is rooted primarily in systems failure, not personal failure. We can’t fix it as a city, but we can do our part. You can’t enforce your way out of a homelessness crisis (or any crisis), and increased suffering and legal liability are the logical result of that kind of thinking. And finally, if we abide the belief that the people around us who have nothing need to take accountability for themselves and their choices — we better be willing to do the same.