How the homelessness crisis hit one of California’s most affordable cities
Jesus Ramirez has spent years searching for housing he can afford in Fresno, California. He jokes that he’ll remain on the streets until he’s old enough for a retirement home. For the last two years, the 47-yearold spent most nights sleeping in front of closed businesses in the heart of California’s Central Valley. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he receives $950 a month in government assistance, but he hasn’t been able to find a place in his budget in Fresno, which had the greatest rent increases of any US city last year.
“I’ve tried,” he said. “But at this point if I haven’t found one of those apartments where it’s based off your income and your mental health, chances are I’m not going to find one.”
Ramirez lost his housing at a time when California’s homeless population surged dramatically amid the pandemic, prompting the state to invest billions in housing and related services to address the longstanding crisis. Fresno, the state’s fifth-largest city and one of its most affordable, saw a substantial rise; the number of unhoused people climbed from 1,486 individuals in 2019 to an estimated 4,239 in 2021, according to city data that both officials and advocates acknowledge is likely an undercount.
Local officials had once considered Fresno a success story – by its own count the city managed to reduce homelessness by nearly 60% between 2011 and 2017, the largest decrease anywhere on the west coast – but numbers started climbing again even before the pandemic. In 2019, Fresno had a higher rate of people living on the streets than any other major city in the US.
Now as rents continue to rise, pushing Fresno’s poorest residents into substandard housing or forcing them to leave the area entirely, homelessness in the city has reached unprecedented levels. Officials have said they’re doing everything they can to find solutions, using state and federal funds to expand housing options, but advocates question the city’s approach and argue that Fresno’s leaders are failing to enact policies that will prevent the crisis from worsening.
“We’re not seeing the urgency that these types of issues merit,” said Grecia
Elenes, a policy advocate with the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, a Central Valley-based advocacy organization. “Almost weekly, without fail, we have a new statistic about how unaffordable the city is, how people born here cannot stay and how they’re stuck living in horrible conditions.”
A growing city
Fresno has historically been one of the most affordable places to live in California, and among the most diverse cities in the US, but it’s also one of the poorest. Rising rent prices amid a statewide housing crunch that’s pushing more and more Californians to cities in the agricultural Central Valley, stagnant wages and a shortfall of nearly 40,000 affordable housing units, part of a vast shortage, have made it even more difficult for unhoused residents such as Ramirez to find their footing.
“There has not been construction of new, affordable housing and rental units that could ever accommodate the growing city,” said Jim Grant, the retired director of the social justice ministry at the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fresno. “We are half a million people, and we do not have living conditions worthy of half a million people.”
Ramirez has been unsuccessfully trying to obtain housing through local programs that offer subsidized rent based on income and mental health issues. He wants to work, but he has been without the medication he needs for his schizophrenia for more than a year, making it difficult to report to a job.
Instead, he uses his limited income for food and a gym membership so he can shower, work out and charge his phone. He knows how to live on the streets by now – he wears clothes that dry quickly and shoes that he can resole and carries a shower curtain to sleep on as it keeps away mold better than a tarp.
Ramirez would like to find a room somewhere, but he has no hope that will ever happen, and he believes he will be unhoused for most of his life.
“I don’t mind sleeping on the floor. I don’t need a [whole] apartment, or an extra spare bedroom for a gaming system,” he said. “I’m OK with the fact, the knowledge, that I’m going to be homeless until I’m old enough to get into a retirement home.”
‘You have to treat people like they’re human’
For the last month, Ramirez has stayed in a room in one of the motels the city has converted into temporary housing for those living on the streets, but he is unsure how long that arrangement will last. The city’s current approach to addressing homelessness involved providing shelter at the converted motels, investing funding in services to reduce the number of people becoming homeless, and a new response team, said H Spees, the city’s housing and homeless initiatives director.
The affordable housing shortage, coupled with rising rent prices, had exacerbated homelessness in Fresno, Spees said, but the rise was not unique to the city. It was the consequence of “multiple system breakdowns in society” that include everything from domestic violence to mental health to addiction.
“We understand it’s not just a Fresno problem. It’s a national problem,” Spees said. “[The] mayor and our community sees homelessness as the number one issue. If we don’t address homelessness, there is a sense we will lose the soul of our city.”
The city was making progress, he argued. Fresno had removed encampments from its freeways, providing housing to those who lived there, Spees said, and launched a homeless response team that works directly with unsheltered residents to connect them to resources.
But advocates argue Fresno’s efforts amount to far too little, upholding the status quo and failing to provide true support and dignity to unsheltered people.
Many who work directly with unsheltered people, such as Dez Martinez, an advocate who spent several years living on the streets of Fresno, question the city’s data and have doubts it ever made the strides in reducing homelessness officials say it has.
“It’s so overwhelming,” Martinez said. “During Covid, the number skyrocketed, but in my time being out there on the streets, I’ve seen nothing but a rise every single year.”
Martinez spends her days advocating for what she refers to as “the street family” through her own nonprofits and roles on various committees, and visiting encampments and the converted motels where everyone knows her by name. A recent incident at one motel highlighted everything wrong with the city’s approach, she said.
During the visit, tensions rose when police responding to a call sought to question an emotionally distraught man. He grew increasingly upset as two officers surrounded him, which compelled Martinez and another motel resident to step in to de-escalate the situation despite the protests of the officers. The pair were able to calm the man down when officers and EMTs could not, and eventually the officers left.
“If I wasn’t there, and if we couldn’t de-escalate and get the other street family members around, they would have all tackled [him]. It would have been ugly,” Martinez said. “You have to treat people like they’re human.”
Programs such as the new homeless response team weren’t helping to foster a more humane approach, she continued. City leaders have hailed the new team, which is also responsible for clearing encampments and connecting residents to housing. Martinez and others are critical, particularly because of a new city law establishing a $250 fine for advocates who enter encampments officials are trying to clear. Martinez said the law showed that Fresno doesn’t actually want to work with advocates like her. The ACLU has sued the city over the law, calling it “outrageously broad” and an assault on advocates’ constitutional rights.
People need housing and wraparound services such as job placements and mental health treatment, Martinez said. Advocates also hope to see the city implement rent stabilization, right to counsel and fair chance housing, policies recommended by a consultant hired by the city.
“The city is just having these BandAid solutions to solve the housing crisis,” said Karla Martinez, a policy advocate with the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability. “They’re purchasing motels, but not providing preventative solutions to prevent people from becoming houseless in the first place.”
“It’s always been a crisis,” said Janine Nkosi, an advocate with Faith in the Valley, a community organization that advocates for safe and affordable housing. “It just doesn’t have to be this way.”
Rent stabilization and stronger protections against eviction would help prevent more people from losing their housing in the first place, advocates argue – something Dez Martinez has seen personally. She’s been housed for several years but is facing an eviction after a dispute with her landlord, who she says has failed to provide safe housing. Though she’s found another place to live, the incident serves as a reminder of how easy it is to lose one’s home.
“What about everybody else that doesn’t have the connections that I have made?” she said. “We need to think about the people that are being evicted. Once you’re out here, it’s the hardest thing to get out of the streets.”