Gov. Newsom offers vacant land for homeless shelters
It was two hours after dusk in Santa Ana, and the temperature had dropped 10 degrees since sundown. A line of men and women bundled against the chill curled past the National Guard Armory’s entrance, around the side of the building and into the parking lot, about 150 in all.
Inside, the layout looked like something provided to evacuees after a disaster: row after row of black sleeping pads, lined up edge to edge. But for the people staying here, this is not temporary shelter: Each year for the last decade, from mid-December until the funding runs out in April or May, the same group calls the concrete floor and five bathrooms home.
This is Orange County’s answer to its growing, highly concentrated homeless population. On this day in January, the elderly, people with disabilities and a family were let in early and picked out their sleeping mats first. A trio of men, lined up at least an hour before the shelter doors opened, trickled in with camping gear.
Every December, when the shelter opens, “I’m always amazed. It’s like the first day of school,” said Larry Haynes, executive director of Mercy House, the nonprofit that operates the 10,000-square foot armory shelter. “Everyone says hello like they’re old friends.”
This shelter — on state land, run by a nonprofit agency — should serve as the basic model of what Gov. Gavin Newsom has called for across the state.
On Jan. 8, Newsom issued an executive order that tasked state agencies with evaluating excess land for use as possible emergency homeless shelters. A state map created last year shows more than 1,000 parcels, ranging from a quarter-acre near a San Diego freeway to 70 acres next to a minimum-security prison in Chino.
But the Santa Ana armory has become a harbinger of the problems that mayors and county executives foresee with new emergency shelters in their backyards.
Pushback from local leaders
Last summer, a federal judge lauded Orange County for a cooperative plan to avoid arresting homeless people while directing them toward county housing and health services. The judge called the agreement between the county and homeless activists a model for the rest of the state, if not the nation.
The peace barely lasted into the new year. Santa Ana, the county’s poorest city, filed suit in January, alleging that three other Orange County cities are dropping off their homeless population at the armory in a community that already has a disproportionate amount of shelters. The county has a 400-bed shelter in downtown Santa Ana, with plans to expand it, and the city has a 200bed shelter.
“In recent years, the city of Santa Ana has been compelled to spend millions of dollars from its general fund to address health and safety concerns attributable to the homeless population now living here,” the city said in the lawsuit. “That money would otherwise have been spent on providing core services to residents.”
In several cities and counties contacted by CalMatters, local leaders expressed concern about the governor’s plan to open land for shelters in their jurisdictions. Some see it as ineffective and unfair — offering state land but not paying for the costs associated with a shelter.
The elected leaders say they’ve received little information about how the shelters will operate or who will operate them. They don’t know how people will get to and from the sites. They don’t know how neighbors might react. And they’re still unclear who will pay for it all.
“It’s unlikely the governor is going to come to the city of Oceanside and say, here’s several million dollars to go build a new sobering center, or a new shelter. Just because the governor orders something doesn’t mean anything’s going to happen,” said Peter Weiss, mayor of Oceanside, in northern San Diego County.
The governor’s goals may run into the same notin-my-backyard resistance that faces nearly every local plan for homeless shelters.
Caltrans identified a small piece of excess land in the Bay Area city of Richmond, next to Interstate 80, that could be an emergency shelter. But Richmond Mayor Tom Butt said he’s “not optimistic.”
“The governor’s task force on homelessness decided that cities and counties should be responsible for this,” Butt said. “I think that’s just wrong.”
The state expects to make 100 parcels available this year to governments that apply to use the sites.
Whatever-it-takes mode
Steinberg, Sacramento’s mayor said the counties and regions could work together to solve the homeless crisis, but they haven’t.
“No one would ask the counties or cities to do what they can’t do, but we are in whatever-it-takes mode,” Steinberg said.
James Gore, a Sonoma County supervisor and first vice president of the California State Assn. of Counties, said there could be electoral consequences for officials that push forward with shelter plans. “Diving into homelessness and affordable housing is a good way for elected officials to get voted out of office in a world run by NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard),” he said.
Nevertheless, Gore said the governor’s shelter plan is urgently necessary, especially since local efforts haven’t been effective.
“I would look at my colleagues who are criticizing the governor and say the time for criticism is over. There was local control, and there haven’t been results,” he said. “For cities and counties that think they don’t have enough money, they have a reckoning coming.”
Part of the problem, Steinberg said, is how Californians think about the word “shelter.”
“Shelter has been and in many ways continues to be a pejorative term,” Steinberg said. “It implies to people who are skeptics that the only kind of shelter is a long-term, dusty, mis-run facility where people are helpless without the ability to get long-term housing.
“That’s a stereotype and it may have been an accurate stereotype at one point. But now, when we say shelter, we’re talking about navigation centers, where the point is to gain stability to get off the streets permanently.”
It’s unclear what kind of shelters would be built on excess state land. The governor’s office has mandated that they all have “service provisions” such as housing assistance and medical care.