The history of
homelessness in Santa Ana is a story half told.
Since governments
are understandably loath to admit spending the taxpayers’ money on programs
that don’t work and are identical to programs that haven’t worked either
elsewhere or in the past, they simply do not make such admissions. When more than one level of government
is involved, the problem becomes exponentially greater; partisanship compounds
the problem even more. Worse, the
careers of capable, well-intentioned people can be stymied, internally because
of the psychological dissonance caused by such concealment, and externally when
political tides shift unexpectedly.
I’ve attached as
an exhibit a position paper on welfare reform adopted by the County Board of
Supervisors in early 1997. Not a
single principle offered involves any reform by the County; they all involve
instructions with which the Federal and State governments “should” comply. In a public meeting held soon after
implementation to demonstrate how changes in OCTA routes and rates were
responsive to the needs of the workforce newly caused by Workfare, I forced
Director Doty to admit the County had failed willfully and utterly to comply
with their own Principle 21, intended to “insure the safety of children” even
by including childcare as an intermediate destination in its new routes. Nine million dollars in funds expended
upon a bevy of experts failed to produce a single point to be placed upon layer
11 of the new OCTA System map.
Then, as if such an abject failure had no bearing upon the outcome
desired, childcare was simply omitted from consideration in the final
plan. This is a pattern that
repeats and perpetuates itself in the Board’s dealings with both the Cities and
the citizens “beneath” it.
After the closure
of State Mental Hospitals, here and elsewhere, bi-partisan committees
addressing the growing calamity developed the reigning government paradigm for
helping the homeless: the Federal Continuum of Care (COC): Given the job market
at the time, it was, unlike finding competent childcare, at least possible, if
not probable. It was a reasonable,
economical way to prevent homelessness, but Orange County (OC) quit
participating, largely on the principle of prioritizing tax reductions.
Back to the future…
In that Federal
Continuum of Care, during the first two weeks the guests sought work, while the
shelter provided "two hots (meals) and a cot" and very little else.
Guests were self-referred, and as a result, the shelter was to require only ID to
make a bed available to anyone on an "immediate need" basis. Guests were allowed to re-enter the
emergency level every thirty days if they couldn't graduate to transitional.
At the very least, this officially embodied the sentiment that employment
had everything to do with affording affordable housing.
During the next three
months in a transitional shelter, provided real employment was secured, one
could enjoy, in addition to the hots and the cot, job development, case
management, and generally some flexibility regarding the rules as required by
one's employer. Usually, a referral from an Emergency shelter was required to
get into Transitional (plus the job) so guests with drug, alcohol and mental
health problems usually got weeded out.
This is where the
bulk of the social work was done, because the transitional shelter staff had to
predict which employed people would be able to stabilize their social network
to rejoin it. In this Continuum, no licensed social worker (MSW) was
reduced to handing out "expired" lists of shelters, nor did they
offer classes in "job readiness" to illiterates. The guests who
were not only employable but additionally "socially workable" would
be referred on to the long-term shelter. The rest could try for an
"extension." Note:
that’s why all the MSW’s!
Even reading this now seems cruelly ironic.
Now, no one but a
petroleum site remediation engineer can get a job in two weeks or less, and
temp-to-hire has all but eliminated permanence in the blue-collar
workplace.
Worst of all, five
years ago the Fed ceased funding the 14-day emergency program and as a result
the entire Continuum of Care in the OC has no entry point.
Likewise, there
are no County-funded long-term shelters, so the opportunity to rebuild was
lost. The short ninety days now offered by transitional shelters is as
clear a guarantee of failure as is counting the transition to another transitional shelter as a
successful outcome. Charging money
exacerbates the problem by forcing shelters to accept those who can pay in
preference to those who can succeed.
Even if most transitional programs didn’t charge $200/month or more,
most homeless citizens usually have old and new accounts to settle that will
require well over three months savings to resolve!
The idea that
OC's entire "homeless services" program is missing the leg that does
the heavy lifting has always puzzled me. Surely the well-intentioned
administrators and bi-partisan experts commissioned by Congress to develop the
COC would never countenance programs that continue to collect Request’s For
Proposals (RFP’s) from homeless services providers knowing that taxpayer money
was being largely wasted – it would be like funding workfare routes without any
provision for childcare.
In Orange County,
if we’re in for a penny, we’re headed for a pound. In each case we're assured
that it is meritorious to save “even one child,” and we then fashion
constraints that insure that an always awaited and necessarily larger supply of
funds be provided to accomplish smaller and smaller portions of an ever
increasing task. By week two, the “one Child” has left the building.
Entanglement
In management theory,
this is called entanglement: the supposed rationality of marginally increasing
our investment every year yields no price mechanism whereby a bid upon ending
the process can occur. It is exactly this mechanism that enabled the
Emperor to purchase invisible accessories for his invisible clothes. No one is being paid to tell the
truth that nothing plus nothing is still very expensive when purchased through
the RFP process when “stakeholders” help draft the RFP’s.
Instead, we are
told that the basic task faced by virtually every other citizen and
undocumented immigrant, that of becoming an economically viable agent in the OC's
economy, is something with which the homeless need the expensive professional
assistance of proven provider agencies.
Their homelessness has rendered them incapable of economic rationality,
while leaving them subject to arrest as completely sane!
Since no homeless
person I've met in 20 years would opt to pay for the services of either a social
worker or a case manager, not to mention a Orange County Director of Homeless
Prevention, it is clear that no stakeholder that values such employees could
tolerate policies that might include the enormous cost savings to be had from eliminating
them and paying the homeless instead.
From a
mental-health perspective, conservatorships are no longer granted for simple (economic)
homelessness, and as a result, public policies denying the capacity or sanity
of the homeless are clearly discriminatory. To deny the homeless a role
in the selection and purchase of just those services they need to exist and
become un-homeless seems to me to be a forcible bundling of services that
should be prohibited. When the
question of how to audit cost-effectiveness (in ending homelessness) finally
comes up, voters will readily accept the necessity of rationing, especially
when the entirely anecdotal nature of the OC’s “accidental successes” become
apparent to all.
To Wit: To force a competent adult to accept
unwanted social services to avoid starving or dying from a lack of sleep is a
criminal theft of tax dollars and an un-American, Gulag-style holdover from
the time when the homeless were exclusively the recently de-institutionalized
mentally ill.
Consumers without a choice are not customers…
Today's shelter
provider is not a licensed mental-health provider; homeless services are no
longer largely mental-health services, and no homeless services provider with
whom I'm familiar is authorized by W&I 5150 to invalidate the choices
homeless persons make. Like every other service provider in our economy, shelter
providers must compete for business in the marketplace order to remain relevant,
or become mental hospitals. If
there is no “middle ground” in the sanity of the homeless, why should there be
a moral middle ground where the white of well-spent taxes becomes the grey
backwater of waste? There is therefore, no legal justification for
shelters as they currently operate.
If the homeless are not patients, they are the public – they are
customers!
The Ninth Circuit
Court has already held that homelessness is an involuntary condition, deserving
of the same protections of race, religion and sexual orientation. The separate and unavailable nature of
services provided to the homeless, from County bathrooms to the City library,
will likely fall before adjudication as civil rights issues. The increasing and unpredictable effect
occasioned by the intervention of medical professionals will soon quantify the
health costs of being denied bathrooms twelve hours each day and the use of
City Library computers (to obtain healthcare information and services)
entirely. Impassioned physicians
working with the slighted poor make incontrovertible expert witnesses. Taxpayers who have never seen a tax
decrease (jurors) will never accept any administrator’s excuse of “lower
taxes.”
I can’t admit they’re chickens cause I’m stealing the
eggs…
Shelters, their
employees, and the homeless are competing for scarce resources. As a result the most highly placed shelter
provider directors are largely involved in professionalizing or certifying the
staff who measure and supervise the ordinary acts of eating, sleeping and
obtaining housing. Since failure is not an option in the “certified” or
“licensed” professions, such shelter employees are usually charged with
creating reasons and even conspiracies to explain why rational adults would
willingly decline to do any of these ordinary things properly. No one
ever got fired for exiting “bad” homeless people.
The simple fact
that both the funding and operating instructions for the shelter comes from the
various governments (often in opposition to one another) precludes the obvious
conclusion that government is to blame.
Self-preservation clouds any perception of wasteful futility on the part
of the staff; it is therefore, a foregone conclusion that only the homeless are
left to bear the burden of blame for a purely “personal” failure.
There is a
certain tragicomedy to watching the staff stumble anew each pay period over a
conclusion even the completely insane homeless person (it happens) regards as
manifestly inevitable: It's their own fault they're homeless. It's almost
as if the staff earns their unmerited paycheck as compensation for being
disappointed so resoundingly, and even repeatedly, by the failure of the
homeless to thrive even as they were so carefully and laboriously
supervised. The fact that such
supervision, by its very nature, is unnecessary and even counter-productive is
the real crisis in homelessness.
When I attended a
shelter providers forum with a reporter from the Register, it confirmed my
suspicions is my that most of the $13 million then spent on County
"homeless" programs was expended on "certified service
providers" or squandered on a heavy-rotation group of pleasant families
who provide "successful" outcomes for transitional shelter operators
by "transitioning successfully" to another such shelter when their
time is up. Fully two hours of
that meeting dealt with apportioning credit for a non-program!
No one will
insist on an independent audit of (un-duplicated) outcomes across the entire
continuum of care when all it would show is the obvious and era-ending
conclusion that terminating the inputs and outputs of a process will lead to a
cyclic reprocessing of a largely static workload. As long as government funds are provided to "stakeholders"
whose competence is assumed solely by virtue of membership in a
"public-private partnership," those funds will guarantee only
membership and never competence.
The EBT Cash for Drugs Program
Every good
government program depends upon adversarial processes to insure competence -
homeless services lacking such adversarial audits will wastefully devolve as
did the Surplus Agricultural Commodity programs of the 70's: Crops
targeted as a result of national farm policy were diverted to the poor as a
replacement of expensive and wasteful agricultural subsidy programs. That
hard-to-manage program was replaced with an EBT card, which is much cheaper to
[mis]manage. The cash such cards dispense is hardly surplus. The drugs such cash often purchases
virtually guarantee the destruction of yet another generation of poor
children. Family is always best in
the OC only because foster care costs real money. It goes without saying that the County tolerates toxic
parents because we’re toxic.
Apparently it is
far too "unmanageable" a task to insist that EBT funds recipients
provide explanations for their purchases, or that case managers who routinely
budget their own monthly expenses and pay their own annual income taxes are
incapable of managing that same part of their client's cases. That would
actually be useful, if impolitic. It is our County's tacit acceptance of the
slow destruction of children at the hands of parents who maintain their drug
habits with our tax dollars that will earn them the enmity of the voters.
A simple solution
adopted by both Los Angeles and San Diego counties could have a profound impact
upon the health of our children and bring needed cash to our local
economy. It might be the only
program that could reduce the dependence of the homeless upon the Civic Center. The SNAP Restaurant Meals program would
allow “Food Stamp” recipients to use their EBT cards in participating
restaurants. Inasmuch as the
homeless have neither refrigerators nor 24/7 restrooms to prepare or preserve
ingredients under the current program, it makes little difference that the
Camping ordinance makes cooking their food illegal. Inasmuch as every restaurant participating in the program
has a restroom for patrons, it is a wonder that the County still insists that
it be paid for implementing a program after the deadline for funding
implementation has passed. Like
childcare, one wonders whether the Supervisors even understand the necessity
for procedures long required by their own Public Health department. A recent outbreak of Shigella, a
disease caused by fecal contamination, resulted in two inspections of our kitchen
and a demand for the addresses of everyone who serves in the Civic Center. Overlooked was the obvious cause:
people without restrooms between 6PM and 6AM are still environmentally aware. Reaching for lids while fetching coffee
before the restrooms open at 6AM, they dutifully replace the extra lid(s) when
two or three hot-cup lids issue from the dispenser. Likewise, culturing the bottom of stir-stick boxes would
instantly promote the substitution of wrapped straws, an option we have long
recommended. Otherwise Shigella
could spread and people with lawyers might fall ill.
Cash for drugs
aside, let’s move, as promised, to our own County’s dealings with homeless
children’s mental health. As you
read this, please understand that families that stayed at our house were given
full checks, even though the County knew full well that they paid nothing for
room and board. We alone rewarded
their kids for homework well done, and six years of repeated requests for CPS
to safeguard children were ignored.
Our County’s million dollar theft from homeless
mentally-ill children…
In December 2007,
all 46 children who had lived at our house were temporarily housed with their
parents at the Armory while we replaced our bathroom floor. When, given
the continued lack of supervision over EBT drug purchases, I refused Kelly
Lupro's request two months later to re-house those same children of drug
addicts back in my back yard, a conspiracy evolved that fraudulently diverted millions
in State Proposition 63 funds rather than spending a single dollar of County
money for an emergency shelter for families with children. At one point Mark
Refowitz told me he couldn’t discuss this without his lawyer being present! A case manager told me he was afraid he
was going to jail. The Senate
President Pro-Tem said it was Senator Lou Correa’s problem. I’m still waiting to hear back
from the Grand Jury and the Attorney General! In December of 2012, I did hear back from the Director of
the California Child Law Institute at USD: When these children deal with the
stigma of their diagnosis in a few short years, applying either for college or
for low-income housing, this issue will resurface:
The Renew Program
of Providence California Healthcare accepted one healthy child from each family
as being so seriously mentally ill that the entire family qualified for food,
rent and therapy, courtesy of the State. Obviously Prop. 63 is a zero-sum
game: millions accordingly did not go to families who truly needed it because
of mental-illness.
OC’s depravity makes HBO’s Lineup
HBO launched a
documentary by Alexandra Pelosi (Nancy’s daughter) about the Motel Children of
Orange County. Featured in that documentary was Zack Brewster. Zack is
one of the mentally-ill children whose family could have desperately used Prop.
63 funds had they not been squandered to prevent the public from seeing the
Board of Supervisor's true priorities when it comes to homeless children.
Each one of those
46 kids from our place was at grade level. All of them had been seen by UCI Pediatrics, by MSW Interns
from USC, and when needed, psychiatry residents from UCLA. Six of them
performed on stage at Carnegie Hall, making the front page of the LA Times.
Not one of them was seriously mentally ill under the definitions within
Prop. 63 - I should know - I was moved off the OC Prop. 63 steering committee,
ostensibly for failing to update the email address I have had for 20 years…
Beyond declining
to establish emergency shelter(s) for families with children, the County simply
opted out of the emergency shelter business altogether. As the federal government ceased most
of the funding for emergency shelters in the OC, the county declined to
maintain those resources. While
implementing a “two-week, once in a lifetime” motel voucher program, the County
simultaneously directed the Karen Roper, then Director of Homeless Services, to
publicly enumerate the number of emergency shelter beds then available in the
OC.
1512, then 957, and finally 547. The real number is 0!
Inventing a new
Continuum of Care that included, quoting Kelly Lupro, OC's Director of Homeless
Prevention, "a coalition of all those who have a heart for the
homeless," the County pretended first that there were 1512 emergency beds,
and then 957, and finally 547! Three formal, totally untrue statements that empowered OC
Cities to unconstitutionally arrest 1000’s of people for “camping,” while
misleading ER’s and grandparents and even city staff all over the County of Orange.
Those poor people
still believe there’s a place for crippled elders, accident victims, and
families of toddlers whose evictions were illegal. Any Supervisor asked would get Kelli Lupro to confound the
issue by involving 211 – which actually tries to tell the truth! But a direct, disingenuous answer is
what we voted for, especially on so fundamental an issue. This is why I accused Ms. Roper and the
then Board of Supervisors of lying:
After an Open Government
funding request, it was revealed that the only adult emergency beds funded in
the OC were the six in La Habra for patients discharged from ETS, and around
180 beds funded by a $25 fee added to marriage licenses to aid in the
prosecution of domestic violence. Although the OC Cares Partnership calls
these emergency shelter beds, the County correctly admits there are no
"low threshold non-sub-population restricted beds" in the OC.
None – There are no county emergency beds in the OC as a matter of both
design and deceit. As of
today, nothing has changed. There
is nothing except the privately funded religious hospitality houses offered by
the Salvation Army and us. The
Armories are really federal Cold Weather Shelters.
OC Caught with its hand in Laguna’s pocket…
One of the most
interesting aspects of this entire debacle for Cities involved the creation of
the Laguna City (parking lot) Shelter. Rather than admit the structural
failure of OC's "Homeless Prevention Program," some of us heard a
rumor that the OC was going to take credit for the “beds” in Laguna and simply
equivocate their way around the embarrassing goose egg of total failure.
We called Laguna and promised that each person leaving the Santa Ana
Armory when it closed would be given an OCTA day pass and encouragement to
accept the County's invitation to relocate to Laguna.
Laguna called the
County in horror and only then was the County was forced to admit the above
caveat. It was at this point that we invited the Register reporter and 10
homeless people from the Armory to attend the Shelter Provider Forum. As
predicted, not one shelter provider in the OC could offer a single emergency
bed - largely because such services are entirely unfunded. While the
County has unashamedly annually taken credit for the Federal Cold Weather
Shelter Act (Armory) program, it has never extended the four-month effort by a
single month. Nor the corresponding County Redirection program for
families with children, which provided a motel voucher which was often used to
house parents with proclivities toward drug, spouse and child abuse. Recently, funding cuts and competition
have forced the County to house such families communally in a church setting.
A song and dance about saving our future…
Even that
Redirection Program, capably run by Mercy House and credited with "saving
our future" by Boardmember Nguyen was not important enough to be funded
the other eight months of the year. Perhaps "Truth in Spending"
could incline Nguyen to admit that we're actually saving just one third of our
future: the cheap third. Incredibly, she herself could have easily saved
another third of our future had she not spent discretionary funds on a
Vietnamese song and dance troupe of dubious cultural pedigree (but obvious
political utility) in her district.
It's as if we
called ourselves Christian and then closed all hospital emergency rooms in
order to emphasize Christ's miracle healings. As a Christian who has seen
the books, I can promise you that, except for the federal Armory program, the Salvation
Army and the OC Catholic Worker, Christians here have little opportunity to
become involved in emergency shelters even though the County still insisted
recently that there are more than 500 such shelter beds.
Our Crucifixion of ER Social Workers alongside the
Homeless…
Now that year-round
emergency shelter beds are non-existent, real emergency rooms are changing to
reflect that reality. Their almost total inability to obtain State
mandated emergency shelter for those discharged from emergency rooms had
manifested itself in a doubling of the death rate for homeless persons where
their MSI Coverage was merely "pending." An emergency room
which cannot obtain either reimbursement for recuperative referrals or a
legally-required shelter destination for a homeless patient will be
understandably reluctant to treat such patients, even if they are now insured
by the CalOptima Medicaid program.
Obviously, public
policy based upon the saintliness and voluntary poverty of hospital
administrators and physicians is simply the most depraved form of indifference
perpetrated upon the ill poor by the County’s refusal to maintain either a
County Hospital (which would be required to care for Mexican citizens) or
reimbursement for recuperative care given to the mentally ill and substance
abusers.
One Santa Ana
hospital repeatedly bribed a homeless H-MRSA patient addicted to cigarettes
with bottles of Vicodin™ if he would simply leave their ER. The
alternative was attempting to persuade him to remain in isolation for two weeks
without contaminating everyone else while he sneaked off to have a smoke.
Public Health finally had to confine the patient legally at UCI until the
infection was resolved. The H-MRSA infection has closed hospitals all
over the country; so the idea of bribing a human source of deadly contagion by
doping them with narcotics seems to me to paint a much truer picture of the
kind of healthcare the OC's public policy decisions have earned us. The
rats leaving our sinking ship have the plague, and OC's healthcare policies
simply don't provide ongoing coverage as a matter of "principle."
A suggestion: stop the SAPD from herding the homeless toward
our houses!
Given the ongoing
fraud perpetrated upon the homeless and the City of Santa Ana by the County of
Orange, we now ask the City Council what provision the current City plan makes
for the homeless. Now that the
County has officially admitted that there are no "low threshold,
non-subpopulation restricted emergency beds in the OC" it might be time to
reconsider Santa Ana’s application of the Camping and Storage ordinances
The decisions in
Tobe vs. Santa Ana, or Jones vs. LA should incline all OC Cities to cease the
cruel fiction of arresting the homeless for "camping" on public
property. No real defender of private property rights could condone the
alternative: trespass upon private property. Like the emergency room in
the example above, however, police are often pressured to "evict" the
homeless from public property to decrease their visibility, resulting in a very
real increase in contagion and crime in the very neighborhoods the police are
sworn to protect.
Like Laguna, cities
really cannot obtain a defensible definition of (non)residence for particular
homeless persons. I begged the
ACLU to stand down from a lawsuit in Laguna that was to challenge a similar
definition - I proposed that the wiser course was to share such concerns with City
government while trusting in the City Council's ability to evolve a solution
it's voters would continue to fund.
Now that the ACLU has established a Santa Ana office, I’m both certain
and grateful that my influence will no longer matter.
In the past,
Santa Ana ceded a basement floor of a parking structure to create a
"bantustan" where the homeless were denied needed public safety
services. The disorder that followed as sure as night follows day was, of
course, blamed upon the homeless, and used as Santa Ana's rationale for the
"tested" camping ordinance it copied from the National Park Service.
That an ordinance
intended to keep vacation reservations at Yellowstone or Yosemite safe from
overcrowding would be used against the homeless is morally problematic. Such ambiguity on the part of Santa Ana
City government drives a wedge between the homeless and community-oriented
policing efforts and contributes greatly to the difficulties inherent in
counting the homeless or carefully assessing their situation in order to
quantify their public policy needs.
Everyone involved
in the annual PIT process knows that the count is deeply flawed and that the
adjustment needed to make the numbers grow to respectable levels is political
and not statistical in motivation.
No city can simultaneously arrest and enumerate the poor. Asking the police to act as either
social workers or trash collectors debases their status as those who honorably
defend and serve the safety of all people, and impairs their ability to develop
the sources among the homeless that make traditional policing possible.
We propose that
the City allow the homeless the use of parts of those employee-parking
structures purchased with low-income housing funds, but only from 6PM to 6AM.
By reserving a few parking spaces as a storage area fenced and locked
from 6AM to 6PM, we might avoid the spectacle of great mountains of personal
belongings wrapped in turquoise bags that have so offended public
sensibilities. If porta-potties
were lined up at the back of such storage areas, restroom traffic would insure
that people storing their belongings would collect them. A simple surveillance camera trained
upon the porta potties and the belongings could assist in the certain
conviction of thieves and those using the restrooms for prostitution. The County isn’t going to help them,
ever.
People unprotected by shelter need police badly.
The primary
complaint I hear from the "sane" homeless is an absence of
appropriate police intervention. Every Sunday I have to fund the
reacquisition of California ID's for 10 to 15 of my guests: nearly 5% of the Civic
Center homeless experience identity theft on a weekly basis! Any talk of encouraging
such persons to work on their resumes is simply a cruel conceit. Also stolen are their cash, phone,
blankets, even their life…a few years ago an SAPD officer told a homeless woman
that they could no longer afford to investigate rapes among the homeless, just
like fender-benders among the undocumented.
A program
apparently recently terminated, that of taking un-abandoned belongings because
a particular homeless person has “too much stuff,” was a profound impediment to
developing a pro-police attitude among the homeless. Or the Bar.
The 10 year plan is a fraud plagiarized from
Minnesota. Wrong city, wrong plan.
Santa Ana, along
with every other City in the OC, is still waiting for their part in the
County's 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness in Orange County.
Moreover every
City in the OC (except Irvine) contributed greatly to the problem of
homelessness by spending low-income housing funds on everything but low-income
housing. In Santa Ana, such funds were diverted at the U.S. Cabinet level
to complete the construction of a palatial City jail intended to profitably house
"stateless" deportees. The OC variant of the nationwide
10-year-plan [copied from Minnesota] still has no funding and no dedicated administration,
so it's really just a pipe-dream, and not a plan.
The idea that an
executive capable of eliminating homelessness in the OC would even grace such
impolitic plagiarism with a perusal strains belief. The political
environment of Minnesota is liberal and Lutheran; we could have done far better
by stealing a successful plan from a City with conservative mega-church
attendees.
The idea that the
Board would constrain any executive to the budget-less execution of such an
irrelevant document demonstrates their utter lack of support for the position. Any competent executive with OC public
policy experience would decline. Any City with real homeless experience
will encounter only the lip-service of County self-preservation.
The Board passes the Buck…
Now all the Board
needs is to do is blame the plan's failure on a lack of cooperation by the very
cities it never included in the planning process. Inclusion would have to provide an accounting for the costs
cities have born because of the County’s inaction, but it won’t. Lied to, the cities will likely blame
the homeless who interestingly enough, share the exact same position:
financially un-included and allegedly uncooperative.
Recently I sat
through a Board of Supervisors meeting with the father of Kelly Thomas, the
Mayor of Fullerton and a reporter from the Register. As two of the Supervisors congratulated themselves for their
humanitarian intentions and progressive politics, we watched in dismay as they
denied and virtually denounced a completely reasonable request from the Mayor
to afford him a “few weeks to develop support within the community.” I told the reporter that the Fullerton
shelter was thereby doomed and recounted as an example my own experiences in
thwarting the legitimate public policy concerns of our own Mayor Pulido.
Nevertheless,
even taking the same people who bungled the last twenty years of smaller
non-plans at their word, our Plan did not intend to provide a single emergency
bed until 2013, and it failed predictably at that. Armory beds are funded by
the Federal Government, despite the clamor of the some Board incumbents to take
credit for them. Simply put, at least for Homeless 101: Orange County, as a
County, provides not one ordinary, 1993-style emergency bed; not for the sick,
nor for families with toddlers or infants, not for single women or men, not
even for grandmothers who worked their whole life caring for others. I
would suggest that the very last thing we should do is to allow such administrators
to "save our future."
People actually die of exposure in summer too!
It takes a County paycheck (or an MSW) to
pretend that an ever larger, ever younger (and older crowd) of poor is somehow
benefitting from an increasingly irrelevant expenditure of scarce resources on
criminals and drug addicts and social workers.
Common Ground
The fact that so
many other cities refer and transport their homeless to Santa Ana coupled with
the fact that many of the social services the County claims credit for either
don’t exist or are administered in a way that virtually guarantees litigation,
I’d like to propose two avenues that have not been regularly implemented in
Orange County:
First, taking a
page from the Board’s own example, the City might wish to quantify just how
much such County mal-administration is costing our City, and its homeless. It would be refreshing if just one
major stakeholder began to question why a responsibility so clearly given to
the County by the State Legislature has been so completely dismissed.
Second, we
know that you love the city of Santa Ana. Please know that we do as well, as do
many of the homeless we know. We
Catholic Workers often quote Dorothy Day who said “the only solution is love.” We want to
ask you tonight how your love for our city extends to these citizens of our
city. Because, to use another of
Dorothy’s favorite quotes, “Love in
action is harsh and dreadful compared to love in dreams. “
Homelessness is not a problem to be solved, but people to be cared
for.
In that spirit, we would like to invite you to our house for opportunities
for conversation and relationship, away from the formality of tonight. We
invite you to break bread with the homeless any night at 5:30PM, or for
breakfast on Sunday at 9:30AM.
Thank you for this gathering, and may it be the beginning of a new
relationship of trust and care.
