It’s official. Eureka’s
scuttled its plan to establish one or more sanctioned temporary homeless camps
within city limits — three months after it was announced.
After city officials
discovered that the four sites under consideration not only were subject to the
city’s own Local Coastal Program but to the California Coastal Act as well, the
writing was on the wall.
What now? Back to the
beginning.
As detailed by a Humboldt
County grand jury report sent to local media at 5:20 on a Friday night, which
we reported on in Saturday’s edition, Eureka’s now abandoned plan was but a
single phase of a four-step strategy. It’s a strategy for which the city paid a
Sacramento-based consulting firm at least $80,000 to help concoct, and it
revolves around the concept of rapid rehousing.
Rapid rehousing — helping
homeless people off the streets and into permanent housing with an array of
sustaining services — has, according to studies documented by the United States
Interagency Council on Homelessness cited in the report, “a success rate
between 80 and 90 percent, meaning residents are still in permanent housing two
to three years after initial placement.”
It’s the promise of rapid
rehousing that formed the foundation of the city’s four-step strategy:
• “Operation Safe Trails,”
the multi-agency law enforcement sweep which arrested more than 20 people on
April 15 in a sweep of more than 100 homeless campsites in the greenbelt north
of the Bayshore Mall, commonly known as the Devil’s Playground.
• “Operation Helping Hands,”
held on April 30 and May 1, a fair near the Playground to try and make services
accessible to the homeless there. According to local philanthropist Betty Chinn
of the Betty Kwan Chinn Day Center, about a dozen homeless people came to the
first day of the fair and more than 20 came on the second day.
• “Operation Clean Sweep,”
the now-cancelled relocation of the Playground’s population to the
aforementioned temporary camps pending their entry into the rapid rehousing
system ...
• ... via “Operation Home
Stretch,” a transitional housing facility, the repurposed Multiple Assistance
Center — reopening this week 2413 2nd St.
The math is daunting.
As we report in today’s
edition, the MAC’s being set up to initially help up to 40 clients. The grand
jury report describes it as eventually serving up to 100 homeless. Eureka City
Councilwoman Marian Brady told this newspaper in April that there were “580
homeless living in greenways and gulches.”
Where, it seems, a good chunk
of them will stay, at least for the foreseeable future.
The grand jury report had
plenty of more to say, as we reported Saturday. It faults the city for ignoring
$80,000 advice: “Contrary to one of the strongest recommendations of the Focus
Strategies Report, the [Humboldt County Housing and Homeless Coalition] was not
involved or consulted in the plan’s creation.” It proposes the city and county
form a housing trust fund under a joint powers authority to power a unified,
countywide approach to homelessness involving all stakeholders. It has a lot to
say about the amount of cooperation — or lack thereof — between the city and
the county on the issue, an assessment that at least two county supervisors and
one city councilwoman strongly disagreed with in Saturday’s edition.
Leaving any talk of grand,
unified strategies for another time and setting aside finger-pointing, City
Hall and the offices of Humboldt County government are full of people who have
spent months and years grappling with the issue. Let’s assume they’re working
in good faith. Let’s also assume that maybe they ought to follow $80,000 worth
of advice and invite the Humboldt County Housing and Homeless Coalition —
described by the homelessness consultants as “the leader of most of the work
being done to address homelessness in Humboldt County,” according to the report
— to the planning party this time out.
Clearly,
we need all the help we can get.
June 27, 2015
Eureka
Times-Standard
Editorial
No comments:
Post a Comment