City responds to criticism of approach to handling homelessness
The Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury found the city of Eureka has been criminalizing the homeless and hasn’t been providing enough short-term shelter to meet the needs of the homeless. The city responded it’s doing everything it can with the resources it has available.
The response is still in draft form and will be shaped further by the discussions that take place at Tuesday’s Eureka City Council meeting, said Greg Sparks, Eureka’s city manager. The crux of the city’s response is that homelessness is a larger problem than the city can tackle on its own while funding remains scarce, but the city has taken steps to begin tackling the issue already.
“Law enforcement is not the solution to homelessness, nor would we want or expect it to be,” the city’s response states. “More resources and options are sorely needed. The homeless crisis in America is complicated and (a) multifaceted challenge of epic proportions.”
“To tip the scale toward real solutions,” it continues, “we need to place more weight on resources like transitional housing, mental health services, and residential detox programs, thus reducing the need for law enforcement to manage the problem.”
One of the findings of the report was that the city and the county weren’t collaborating well on issues related to homelessness, but Sparks said that finding was the result of “a period where we didn’t have regular meetings.” Those meetings had fallen off for a period of time, but the city has reinstituted them since April, Sparks said.
“Those meetings are ongoing,” Sparks said.
At a May meeting of the homeless leadership work group, the county presented the homeless day center facility and program as one of its primary objective, one of the responses states, addressing the grand jury report’s concern about a lack of day-use centers.
“Day centers would provide services and give people a place to be during the day,” Sparks said. Those centers could also include a place for people to keep their things and possibly their pets, too.
The city’s response states it’s not responsible for a lot of the concerns raised in the report and Sparks said that’s because some of the issues raised were addressed to the county.
In terms of short-term housing solutions, Sparks said the Eureka City Council previously expressed it didn’t support the supervised safe parking areas because “in order for those to work well, they really need to be managed.”
Instead, because of recent court decisions, the city isn’t enforcing laws against sleeping in your car or illegal camping.
“You can sleep in places, but you need to leave there in the morning,” Sparks said.
Studies have also shown short-term solutions divert resources from more long-term solutions, he said.
Implementing those long-term solutions is a challenge because the city has little space left for additional housing. The city overhauled its zoning code and is in the process of working on its housing element to make developing housing easier.
The city is focusing on a five-point plan that includes encouraging the construction of mother-in-law units that can be rented out and encouraging developers to develop residential units that are affordable-by-design. However, there may be issues with some of those points as well.
Affordable-by-design units are considered by the state to be units under 500 square feet. The response states that a 400 square foot unit in Eureka should average about $600 per month, but a quick search on Craigslist on Thursday found only one 460 square foot unit that was $640. Other units that were under 500 square feet were far more than $600, including $945 for a 440 square foot unit, $895 for a 384 square foot unit and $925 for a 450 square foot unit.
Sparks said the city can’t enforce the affordability of a smaller unit, but it was putting funding into other programs and projects that will do more to provide job training and housing. Yet sometimes the city encounters issues with finding an appropriate site for those programs because people might not want it in their neighborhood.
The council asked staff to put together its own strategic plan to address homelessness because, up to this point the city has been using the Focus Strategies City of Eureka Homelessness Policy Paper, which emphasizes long-term solutions around providing housing first, as its guide, Sparks said.
“We’ve recognized that’s part of the solution,” Sparks said. “But it’s not all of the solution.”
September 13, 2019
Eureka Times Standard
By Sonia Waraich
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