Fees will fix homelessness, right?
Thank you to SJPC volunteer, Bella Ahwal, for writing this piece!
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At the 2p April 29th City Council Meeting, Mayor McCarty FINALLY agendized homelessness, as he promised he would…it only took him 4 months after being elected!
Brian Pedro (pictured here), director of the Department of Community Response, presented a Homelessness Workshop, essentially to announce the strategies the Department plans to implement across the City.
Pedro presented the following strategies:
Slowly decrease funding to congregate shelters as they shift funding to long-term interim housing where clients pay a program fee/rent
Maximize efficiencies to serve more people, put those dollars back into systems to create more services
Increase prevention and diversion program funding
Supportive service model that uses currently available services
Using public/private, hospital, and faith-based partnerships
“Safe parking” sites, so people can park overnight in their vehicles in designated spaces, with the use of program fees from City Motel Program to help sustain services
For this write-up we will be focusing on proposal #1, regarding interim housing and the plan to charge people rent for staying in those communities. Interim housing is a form of long-term housing where folks can stay for an extended time period, if needed. Even though it isn’t classified as a shelter, it is typically not classified as permanent housing either, which allows it to be built quickly since it falls under the scope of the Emergency Shelter Declaration. This interim (which in practice is long-term) housing was referred to as “micro-communities” throughout the meeting, so it is important to establish what it encompasses. These micro-communities are less costly to the city to build and maintain than the poorly run congregate shelters that provide short-term solutions but do not address homelessness at its root. Remember this part, it’ll be important later.
Many public commenters actually did recognize how the problem of homelessness is the fault of the city, not of people’s individual short-comings. A lot of people expressed sympathy for our unhoused neighbors, and pointed their fingers toward the city for not doing enough to help people through housing insecurity - and rightfully so.
During her public comment, Dr. Gina Warren said:
Intergenerational trauma, poverty, domestic violence, all of those things are why people are out on the street. It’s not because they have a mental health issue, it’s because they’ve experienced those things and they have no other resources to get out
Dr. Warren brought an unhoused community member, Joseph Gregory, to speak to the Council and she supported him with making his public comment. Dr. Warren was silenced by Mindy Cuppy, the City Clerk, as she tried to introduce Joseph. Joseph was able to make his comment, but the lack of compassion or understanding he received from the City Clerk provides a strong example of the kind of treatment our homeless community receives from the City.
Even many business owners showed compassion for our unhoused neighbors, and expressed frustration regarding the city’s inability to better tend to this problem.
Most of the Councilmembers didn’t think twice about charging rent in the micro-communities, but Councilmembers Vang (pictured here) and Dickinson raised some questions about the ethical implications, especially when the city’s goal is to get people off the streets.
Councilmember Vang stated that she doesn’t support charging a fee:
Our housing policies and practices must guarantee housing as a human right, not as a good to be commodified
Councilmember Dickinson asked Pedro what the general income of residents in the City’s Motel Shelter Program is, in order to gauge the feasibility of charging fees/rent from people’s limited and sometimes unsteady income to pay to reside in micro-communities.
He said:
How many people will be deterred from going under a roof because they have to pay a fee or rent to do that. How many people are going to sacrifice ⅓ or a ¼ of their available income each month to have a roof?
He also pointed out that the voluntary nature of the micro-communities isn’t supposed to deter people, it is supposed to get people off the streets.
Based on Mr. Pedro’s (weak) attempts at justifying these proposals, he was entirely uninterested in considering how unethical the plans are. Like so many others, he seemed unwilling and/or unable to see unhoused folks as deserving to live without being subjected to continual suffering.
Remember how we said that these micro-communities are CHEAPER than congregate shelters? Councilmember Dickinson (pictured here) asks, and it is important to emphasize this, why do we need to charge tenants of the micro-communities if they are cheaper for the city than the more expensive emergency shelters that, of course, don’t charge the people staying in them [as of now]?
The option of micro-communities is already more cost efficient. When trying to help people get back on their feet and re-establish their lives in this type of housing, the last thing we need to hit them with is an important chunk of their income being taken away - an action which might put them at higher risk of ending up back on the streets.
These “proposals” from the Department of Community Response were not suggestions that had a chance to be debated, revised, and potentially rejected. Micro-communities will be developed, and these steps will be implemented regardless. The Council had no ability to debate or vote on the necessity of charging rent in these communities. Mayor McCarty suggested another workshop at a later date to discuss the details of implementation, where they can further assess the aspects of these strategies. But it is hard to say if he will keep his promise, especially considering how long it took him to act on the promise to agendize homelessness.
