Buiza Housing/Homelessness Q1

Housing affordability and homelessness have become intractable problems because we have failed to address some of the fundamental issues that inform them: poverty, the isolation of low-income and immigrant communities, the focus on progress and infrastructure development on gateway cities, etc.On a macro scale, the widening income inequality in our Read more…

Painter Housing/Homelessness Q3

Our joint approach should view homelessness as an emergency, much like a natural disaster. This will involve both short term and long term solutions to provide housing and services to those experiencing homelessness right now. This will fundamentally alter how we approach building new housing of all types that can Read more…

Painter Housing/Homelessness Q1

The reasons people cite for becoming homeless for the first time are increasingly based on economic reasons including housing affordability. In the 2019 Demographic Survey in Los Angeles, this number reached 71% up from 55% just a few years earlier. People experiencing chronic homelessness often have additional barriers to becoming Read more…

Myers Housing/Homelessness Q3

The homelessness problem is more difficult to solve than the housing shortage and affordability problem. It is also more permanent and likely to keep growing for the foreseeable future. Our booming economy cannot stem this tide, nor can a potential glut of affordable housing. Mayor Garcetti’s major efforts of the Read more…

Jordan Housing/Homelessness Q1

“People” who are considered homeless are not monolithic. While housing affordability in most cases leads to transitional homelessness and in some cases chronic homelessness, it is not a straight line.The two differ in that housing affordability is primarily ebbing and flowing with the economy while homelessness can ebb and flow Read more…

Pastor Housing/Homelessness Q3

What is missing is what I’ve stressed above [in the prior question] – the idea that homelessness and housing affordability are increasingly connected. While mental health, substance abuse, and lack of support for veterans are important drivers, it’s the single parent, the student, the older folks next door, the hard-working Read more…

Pastor Housing/Homelessness Q1

Housing affordability and homelessness are indelibly linked. Despite stepped-up efforts to get the unsheltered into either transitional or permanent housing – after the passage of Measure H to expand services, the number of individuals touched by outreach efforts tripled – the homeless count in both the City and the County Read more…

Rutherford Housing/Homelessness Q3

In addition to increasing efforts to provide mental health support, substance abuse treatment and other social services to those who need it, we need to focus on helping homeless individuals find jobs. Here in San Bernardino County, we are partnering with a nonprofit staffing agency to provide job coaching, placement, Read more…

Rutherford Housing/Homelessness Q2

Abuse of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) has exacerbated the state’s housing affordability issues by making it more difficult and more expensive for developers to bring homes to the market. In particular, the law has been used to stymie high-density and in-fill housing projects that would help ease housing Read more…

Goldsmith Housing/Homelessness Q2

The issue of housing affordability can be tied directly to economic justice. Liberty Hill recently co-published a report entitled Priced Out, Pushed Out, Locked Out: How Permanent Tenant Protections Can Help Communities Prevent Homelessness and Displacement in LA County. This report describes how tenants across unincorporated LA County are facing Read more…

Morrell Housing/Homelessness Q1

While a shortage in housing aggravates the problems of both homelessness and housing affordability, there are key differences. Anyone can find themselves temporarily homeless due to economic conditions. However, data shows that for many individuals experiencing homelessness, it is a chronic problem that often comes with challenges of mental and physical Read more…

Summers Housing/Homelessness Q2

There is a growing realization that California’s housing crisis is fundamentally a supply problem, but too many of the commonly proposed solutions fail to address the issues that discourage homebuilding in the state – and many would even make things worse. Soaking taxpayers with expensive housing bonds will only add Read more…

Summers Housing/Homelessness Q1

There is certainly a good deal of overlap between the housing affordability and homelessness crises, particularly here in California, because financial issues are one of the leading causes of homelessness, and housing is typically one’s greatest expenditure. But there are a number of other reasons people become homeless – including Read more…

Bailey Housing/Homelessness Q3

It’s easy when addressing a crisis that is as complex as homelessness to gravitate towards safe and simplistic solutions, when in reality our response must be connected solutions that acknowledge the complexity of the issue. You might hear some say, “this is about mental health”. The truth is homelessness is Read more…

Dunn Housing/Homelessness Q4

Orange County business leaders have identified increasing the supply, choices and affordability of housing as a key initiative to Orange County’s long-term economic prosperity. As a result, OCBC is a leader in research, with cutting-edge data, that has assisted regional agencies like the Southern California Association of Governments, individual city Read more…

Dunn Housing/Homelessness Q3

Cities are required to identify sites for homeless shelters by law. Builders must have full “by-right” authority to build, with ministerial approvals only. Homelessness is not a crime. If sufficient housing is not produced, cities will not be permitted to enforce local “no-camping” ordinances and tent cities may develop in Read more…

Dunn Housing/Homelessness Q1

Housing affordability, homelessness and—add to that–demands for rent control as rents increase exponentially–are all by-products of a decades-long failure by local elected officials to plan for, and encourage builders to build enough housing supply and choices, in a variety of price ranges, for a growing population, thriving jobs market and Read more…

Bornstein Housing/Homelessness Q2

There are several things missing from the discussion. People needing subsidized housing are not failures, lazy or undeserving. They are households whose employment does not pay the level of wages required to afford market-rate housing in Southern California. What’s missing is an understanding of who needs help in affording housing, Read more…

Bornstein Housing/Homelessness Q1

The problems are linked: the lack of a sufficient supply of affordable housing means an otherwise tolerable disruption in family, health or finances can result in loss of permanent shelter. Once experiencing homelessness, many people use drugs to cope with negative feelings and daily conditions while others may develop mental Read more…

Cavecche Housing/Homelessness Q3

The increase of the homeless populations in cities all across Southern California has become a crisis for taxpayers across the region. Access to public property, sidewalks, parks, trails, public centers is being denied due to legitimate safety and health concerns. This is tantamount to a taking of property from a Read more…

Cavecche Housing/Homelessness Q1

The issues of homelessness and housing affordability intersect more than they are linked. Homelessness is an issue with many moving parts; mental health issues, drug addiction, early prison release, unemployment, lifestyle choice, and housing affordability. Of course we need to build more affordable and transitional housing that not only gets Read more…

Shelley Housing/Homelessness Q4

People who are homeless have an income from government benefits, and it may be time to investigate whether anyone is exploiting homeless people to obtain those benefits, perhaps through fraud. For example, the Social Security Administration will pay Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits to a “representative payee” who can be Read more…

Shelley Housing/Homelessness Q3

What’s missing is a disaggregation of the “homelessness” problem into distinct categories with unique causes. In the 1960s, California adopted the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which provided for the involuntary commitment and treatment of a person who is a danger to himself or herself or others or who is gravely disabled. The Read more…

Shelley Housing/Homelessness Q2

The government’s role is the problem, not the solution. The effect of climate-related regulations on housing construction is the subject of a lawsuit against the California Air Resources Board by a group called The Two Hundred, a statewide coalition led by civil rights and social justice advocates. The lawsuit notes Read more…

Kotkin Housing/Homelessness Q2

There are three main opportunities. One is to take advantage of the coming tsunami of redundant retail space that can be converted into all kinds of housing, from patio homes to townhouses and larger multi-family. This can be done without much new infrastructure and destroying existing middle income neighborhoods. The Read more…

Kotkin Housing/Homelessness Q1

To some extent homelessness is a unique problem, more tied to family and social dysfunction. But it increasingly represents part of a continuum that extends from people sharing apartments, sleeping on couches of friends and in their cars. High rents certainly contribute here, forcing more working people out in the Read more…

Devereaux Housing/Homelessness Q2

The factors leading to increased housing costs and their effect on affordability are discussed quite a bit, as are exhortations for government to provide programs that assist people or projects to address their needs. However, there is little discussion regarding the fact that, given the wealth gap in the country Read more…

Montejano Housing/Homelessness Q4

The Building Industry Association of Southern California (BIASC) had been steadfast in its commitment to promoting the creation of new housing across all socioeconomic levels, particularly when it comes to addressing homelessness. In 1989, BIASC created HomeAid Orange County, a charitable nonprofit dedicated to providing immediate housing and support services Read more…

Montejano Housing/Homelessness Q2

When it comes to the lack of affordable housing in Southern California, there’s been a failure to seriously address the crippling effect which government overregulation has on new housing construction. Most notably, policymakers have avoided making a sincere effort to reform the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Originally enacted in Read more…

Bishop Housing/Homelessness Q2

Solving California’s housing crisis isn’t as simple as making it easier to build homes by eliminating red tape, reducing fees, or strategies that singularly aim to provide more homes in job-rich areas. 200,000 residential units are already entitled in Western Riverside, yet only 25,000 have been built in the last Read more…

Greenlee Housing/Homelessness Q1

Housing affordability and homelessness are inexorably linked, which is why a key policy priority for the Southern California Association of Nonprofit Housing (SCANPH) is to dedicate resources to understanding and addressing emerging data about the fastest-growing segment of newly homeless persons in our region: low-income people who make less than Read more…

Bradbard Housing/Homelessness Q3

In addition to a focus on reducing today’s on-the-street homeless, we also need to pay attention to the thousands of families living in overcrowded housing across Southern California. Families living in converted garages, garden sheds, or packed into a single bedroom present public health issues and other challenges for children. Read more…

Bradbard Housing/Homelessness Q1

Housing affordability is clearly a factor in today’s lack of housing for our homeless neighbors, but homelessness is much more complex than simply being about housing costs. Homelessness is also impacted by mental health, substance abuse issues, lack of available supportive services to help stabilize those on the streets, and Read more…

Soubirous Housing/Homelessness Q3

Society must first admit that chronic homelessness is mostly due to drug/alcohol use. Many substance users are self-medicating due to past trauma, abuse or situation. A smaller portion of the homeless population is there because they do not take prescribed medications that help mitigate their congenital mental health disorders. They Read more…

Campbell Housing/Homelessness Q4

What is lacking is will. Mayors and city councils must have the will to take people off the streets and send them to centers providing the minimum basics. There is nothing unconstitutional about doing so. Misplaced compassion has actually kept homeless people from services more efficiently provided in centralized locations.

McKellogg Housing/Homelessness Q3

Employment. California has begun to incorporate planning for livelihood-sustaining jobs into discussions of homelessness, but it is still an afterthought in a “housing first” model. A more explicit set of initiatives are needed to combine jobs (in social enterprise), economic mobility (via education/training (in the workplace or in other settings), Read more…

McKellogg Housing/Homelessness Q2

While affordable housing for middle-income working people like teachers and first responders gets some attention, very little attention is paid to housing affordability/access for low wage workers – particularly those who are overcoming high barriers to return to or join the workforce (e.g. the populations served by REDF’s portfolio of Read more…

McKellogg Housing/Homelessness Q1

The exponential growth of homelessness in Southern California during the last decade has been driven in large part by the growing gap between rising housing costs and stagnant wages for people with low incomes in urban centers. Rising housing costs are a function of demand for market-rate housing and insufficient Read more…

Swaim Housing/Homelessness Q2

Regulation and taxation are rarely discussed. I’ve seen few clearer illustrations of that one-sided debate than in the recent gubernatorial race. Gavin Newsom talked about producing more “affordable” housing through government spending and lawsuits against cities failing to do their fair share; John Cox, a home builder, underscored the high Read more…

Swaim Housing/Homelessness Q1

Absolutely, they’re linked. Setting aside the mental/social problems affecting perhaps two-thirds of all homeless, we’re still left with many people for whom affordability is a problem. But affordability is often mischaracterized as a problem created by gentrification or the presence of successful corporations in which relatively high employee pay (effective Read more…