Homeless Watch: Santa Barbara County Proposes Changing Definition of Success

When you can’t beat a problem no matter how hard you try, how much you spend, and how much you actually accomplish, maybe the best response is to change how you define success. That’s the message the Santa Barbara County supervisors received loud and clear from the county’s Community Services Department Tuesday on how it attacks the issue of homelessness. 

Joe Dzvonik, assistant director in charge of homeless programs, said after spending $76 million — in mostly one-time state and federal dollars — over the past four years, the number of new homeless people seeking services in Santa Barbara has kept going up at a greater rate than the number of homeless people successfully transitioned into housing. In the past year, 1,368 people transitioned out of homelessness and into housing; that’s the good news. In that same time, 1,712 first-time applicants sought homeless services, thus bringing the total number of people seeking help last year to 4,457. 

Rather than establishing a goal to “reduce overall homelessness,” he said, “it is more realistic — and more likely achievable — to set a goal of making homelessness less frequent and more brief,” he said. 

The goal should be to keep the number of new people entering homelessness to no more than the number of people leaving it. This he termed “functional zero.” Translated into plain English, that really means reducing the number of people experiencing “chronic homelessness.” Translated further, that means getting those at risk of becoming homeless help earlier in the process, before, for example, they get evicted for failure to pay rent.

Driving this shift in focus are a couple of things. First, the flow of state and federal dollars is expected to drop by more than 50 percent next year at a time when the state legislature is looking at $12 billion in spending cuts and the federal government under Trump is cutting back drastically on a host of safety-net programs. Also driving it is a widespread concern by those in the trenches of care that the people they’re seeing have been homeless much longer and that their problems — mental health or addiction issues — are significantly more acute. 

A stocky, no-nonsense guy who exudes a definite sense of mission, Dzvonik buried the supervisors in a blizzard of statistics, all seeming to show that as the problem got better, it also got worse. But the good news was — almost always — that it got worse at a slower rate.

By any reckoning, the county has thrown money, resources, and staff into the issue with rare resolve and ingenuity beginning in 2021. In that time, many new units of transitional and permanent housing were built, and many inventive new programs launched. The county secured millions in grant funds to help clear out more than 100 encampments and millions more to put them under the auspices of a Safe Parking program run by New Beginnings. But for as many people who got off the streets, there have been even more losing their housing. The big jump has been in the number of people living in their cars — either families with kids or the growing ranks of those 55 or older who find themselves without shelter. There’s been a significant spike in the numbers of young people between the ages of 18 and 25. 

With funding evaporating, the supervisors were at a loss to do more than to say kind things about the good work done. 

Supervisor Joan Hartmann said she wanted to see a report in nine months showing how money from Governor Gavin Newsom’s Proposition 1 — which narrowly passed at the polls with the promise to provide housing for people who are homeless, mentally ill, and addicted — might fill the breech. 

Supervisor Bob Nelson expressed gratitude for the heroic work done cleaning out the encampments sprouting in Santa Maria’s riverbed. But he cautioned that maybe people who were born and raised in Santa Barbara can no longer expect to grow up and live here. There are cheaper places, he noted, to live.