California To Spend Billions to Tackle Homelessness

California has more than 115,000 homeless people, many suffering from some kind of mental illness. This week the state Legislature is acting on a $2 billion bond that would help get many of them off the streets. The state Senate approved the bond yesterday, the Assembly is expected to take it up later this week.

People like Angelina Washington. She is homeless and currently lives in a long-term shelter for women with mental illnesses at Sacramento’s Loaves & Fishes. That’s a nonprofit that provides services to the homeless. Washington has a simple wish, if she ever has her own apartment.

“To sleep in when I want," she says. "We can’t sleep in over there at the shelter. We have to get up at 6:30 and we have to be out by 8.”

Because she’s been homeless for so long and suffers from mental illness, Washington could potentially benefit from the proposed bond. It would make $2 billion available to California counties over several years to create permanent supportive housing for people like her. The bond would be paid for with funds from Proposition 63, which provides money for mental health services.

Joan Burke is director of advocacy at Loaves & Fishes. She says the money would help expand programs that have already proved successful.

“We do know what works. And we do have good programs that are helping people get out of homelessness much more quickly," she says. "We just don’t have enough of them.”

Senate President pro tempore Kevin de León started thinking about the bill last fall after taking a tour of Skid Row in Los Angeles. Counties already provide various services to the homeless. But de León says having a home is key to helping a person get stable.

“You just cannot provide psychotherapeutic services or substance abuse therapeutic services and expect them to go back and live in a cardboard box in an alley or adjacent to an off-ramp," he says. "It’s nonsensical. It’s illogical. And you’re wasting money.”

Jennifer Wolch is dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design and studies homelessness. She says housing-first approaches have been extremely successful. She acknowledges the strategy is initially expensive, but says it's a good investment.

“Ultimately it costs taxpayers more money to leave people on the streets," she says.

Wolch does foresee some challenges, specifically where the housing will be built. She says neighborhoods tend to push back when low-income housing or other services are proposed nearby.

“There’s a lot of resistance that needs to be dealt with," she says. "And I think that some of it has to be legislated in terms of not allowing communities to zone out or, in various other ways, exclude these kinds of facilities.”

Money from the bond could be awarded as early as this fiscal year, which begins in July.

California voters have supported large housing bonds in the past, including a $2.1 billion bond in 2002 and a $2.9 billion bond in 2006  for overall housing programs. In 2014, voters approved $600 million for veterans' housing.