Can we talk about the homelessness situation again? What does SD do to prevent homelessness? There are plenty of services that provide limited help once you are homeless but are there any prevention programs? Looking for data.

The homeless situation in downtown (and elsewhere) is beyond unacceptable, it’s disgusting, dangerous and unsanitary. There is not a single block of downtown that isn’t either lined with tents, filled with garbage or has unwell people essentially slowly dying or going mad in public.

This morning going to grab a coffee was another typical morning. I opened my front door and on my front door was a puddle of urine and a pile of garage (jeans, jars of different types, papers, cups, etc). About 10 feet from my door, was a man passed out on the sidewalk who had open sores up and down his legs, his shorts around his ankles and about 2 dozen flies cover his bare ass. I walk to the end of block where two trash cans had been knocked over and the trash spread across the entire block (this is common as unhoused people dig through the garbage to find food and leave the trash on the sidewalks). My closest coffee shop is about 4 blocks away but 3 of those 4 blocks are covered with tents so I walk down the middle of the road, trying not to get hit by cars. When I arrive at the coffee shop, the barista is dealing with a half dressed, unhoused man who is screaming at people in the shop and refusing to leave. On the walk back to my house, a woman was pooping on sidewalk in the open as she yells to herself.

This is an every day experience and I have never seen it worse. To visualize how bad the situation is - here is a map of **current and active** reports of homeless encampments in downtown San Diego: https://imgur.com/a/va5abuN. This is from the City of San Diego’s “Get it Done” App.

I know there are a lot of posts here complaining about the homelessness and I don’t blame people. It is incredibly difficult to watch. If you live in a suburb of SD and you haven’t regularly experienced what is happening in downtown, or east village or PB or OB, believe me it is so shocking. But for this post, I want to try to wrap my head around how we ended up here and I am hoping people in this subreddit can help me gather some information. I am not here to blame homeless people, nor attack people who are working their asses off to try and do something to address the problem (in fact I highly admire those people) - I am here to gather about data and better understand how San Diego has gone from bad to worse to shockingly unacceptable.

I want to start with how I have come to understand the problem. I likely don’t have a full picture as I find it difficult to find meaningful, current data anywhere but I will start with how I see it so that you know the lens through which I am writing this post.

When I research homelessness in San Diego, here is the conclusion that I draw:

  1. it seems that there are basically zero programs that help prevent homelessness and then dozens of programs that are band-aid, non-permanent solutions to homelessness (park your car overnight, eat a warm meal, have a shelter bed for the night, etc.).
  2. In the past 5 years, 10s of millions of tax dollars (at least) have gone through city, taxpayer-funded programs to address homelessness. All of this money has gone to programs that band-aid, and none that actually prevent homelessness. No progress has actually been made, the situation if far worse than it was.
  3. Despite all the tax money being spent on programs, it seems the city has shifted the burden of solving this problem on to 3rd parties, who are doing the most on-the-ground work. Most of them are charities which rely on donations, but also non-profits like Downtown Partnership. These organizations also seem heavily focused on a band-aid approaches as well. Here is just a quick list of organizations I was able to find in 10 minutes that are trying to help the situation:
  • The City and County of San Diego
  • Downtown Partnership
  • Housing Commission
  • Father Joes
  • Brother Bennos
  • Regional Task Force on Homelessness
  • Jewish Family Services
  • Neighborhood House of Calexico
  • East County Transitional Living Center, Inc.
  • Alpha Project for the Homeless
  • San Diego Rescue Mission, Inc.
  • Dreams For Change
  • The Catholic Charities of San Diego
  1. With the dozens of programs and tens of millions spent on solutions, homelessness has increased by at least 10% in the last two years in San Diego. Currently there are between 8K and 9K people in SD experience homelessness according to reports.

Through this lens, it begs the question, how can we spend so much time, energy and money on the homelessness situation for it only to get worse? How much worse is it going to get? What is the breaking point if its not the daily situation that I described above?

The way I see it, tacking homelessness must be a two pronged approach:

  • A long term plan based on prevention.
  • A short term plan to help those currently experiencing homelessness.

As I mentioned before, it doesn’t seem to me like we have any efforts to actually prevent homelessness. This would explain why we can have a dozen organizations spending tens of millions of dollars only for a problem to get worse. As the famous quote goes “we can pull bodies out of the river all day but at some point we should ask why bodies are in the river in the first place.”

So my question for reddit is…

  1. Does the city, county or any organization collect data on why people are homeless in the first place? I want to understand how someone goes from being housed to unhoused. This seems like the common sense, first step of solving this situation to me but I can’t find a trace of data on this anywhere.
  2. If there is data being collected on the reasons why people are homeless in the first place, are there programs or organizations that are working on prevention?
  3. If there are programs or organizations that are working on prevention, how much money are they currently spending? Do they need help from the community? How do we, the community, strengthen these programs?

As a complete aside, my hunch not based on any data, is that the number one reason for people becoming homeless will end up being lack of healthcare. For people struggling with mental health, physical health ( I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen open wounds or people who physically are rotting to death), drugs and alcohol, isolation, despair.

My mom is a 78 year old woman who has been volunteering at a homeless shelter for about a decade now, packing groceries, cleaning clothes, etc. and while she is close to this issue, at this age, she isnt the right person to get into the specifics. She just tries to help where she can but I would like to share some things she has told me over the years that stuck with me:

  • Her shelter services thousands of people a week
  • She guesses that at leas 60% of the people in her shelter picking up groceries or clothes are working full-time.
  • In her mind, isolation and despair are the two driving factors of homelessness. She has had dozens of conversations with people who say they lost their loved one, or a child, or lost their home, etc and the despair and isolation was too much. Working at the shelter for so long, much of the homeless population in her area knows her by name and its not uncommon for people to recognize her on the streets and say hi. One day she was walking and heard someone screaming her name and saying hi. She didn’t recognize this person at all and tried to keep walking but he persisted in saying hi to her. It was then that she realized that the man was a person who was a fellow volunteer at the shelter with her. His physical appearance was so bad that he was unrecognizable to my mom despite working beside him for years. She stopped to talk to him and asked him what happened and he said he lost his wife and he never could get a grip on the loneliness that caused which turned to heavy drinking, which turned to drugs, which turned to him not being able to pay his bills. I always remembered she told me that if you really stop and listen to people’s stories of how they ended on the street, you will inevitably find a situation of dispair that our society doesn’t deal with. This is just an anecdotal story from my mom but thought I would share it.

  • EDIT: Just to reiterate, I am wondering if anyone is aware, and can share, a link to an organization that is collecting or analyzing data on the reasons for initial homelessness. I know there are a lot of opinions and theories about how and why we ended up in this situation and those things have been discussed tirelessly in other threads on homelessness. And I'm sure all of those opinions and theories have an element of truth to them but I am wondering, is there any sort of data-driven efforts being done by anyone to study/address prevention. Thanks.