San Diego may jail some homeless folks for refusing shelter. Should Sacramento? | Opinion

Imagine this scenario: A police officer approaches a homeless encampment. Dispatch informs the officer that there are 15 to 20 available shelter beds nearby. The officer encourages the encampment occupant to take the shelter opportunity. After three visits and three rejected invitations, the homeless person gets booked into jail and then released.

“In a situation where an individual is held in jail for a brief period of time and ultimately released, at the very least, that will create a disruption in the pattern that an individual in many cases got comfortable with,” said Stephen Whitburn, a San Diego City Councilman who has advanced this enforcement idea.

This scenario is impossible right now in Sacramento.

Opinion

We do not have enough shelters. We do not have a comprehensive real-time system to identify empty shelter space. And we do not have an ordinance that uses the threat of law enforcement to motivate the occupants of troublesome encampments to move to a safer environment.

This is possible with enough resources. Starting July 30, this will be the new homeless reality in the city of San Diego.

As the homelessness proliferates across California, some of the larger cities in the state are trying different responses to the crisis. The Sacramento City Council, for example, will debate August 1 whether to increase shelter capacity short-term by assigning City Manager Howard Chan the authority to establish outdoor “Safe Ground” managed encampments.

San Diego is perhaps only a handful of months ahead of Sacramento on creating new “Safe” sites if our City Council says yes and Chan gets to work. San Diego’s approach to homelessness also reveals the incredibly tough policy decisions and tradeoffs when a city has more shelter space and management tools:

Should available shelter space on any given day go to those who need it the most or the most troublesome on the streets?

Should a city send a homeless person with an intrusive encampment briefly to jail for repeatedly refusing shelter space?

And absent adequate state help such as today’s reality, should more money in a city like Sacramento be redirected to homeless resources to build the shelters and communications infrastructure to respond real time?

Sacramento should be watching what is about to happen in San Diego very closely. We are all about to learn something.

Coincidentally, San Diego and Sacramento counties have roughly the same homeless population - about 10,000 according to the most recent annual census efforts. Roughly a quarter of them are in shelters here in Sacramento. A full half of them are in San Diego. Why? San Diego County, with 3.3 million residents, has double the population and essentially double the available government resources.

Basically, San Diego has about half the homeless problem and twice the resources than Sacramento to deal with it. Our shared problem is the lack of affordable housing, according to the largest study ever of its kind, the higher price of housing driving former renters to the streets. Safety nets and law enforcement are dealing with the symptoms and not the causes.

But the civic symptoms of homelessness are devastating. Consider these statistics from Sacramento Assistant City Manager Mario Lara: City staff so far this year have removed 27,000 cubic yards of waste from homeless sites in Sacramento and 24,500 hypodermic needles.

Sacramento’s shelter system is hamstrung by both an inadequate number of beds and a lack of comprehensive real-time information. At present, 35 percent of Sacramento shelters are currently participating in a coordinated access system that shares shelter vacancy information, the Sacramento City Council learned at its June 27 homeless workshop. It takes emails and phone calls to learn the status of the rest.

“It is a matter of training the providers and getting them ready,” said Lisa Bates, the chief executive officer of Sacramento Steps Forward, the non-profit organization charged with managing the shelter system on behalf of the city. She hopes 80 percent will be inputting information into a shared information system by the end of the year.

“We need this system done tomorrow,” Sacramento City Councilwoman Karina Talamantes said at the council’s June 27 homeless workshop.

What real-time information would reveal, said Bates, is that “there is limited to no availability in your shelter system right now. You are at capacity even without (shelters) being in coordinated access.”

Meanwhile in San Diego, every shelter by 7 a.m. inputs into a shared information platform how many beds are available along with other important information, such as whether the bed is on a first floor and more suitable for someone who is old or infirm. By 8:30, the information is collated and sent to 24 different nonprofits and government agencies for potential referrals, said Jonathan Herrera, director of the Homeless Housing Innovations division of the San Diego Housing Commission. The city typically has 15 to 20 available shelter beds each day.

Both the San Diego Police Department and San Diego County Sheriff receive this daily information. With this kind of real-time information, it only takes 10 to 15 minutes to identify whether there is a shelter bed available that meets the needs of a particular encampment occupant on a street.

More Safe Ground capacity is coming to San Diego (it is called Safe Sleeping there). The city is in the process of occupying a new 136-tent site in a city operations yard on the edge of Balboa Park, which includes the famous San Diego Zoo. Another in development will house another 400 tents approximately. These two sites alone represent about half of Sacramento’s existing shelter capacity, which reflects the potential of how managed encampments can make a big difference.

San Diego’s expanded capacity, combined with real-time information on vacancies, enabled the City Council to consider a new and controversial policy choice. Should it use the threat of law enforcement action to motivate encampment occupants to seek shelter? By a 5-4 vote after eight hours of conflicting public testimony, the San Diego City Council on June 13 barely said yes.

The ordinance takes effect July 30.

“It became really clear to me that the encampments posed public health and safety hazards to those living in them and the surrounding neighborhoods,” said Whitburn, the San Diego City Councilman who was a lead drafter of the ordinance. “The goal of the ordinance is to nudge people into a safer and healthier place.”

The ordinance takes a three-strikes approach. A first visit to an encampment by an officer begins with a warning along with the invitation to migrate to available shelter. The second visit comes with the same invitation and a citation (the ordinance allows any fee to be waived). The third visit, invitation rejected, would result in transport to jail.

A federal court ruling prohibits law enforcement from relocating the unhoused unless there is shelter space available to do so.

“In a situation where an individual is held in jail for a brief period of time and ultimately released, at the very least, that will create a disruption in the pattern that an individual in many cases got comfortable with,” Whitburn said.

What begins to unfold on the streets in San Diego come August is anyone’s guess. Whitburn is hoping for fewer encampments. If their occupants refuse shelter, a homeless cycle through the jail is about to commence. For Whitburn and the council majority, the status quo was simply no longer tolerable and it was time to try this experimental combination of incentives and sanctions.

“I am keeping an eye on what Sacramento and other cities on the West Coast are doing,” Whitburn said. “We all need to learn from each other.”

In Sacramento, Mayor Darrell Steinberg has said he thinks the city’s $44 million homeless services budget (mostly state funds) is sufficient to create more Safe Ground sites this fiscal year if the City Manager identifies them. More shelters and better information would open up some management choices we simply do not have right now. By then, there should be solid data on whether the San Diego ordinance experiment is succeeding or not.

Then it is just a matter of courage to do what looks to be right.