Homeless Shelter in Lake Forest? Part 2

Yesterday we looked at the secret plan to create a homeless shelter in Lake Forest. The plan relies on defeating me at the election and putting Mark Tettemer in my place so that the new majority – Voigts-Robinson-Tettemer – will roll over and give the Irvine Mayor, the Supervisors and the Central and North County politicians what they want. The details are laid out in that article – Click Here.

Today I want to focus on why Lake Forest doesn’t need a homeless shelter. I already produced an extensive research report (available on request) and shared this report with the authorities, but facts are often the last thing Politicians are looking for when they create public policy.

So here are the facts.

A few months ago, the Mayor of Santa Ana was complaining about South Orange County “dumping” their homeless in his City. He demanded we build our own homeless shelter and he almost got his way with the proposed 400-bed Trabuco Canyon shelter. I asked our Police Chief if this was true and he said “No. I don’t think so.” I asked him to review the Homeless Liaison Officer logs and confirm that we weren’t doing this. He did and again, said “No”. That got me thinking about why Santa Ana had such a big problem and we didn’t.

THE DISPARITY

In the next few weeks I researched just about everything there is to know about Santa Ana and Lake Forest – compare and contrast on hundreds of dimensions and narrowed the field down to slightly more than 50 factors that could account for the disparity between the numbers of homeless in Santa Ana and in Lake Forest. Based on the most recent data, the number of unsheltered homeless per 100,000 people for Santa Ana is 139.4 while the number for Lake Forest is 45.6. On a comparative basis, Santa Ana has significantly more homeless people

THE FACTORS

According to the best estimates, the “major factors precipitating homelessness” include (in rank order)

• Securing or retaining jobs with sustainable wages
• Finding or retaining affordable housing, including evictions and foreclosures
• Family issues which include domestic violence, family dysfunction relationship dissolution, and death of a family member.
• Alcohol or drugs
• Mental Health
• Physical Health
• Release from jail/prison

Each of these issues can be explored looking at the demographics related to each of them, and therefore the probabilities of these conditions leading to more (or less) homelessness. In other words, if the factors leading to homelessness are more predominant in one city vs. the other city, we might expect therefore that the city with more factors predisposing their residents to homelessness will, in fact, have more homeless people.

RESULTS

Using the more than 50 measures taken from a variety of sources, and examining these measures against the 7 major factors found to contribute to homelessness, it was apparent that Santa Ana with the higher rate of homelessness has far more measures which indicate that the residents are at higher risk for homelessness. Especially on those factors which are the most common causes of homelessness (i.e., employment, housing, family issues), the discrepancies between the Santa Ana and Lake Forest were dramatic.

On 10 of 12 employment measures, 6 of 7 housing measures, and 8 of 9 family issues, Lake Forest had lower levels of risk indicators than Santa Ana. Not only was the difference quantitative, the qualitative differences were marked. Lake Forest had lower unemployment, fewer homeless school children, fewer evictions, fewer calls for domestic violence, more affordable homes, fewer foreclosures, fewer people living in poverty, fewer children without secure parental employment, etc. On those few measures where Santa Ana prevailed, the importance of the measures (e.g., being able to live and work in the same city, slightly fewer divorces/separations) was far less germane.

The results suggest that homelessness is created from within, and not by external factors, and fundamental changes as to how cities are managed and improvements in living conditions with the reduction in high risk factors is a more fruitful approach.

Equally as important, the study showed that while a large homeless shelter might be needed in Santa Ana, it wasn’t needed in Lake Forest because we simply do not produce that many homeless people. Previous work with the homeless shows that they tend to identify with their “home” city, so a city that produces many more homeless people is likely to keep those homeless. Some exceptions can be noted, especially for beach cities and for cities that provide shelters or soup kitchens. Those cities tend to attract homeless people disproportionate to what their demographics suggest they are producing.

THE BOTTOM LINE

A large homeless shelter is not needed in Lake Forest. We do need to find better ways to house homeless people, but a homeless shelter is not the answer. Tomorrow I'll explore this issue and on Thursday I’ll focus on what the City has been doing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Jim Gardner is on the City Council for Lake Forest where he serves as Mayor. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and you can share your thoughts about the City at Lake Forest Town Square on Facebook His comments are not meant to reflect official City Policy.

Dr. Gardner has office hours every Tuesday from 4 pm to 6 pm at the City Hall. In addition, he holds a town hall meeting every quarter. The next meeting will be in January.