There was a time when people thought of homelessness in the cities as one of those intractable problems for which there were no real solutions. It was attributed to mental illness, drugs, alcohol, child abuse, runaway teenagers, war damaged vets and some many believed were just simply bums too lazy to work. Each city tried to push the homeless into the next adjoining town just to make it someone else’s problem. Way back then, there was even something called a “vagrancy statute,” which essential meant that you could be arrested for being poor.
In many places, these old attitudes still persist. Just recently before the Alabama / Clemson football game in Tampa, Florida, the city decided to arrest nine people for feeding the homeless in a public park without a feeding permit. Apparently, you can feed the pigeons without a permit, but not people. The feeding had been going on for years but the city suddenly got tough, it was speculated, because all the tourists were coming to town for the big game and it didn’t look nice.
Lots of people are now researching homelessness — sociologists, demographers, psychologists, mental health professionals, government officials and, significantly, police departments who find themselves spending more and more time and budget dealing with homelessness and its aftermath.
What they have found is not terribly surprising. The reason that many people are homeless is because they have no home. And the reason they have no home is because they can’t afford one. If that surprises you, you should know a recent rental study that compared city rental costs all over the country for a one bedroom apartment found the new national champion for the highest rental in the country was not New York City or San Francisco but our own adjacent Santa Monica, Calif., followed closely by the Venice Beach area, which is rapidly becoming Silicon Beach. Malibu was not in the survey because it’s too small but, having looked for an apartment or condo to rent a couple of years ago in both Malibu and Santa Monica, I can tell you that the rents in Malibu are the same as you see in Santa Monica and the supply of available units in Malibu is even more limited.
None of us likes to think that we are part of the problem. After all, we’re all good well-intentioned people and none of us wants to see people living on the streets or sleeping in doorways or under benches. But we are part of the problem. Imagine someone walking into the Malibu Planning Department and saying they want to build a block of low cost apartments, or at least apartments cheap enough that people who work here in Malibu can afford to live here. By the time they got through all of the requirements, the setbacks, the view corridors, the consultants, the outrageous city fees, the high land and building costs, and all of the statues that make it difficult or near impossible to build anything at a reasonable cost, those low cost apartments would cost about as much as an apartment in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. That is not accidental. That’s the result of government land use policy.
Recently, the Public Policy Institute of California, a highly respected California think tank, released a report about the lack of affordable housing in California and the relationship to the two-decade growth of homelessness in California. What they found is that homelessness in California is linked to the growing gap between rich and poor. It’s not that the rich are too rich, it’s that the poor are too poor. For example, to move into any apartment, say one for a family at $2,000 per month, generally means they want a first and last month’s rent and a security deposit of another month’s rent, which for a $2,000 apartment means $6,000. Most Californians simply don’t have it.
Malibu is now seriously paying attention to the issue of homelessness. From our past stories, I know we have close to 200 homeless living in Malibu. They live in the canyons and along the creeks, which is both a fire hazard and a flood hazard if the rains continue. There are few bathroom or shower facilities. Transportation is a problem and bad weather could be a disaster.
On Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2017, from 7-9 p.m., the City of Malibu, the Malibu Task Force on Homelessness, and an organization called The People Concern (formerly the Ocean Park CC) are holding a Town Hall meeting in Malibu City Hall (Multi-Purpose Room) to try and find some solutions while effectively addressing the needs of the homeless for permanent housing, consistent with the desires of the city and its residents.
There are some very tough questions to grapple with. You all should try to attend.