AnonymousBy Anna Marie Gott
As a result of the Loma Fire the City Council is having a Special Meeting tomorrow at 6:00PM. The topic? Considering Emergency Actions To Abate Encampments In Fire-Prone Areas. What does that mean? Clearing the homeless encampments along the railroad tracks, off ramps, hillsides, creeks and sidewalks due to the fire risks and rehousing them elsewhere.
The big question is: Where?
Right now, the City is eyeing the Carrillo Castillo Commuter Parking Lot again. This time it will be a mega encampment instead of a “Tiny Homes for the Homeless” project, which residents successfully halted a few years ago. In my opinion, the plan is much worse and there is absolutely no guarantee that the operation will cease after the fire season.
That said, we do need to clear the encampments due to the fire risks. To do this an emergency order must be passed and sites need to be identified to re-house those from the encampments. The emergency order is easy. The hard part is finding a location where the homeless people can be relocated and where they will stay put.
Why? Apparently if the location is too far away from their regular haunts they may not be willing to stay at any of the locations the City wants to set up to house them. On the other hand, how many of us want a City Park or another property in the middle of a neighborhood turned into a mega encampment?
The Council will want to use a City or County property. That said, ideal locations would include: a kitchen, bathrooms, a large space for indoor housing, office space for services, space for mobile showers and a laundry, and perhaps even spaces for tents in a parking lot. If a building wasn’t available then the space would have to be large enough for a mobile kitchen, bathrooms, mobile showers and a laundry, tents and space for services. – A large parking lot or grass area will be needed for any location without a building.
Prime locations where we have the facilities or land for operations of this nature include:
- City Hall’s parking lot,
- The City Planning Department’s parking lot,
- The Public Health Department off of Hollister,
- The Veterans Hall on Cabrillo,
- The Elephant Bar off of Hollister,
- Any of the City’s parking garages,
- The Garden Street parking lot,
- The Clark Estate, which has a huge lawn and is remote, and
- Our City Parks parking lots
Of note, there are over 900 homeless individuals in the City with ~75 age 18-23. There are some families too. So, we will need to open multiple locations throughout the City for distinct homeless populations.
With this said, one area where we should not place more homeless shelters is District #1 until each District has opened its own encampment shelter. Why? District #1 already has two shelters. PATH on Cacique and the United Way on E. Yanonali St.
In my personal opinion the City should avoid PATH as a partner in any location. Why? This is based on the multi-years long problems residents have had with their facility and their lack of compliance with the conditional use permit.
What would I advocate for? I ranked my list from top to bottom and the 1st location I would like to see with an encampment is City Hall.
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How about outside of city limits? If that doesn’t work than I say we disperse them around San Roque, the Mesa, Hope Ranch and the Riviera. Maybe it will help drive housing prices back down to earth.
Remember, if you build it, they will come. District 1 has born the brunt of this due to the idiotic decision to place homeless shelters on the waterfront.
I’m glad the city is finally looking to do something about the “homeless” population. I’m also very dissappointed they are only planning to move them. The city is not planning to discuss doing anything to address the addiction and mental health issues that are the root cause of “homelessness.” It is also interesting that the city is not planning to do anything to address the fuel problem. Even if the city manages to move the “homeless” out of the fire prone areas they have identified, these areas will remain fire prone. Why can’t the city come up with a plan to make the fire prone areas less fire prone, like clearing all the fuel? I predict the city’s effort will accomplish nothing.
Thanks to Anna Marie Gott for this. This fire was started by a homeless arsonist, not by an encampment resident. An important start would be to clear the brush. Perhaps it would be helpful to clear the encampments of brush and make the locations clean and safe and allow a limited number of people to live there. And also use public parking lots. The City Hall parking lot makes sense; it doesn’t serve many businesses; also, the County parking lot would make sense. But does Santa Barbara want to have semi-permanent tent camps in its downtown?
And still, lots of mention of the TV Hill fire, but no mention if the arsonist is a homeless guy… the silence is implicative…
Shocking that after the 2018 declaration of emergency regarding housing and receiving millions in grant money that 3 years later the City declared another homeless emergency.
And yesterday’s meeting shows that they have put zero thought into the issue in those years.
Way to go! You’re definitely not getting my vote.
If you put the homeless in the Sears building you will destroy the restaurants and retail there.
Cars will be broken into, restaurant patrons harrassed for money, the stores will be shoplifted into poverty and the store owners will become homeless too.
LA rented a bunch of hotels for the homeless and paid $100HR for security staff.
The homeless folks propped the doors open so people could engage in prostitution in the rooms, drug dealers walked down the halls with drug menus. People were stabbed and shot. Nice accomodations mean nothing to some people and those folks won’t modify behavior.
The accomodations and locations need to be gauged to the lowest common denominator, until folks are sorted out into low, medium, high risk