In Part III of my review of the big Costa Mesa election issues, I’m taking a closer look at how the City is managing its homelessness population. As I did with Part I’s review of our crime statistics and Part II’s rundown of cannabis, let’s start with the City’s current policy (and challenges) and then get into the election impact.

Homelessness: California’s Enduring Policy Failure

I hate to say this but homelessness is almost synonymous with California in the minds of many non-Californians. The images of extreme and chronic homelessness in big cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles – scores of tents lined up on the side of the road, in parks or under overpasses; open air drug use; filthy shopping carts packed tight with bundles of dirty blankets – have been circulating in the mainstream media for a very long time. And while these stories often paint an unrealistic picture of the homelessness situation in California, they ring true because this state really has done an exceptionally poor job addressing this issue.

Despite only 11.7% of the overall US population living in California, California is home to 28% of all homeless persons in the entire country, and almost half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless. Statistics like these underscore the shocking scale of the State’s failure. And worse, it isn’t even a budget priority issue. California spends like a drunken sailor when it comes to homelessness programs, earmarking $24 billion for related initiatives since 2019. Result? From 2019 to 2024, California’s homelessness population grew over 18%, from about 151,000 in 2019 to about 186,000 in 2024. So in California, we have the worst homelessness problem in the country, we spend billions to fix it, and it gets noticeably worse. What is going wrong?

California Mistake #1: Not Building Enough Housing

Frankly, the biggest issue plaguing California is that it simply does not build enough homes, particularly in the Coastal regions. This has a bunch of negative social effects, but one of the worst from an economic, political and moral perspective is that it exacerbates the rate of homelessness. Note that I did not say that high housing prices cause homelessness! On the contrary: I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the proximate cause of most people becoming homeless is a crisis in one’s personal life, be it mental illness, sudden job loss or disability, or addiction.

However, extremely high rents and extremely low vacancy rates will, all else being equal, cause people facing those kinds of crises to become homeless more often than they would otherwise. That is because becoming homeless makes these underlying problems worse, and thus more difficult to escape.

And that’s the California conundrum. It’s not that California, compared to other states, has proportionally more people having mental health crises, being kicked out of their homes due to marital strife, being fired at work or grappling with a sudden medical condition. It’s that when those things happen, the housing market operating in the background of these personal crises make becoming homeless much more likely than in other states.

So would building more housing solve California’s homelessness problem? Almost certainly not. But it would help slow the growth of the homeless population, which would make serving the ones currently on the street a lot easier. But are all housing typologies created equal when it comes to addressing homelessness? The intuitive response is that we need deeply affordable options in order to directly affect those at risk of homelessness, and the only way to do that is to (1) have the government build it, or (2) force developers to build it, on the back of market rate housing production. We’ll come back to that.

California Mistake #2: Not Going All In on Substance Abuse Treatment AND Enforcement

It’s no secret that homelessness is frequently correlated with substance abuse – by some estimates, between half and three-quarters of homeless individuals have a drug or alcohol dependency. Substance abuse is an especially pernicious malady as it undermines a person’s ability to plan, get organized and hold onto a steady job — all prerequisites for accessing available government services and ultimately escaping homelessness.

However, there is clear split in how to handle substance abuse problems amongst the homeless. For a long time, California biggest cities — most notably San Francisco, but others as well — have embraced as “harm reduction” model, which essentially attempts to avoid drug overdose deaths by providing drug users with clean drug paraphernalia (such as sterilized needles) and allowing them to use drugs in a supervised, safe location. Amazingly this approach did seem to do a pretty good job bringing down deaths from heroin, but it has buckled under the fundamentally different threat posed by fentanyl.

The second approach is what I will deem the “Alberta approach,” is to coerce drug addicts into rehabilitation and treatment through the threat of law enforcement. Now, that sounds a lot ickier than allowing users to abuse drugs in a safe environment until they come to their senses of their own free will, but it is also, frankly, a lot more realistic. Many drug addicts have lost the ability to think rationally, because lack of rational thinking is a symptom of their disease. Furthermore, with hyper-potent and deadly drugs like fentanyl in the picture, getting addicts clean may be the only way to save their lives. Following every one of them around with a Narcan injection while they continue to use is not only logically impossible, it’s almost certainly leading to unnecessary and preventable death.

Recognizing this fundamental truth, Alberta has decided to take a two-pronged approach: first, it is empowering its local police to enforce quality of life offenses, such as camping, loitering, petty theft, and public urination; and second, it is using diversion from the criminal justice system and into publicly-funded rehab facilities as a carrot to encourage drug addicts to get clean. To sweeten the pot, these rehab facilities don’t only provide treatment, they also provide housing: Alberta’s program will provide treatment in a specialized facility for up to one year, which includes room and board at the facility.

Personally, while I understand the rationale behind programs like harm reduction — I’m a libertarian, and part of me appreciates the respect for personal autonomy built into that approach — I think California erred badly in putting its eggs in that basket, rather than leaving the door open to a more forceful, enforcement-and-rehabilitation-focused approach like the Alberta model. The latter would be very expensive, but it’s not like California is shy about spending money in this area. The problem is, to the extent California is investing in this area, it is doing so without the enforcement piece and it is overly reliant on the private and nonprofit sectors to deliver these services.

So how Does Costa Mesa factor into this?

Housing

With respect to housing, I’ve already praised this City Council for its efforts to bring new housing to the City, specifically by tackling the stranglehold of Measure Y by passing Measure K. And even though I think the city has erred by hobbling new home construction with an inclusionary housing ordinance, I am glad that the version that they did pass was as light-touch as could be politically managed.

But what I haven’t talked much about is the two Project Homekey projects that the City has pursued, in part as a way to park its excess COVID/American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) money. The city landed one such project to convert the Motel 6 on Newport Boulevard to permanent supportive housing, and another recently to covert the TravelLodge on Bristol into something similar.

On the surface, this is exactly the kind of deeply affordable housing the city needs in order to provide the “safety net” housing that can prevent the near-homeless from becoming completely homeless. However, I think that take is too superficial. Actually, it was the old run-down motels that were providing that service, by taking all comers regardless of status (even if they provided substandard housing).

Instead, these shiny new facilities will likely be taking clients from the Costa Mesa Bridge Shelter, which currently has almost zero vacancy most nights. In other words, we are taking away facilities that provided safety-net housing to the not-quite homeless and traded them for beds that help free up shelter space, essentially extending our shelter services into a long-term population.

I’m not sure that’s really enough, but it might be all the city can directly control. Ultimately, when it comes to housing, the city is going to need to get an assist from its neighbors to help alleviate the broader housing crisis, because housing is really a regional or metro area issue. And until that happens, the city is going to have a relatively high rate of homelessness — almost nothing can change that. So unless we want to emulate the harm reduction model that lets people sleep on the streets, suffer untreated mental illnesses and openly use drugs, we need a facility to intake homeless individuals (i.e., our Bridge Shelter) and a way to ensure we have sufficient capacity at that intake facility to allow it to continue to function.

This, by the way, appears to be what Redondo Beach has done, which was recently touted in the LA Times as a homelessness success story. Now, I’m not sure you can really call something a “success” when “success” is defined as balancing the number of people your city lifts out of homelessness with the number your housing policies force into it (this is what they call “functional zero”, in homeless policy parlance), but I suppose it’s better than abject failure. How did Redondo Beach do it? You guessed it: they essentially expanded their shelter with tiny homes and took advantage of Project Homekey to build even more supportive housing. That’s very similar to what Costa Mesa has done.

Enforcement and Treatment

However, another side to the Redondo Beach model is that it does take an aggressive stance on enforcement — something they were doing even before the US Supreme Court decision in Grant’s Pass v. Johnson was handed down earlier this year. As in Alberta, Redondo Beach uses an “enforce and divert” model by arresting homeless individuals for “quality of life” offenses and then diverting them into drug and mental health treatment using a “homeless court”. And so far, it does seem to be working: not only has Redondo Beach achieved “functional zero”, it has reduced its unsheltered homeless population from 105 people to 18 people today.

Taking a look at the candidates, each of James Peters (Mayor), Mike Buley (District 1), Adam Ereth (District 1) and Jeff Pettis (District 6) list homelessness as a top issue of their campaigns. The three right-leaning challengers, especially Peters and Buley, have centered enforcement as key to addressing homelessness in Costa Mesa. However, neither of them have provided much detail on where those folks arrested for loitering or vagrancy are supposed to go (other than jail, I suppose). Pettis and Ereth, on the other hand, each of which have more first-hand experience with homelessness in our area, appear to de-emphasize enforcement in favor of a treatment-first approach.

Really, I think the big blind spot for all of these hopefuls is the lack of connecting our challenges with homelessness to housing. Housing is an immediate problem because, without having some housing available for the indigent and struggling, people are getting stuck at our Bridge Shelter with long stays. This in turn undermines the Bridge Shelter’s capacity to take on new clients and reduces law enforcement’s ability to divert homeless offenders to shelter rather than jail. It is also a long-term problem; if there is no housing available at an affordable price, then climbing out of homelessness is going to be incredibly difficult.

And finally, I haven’t heard any candidate, or any sitting City Council member, mention the homeless court solution pioneered by Redondo Beach. That seems like an obvious avenue to consider as it would serve and the effective bridge between enforcement (which is necessary to keep our public spaces open and available to all residents, but most particularly to low income residents that rely on them) and treatment.

So is this a winning political issue?

Honestly, I’m not so sure. Costa Mesa really has done a pretty good job handling its homelessness problem. The Bridge Shelter is widely regarded as a success and the use of Federal ARPA money to create additional post-shelter capacity was a great way to use one-time funds, even if the results are expensive. And while the city should of course be concerned about getting on the hook for long-term spending at these facilities, most residents understand that these rundown motels were already costing the city money in terms of police and EMT calls. All things being equal they have to rather live next to a well-run supportive care facility than a drug den.

So yes, the most recent point-in-time count wasn’t particularly flattering. But, not only did homelessness generally rise region-wide, the city is already pursuing a prudent path to address it without giving in to some of the goofier ideas (such as the needle exchange that recently took root in Santa Ana). So sure, I think the challengers should talk about homelessness. But in this case, the current council has done a decent job giving them little to work with.