Editor’s Note: The following was written before the release of the Supreme Court case and County figures on homelessness.
The unsustainable inflow of transient homeless people is too much for this city to handle. Another violent attack by a homeless person in Santa Monica happened on Monday. And what are we to make of this awful pattern, this seemingly now-regular occurrence?
We the people’s republic of Santa Monica, Home of the Homeless — what are we to do? This past week I was very fortunate to sit down with Santa Monica Police Chief Batista, Housing and Human Services Director Heather Averick and City Manager David White, along with the Editor in Chief of this newspaper, Matthew Hall, to ask just that.
As is often the case with issues of such complexity and history the questions and the answers were not clear or obvious. But I am left with a feeling that Averick and Batista care deeply about Santa Monica and are taking these issues very seriously.
Averick advanced the city’s many programs that successfully help prevent our residents from becoming homelessness. Programs to help at-risk elderly residents not lose their homes, and programs to help those who’ve lived here for five years or more, attain access to housing within our city.
These are admirable and successful initiatives that show a deep commitment to our residents and to the insidious spiral that becoming homeless can have on one’s life — aiming to stop the spiral before it becomes critical. So, we as citizens have reason to be proud, and grateful to White, Averick and the council for their admirable work.
But what of the violence? And what of the transitional folks who come here from across the county if not the country? This is where things get more complicated.
Roughly 20% of police calls have some relation to homelessness and a staggering 67%-69% of Santa Monica Police Department arrests are homeless related. That’s a lot of police resources dedicated to homeless related crime.
The police are doing a lot, with limited resources to tackle these issues, and I will dedicate serious time to exploring those initiatives in my next column. They are using drones and updating cameras. An understaffed police department has been hiring and seeking funds to keep hiring more officers. They’ve updated their 30+ year old records management system and are changing how and where they patrol, to concentrate in areas with higher incidence.
So, noting that we will engage more with that later, let’s look at what the real problem is: More high needs homeless people arrive here than we have services to meet.
And how do I know that? I don’t. Because we have not set forth a plan to collect that data. City officials are working on a strategic homeless plan and tell us they will have it next year… After the election, I should add, when the council may look and act differently. But we will set that aside for now.
The 2022 Moss Adams report had all sorts of great suggestions and the city quickly took up many of them. The one left behind, was the collection of data. White told us that they instituted programs quickly that they thought could make substantive change, and held off on programs (ahem data collection) that were less critically important to helping the homeless emergency.
This is a logical answer, but I take issue with it. Without actual data we don’t know if what we’re doing has any positive effect or where to best put the considerable resources we expend. It seems quite critical to me.
So, the city has a plan — to make a plan. That makes sense except for the reality of violent homeless incidents that seem to keep occurring at a horrific pace — not to mention tourists who send pictures of used needles on our wonderful beaches back to their friends, with sentiments like "never coming back here…" or "I don’t know how you live like this." Which are both comments I’ve seen tourists post on social media about their experiences here.
My main issue, and again I don’t have data to back this up, is the Metro’s termination policy, wherein they make all passengers exit the bus/train at the end of the line. Since we have a train and two bus lines that terminate downtown, it follows that a steady stream of homeless folks emerge there.
And what do they find? They can walk a block and get some new clothes, and some food. Then they can walk down to the palisades bluffs and find shady grass to lie in. A welcome bastion of services and relative comfort.
These are human beings, Miles. They deserve comfort. I agree — absolutely agree. In the world’s richest country every human being deserves basic resources, a modicum of comfort and stability, and dignity. Like the unhoused, many of us in this country don’t feel like we have any of those things. So clearly there are broader issues here.
But Santa Monica cannot shoulder the burden of basic needs for a desperate population of transitional homeless people — especially when it turns violent.
We need to get metro to change the termination points of their bus lines, to either loop back to downtown or to end at Olympic and Sepulveda where our local LA county department of mental health is located. Let’s funnel people who need serious help to places where they can get serious help and if that’s not Olympic and Sepulveda, where is it— let’s terminate bus lines there.
As for the train, let’s have metro/county staff the terminating station (promenade) with security and homeless outreach folks. No harassment, but certainly initial engagement, so that people who are in states with low executive function who need help aren’t let off into our city to figure it out by themselves.
Metro may say "no" and that’s when we can ask Ben Allen or the courts can step in and help us come to a solution.
We are always going to be a magnet for homeless people, who God bless them, truly need somewhere safe and comfortable to exist in relative peace, not to mention a pathway into housing. But in order for us to succeed as a city we can’t be overwhelmed by a flood of high needs homeless folks.
We just don’t have the resources, and it’s eroding every other area of our city’s bright future.
Miles Warner is a Santa Monica parent and resident.
