Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva (D-Fullerton) introduced a package of bills that will address issues with homelessness. These bills, AB 1788 and AB 1789 address both California’s immediate and long-term needs to make meaningful strides toward alleviating the homelessness crisis in our state.
“Our communities need help fighting homelessness, and these bills provide needed structure and accountability. By addressing the immediate and long-term needs of those experiencing homelessness, these bills will aid our state’s most vulnerable population and allow our communities the groundwork for lasting solutions to one of our society’s most pressing challenges,” said Assemblywoman Quirk-Silva. “In the face of our state’s homelessness crisis, AB 1788 and AB 1789 are compassionate and comprehensive responses.”
AB 1788 establishes homeless adult and family multidisciplinary teams in each county to expedite the identification, assessment, and linkage of individuals experiencing homelessness to housing and supportive services. It also allows the sharing of confidential information among provider agencies for coordinating services, authorizing counties to form mental health multidisciplinary teams for justice-involved individuals diagnosed with mental illness, both during incarceration and post-release. These teams can share confidential information to coordinate supportive services with protocols developed at the county level. Members of the mental health teams are bound by privacy and confidentiality obligations.
AB 1789 empowers the Department of Housing and Community Development to provide loans or grants for rehabilitating, capitalizing operating subsidy reserves, and extending the long-term affordability of housing projects that qualify as “challenged developments.” A “challenged development” is defined as a project at least 15 years old, serving very low or extremely low-income households, and lacking access to sufficient private or public resources for substantial rehabilitation. Priority for these loans and grants is given to department-funded housing projects with expired affordability restrictions or a remaining term of less than 10 years or those at risk of conversion to market-rate housing.
This legislative package will focus on addressing the homelessness crisis with a commitment to lasting change and improving the lives of vulnerable Californians.
Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva represents the 67th Assembly District, which includes the Orange County communities of Anaheim, Buena Park, Cypress, Fullerton, and La Palma, as well as the Los Angeles County communities of Artesia, Cerritos, and Hawaiian Gardens.
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Categories: Local Government, Local News
Good. More unaccountable bureaucracy and funding for the Homeless Industrial Complex.
The point of these changes is to reform the bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy is the roles and rules for how a large organization gets things done, whether private or public. A bureaucracy succeeds or fails based on its rules and how successfully the people who implement them do their work.
The mistake would be pretending you can get people off the street without coordinating between parts of the bureaucracy. Of course you need to, and that’s what isn’t happening and a big reason as to why we’re failing. We have a broken fragmented system that doesn’t coordinate assistance with each individual’s ongoing case in mind.
Imagine a homeless outreach police officer trying to deal with a given individual on the street. What’s their mental health situation? What meds are they supposed to be on? Where are they supposed to be? Is there a housing plan in progress for them? Is there family that can help them? Who? What documentation do they need to become employable? Etc.
If information isn’t coordinated and accessible it’s significantly less likely that any given interaction is going to help the person get into a better situation. Instead it will likely be transactional at best to get them moved along and out of sight for the moment. Which just kicks the can down the road/ moves the problem.
Blah, blah. You aren’t getting better, you’re just getting more.
Yes David, I’m sure my understanding, care and clear logic can be downright frustrating to those who prefer to substitute gut feelings and ideology for reason.
Socks. Homeless people need socks.
Risible, reductive and insulting to all parties, all at once! You’re in top form DZ.
I’m sure some people do need socks. Basic needs. But the rule of thumb is housing solves homelessness. It’s an overstatement but you need to start from the definitions. Homeless = unhoused. The person is on the street or living in their car or flopping with friends for short periods.
What’s their actual pathway to stability? Addressing basic needs (food, hygiene, clothes…), health care, getting vital records accessible, getting contact info for relatives, getting (back) on meds/treatment for mental illness, job training, dealing with addictions, etc.
But what “housing solves homelessness” is all about is understanding you’re not going to make progress on any of those issues while someone is on the street. So if you’re not quickly getting them off the street you’re not serious about their problems, or the impacts of their being homeless on the rest of society.
And what this article is about is reforming the bureaucracy to address that bigger picture that keeps the context of the person and where they’re at.
If you have a business, and you’re working on job there is a principle of a “job card” being where you’re at in completing a given job. There is an order to things but ultimately you should be able to take any job in the shop and understand quickly where it is in the process and what’s next. What’s been done and what it is waiting on.
Just like a shop you may have all the tools and employees available. Similarly government has housing programs, food programs, addiction programs, access to vital records, etc. But to the extent those parts of the bureaucracy are not in sync, not allowed to talk to each other (privacy), normally driven by the fully rational, stable, housed customer in a good mental state with an address and telephone number, the system breaks down in addressing the needs of people who have no stable address and telephone number, may not be fully rational, are fighting issues of basic needs on a daily basis.
So the need for reforming the bureaucracy to be less customer driven than proactive, self-driven, more integrated and big picture oriented/comprehensive seems obvious. Homelessness is hard and complicated, but government wins wars, builds and maintains public infrastructure, public safety… big hard things. It’s not that it cannot handle complicated stuff. But it is clearly failing regarding homelessness. I think it will continue to fail if it is not proactively treating each homeless person or family as a case, with all info available and understanding of where they are and a plan for where they need to get, with services orchestrated to that end.
As someone who spent eight months on the streets, I agree. While socks may be a general necessity/want; I am a HUGE advocate of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The most basic of which are: Physiological and Safety needs.
Gut feelings is what has created the current policy toward homeless problem – don’t ask about effectiveness, spend money just to be seen to be doing something. The County hired a Homeless Czar a few years ago and got NOTHING for it except another $300,000 annual price tag and a pension spike. But the people who hired her sure felt good about the press release.
Someone like me has to continue to applaud the efforts of people like Sharon Quirk Silva in trying to alleviate the homeless crisis in our midst.
It truly serves NO ONE to keep people on the street (and doing nothing or next to nothing does exactly that):
Keeping people on the street certainly destroys the lives of those who find themselves that situation. However, it diminishes the quality of life of everyone around, and yes, makes us into far worse people than we’d want to be.
I’ve long believed that Archbishop Desmond Tutu said it best noting that Oppression dehumanizes everyone. (Paraphrasing) he noted that yes, oppression makes victims out of the oppressed, but it also makes monsters out of the oppressors.
So thank you Sharon — and there could be all kinds of others as they decide to stand up and do the right thing — for trying.
Honestly, “your reward will be great in heaven” and it’s a reward that is open to everyone in as much as we choose to care. And if we don’t we, choose our own fate and ultimately get what we deserve.
Our society has a problem, homelessness. If QuirkSilva can increase coordination between current systems to better tackle the problem, more power to her with my salute. Of course David W, Zenger is correct, we will just get more, bureaucracy. It is a fact of life. But Dennis and John are also correct. They are willing to take a risk and go ahead. We owe it to our fellow man to at least attempt to help. David W. Zenger, have you ever gone without a good night’s sleep free of the need for self-defense and a warm shower and clean clothes to begin your new day? You may have. I have hitchhiked across America and done it for months. It is difficult when it is no longer an adventure. The homeless do it every night. They begin again each day without clean clothing. We must be a caretaker of the less fortunate and help them to re-launch. Some won’t, a cruel fact. But let’s not quit now.
Actually the problem is not coordination.
Instead,
(1) It’s a lack of beds at the shelters. This fall it was almost impossible for a woman, let alone for a newly homeless family to get into a shelter in Northern O.C.
(2) It’s a lack of vouchers for apartments (the waiting list in OC for Section 8 vouchers currently approaches 10 years…) and
(3) Finally, it’s a lack of apartments that accept the vouchers even if / when one get one. In 2022 it was found that in L.A. County (but OC is similar) only 10% of Section 8 recipients were able to find an apartment that would accept them in the 6 months before the vouchers expired.
The problem? You suggest that providing housing addresses the problem. It doesn’t. It addresses the symptom of a bigger, societal problem. And maybe picking at the symptoms is the only thing that can be done.
Nobody ever seems to want to talk about dysfunctional families, sex abuse, drug addictions and an actuarial presence of mental health issues. That would suggest that homelessness has become a permanent situation.
I’ve been watching the Homeless Industrial Complex make a fortune in OC over the past 15 while accomplishing very little.
Salute away. Adding more bureaucracy doesn’t solve anything except create more people dependent on making work for themselves.
If quirk saliva is involved, you KNOW it’s a bad idea. I wish that @#% would go away.