The Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury, a board of citizens impaneled for a year to look into governmental issues, released a report today making recommendations on how to address the region’s overwhelmingly high homeless rate.
The 38-page report looks back at the recommendations from the consulting group Focus Strategies that led the city of Eureka and the county of Humboldt to adopt resolutions supporting a Housing First approach to addressing homelessness in 2016.
The report states that it will take years for the affordable housing stock to catch up with the current demand and, in the interim, “our current and future unsheltered homeless will need somewhere legal to stay, both day and night.”
“While creating more usable shelter is necessary, speeding up the rate at which affordable housing is generated will go a long way to address our homeless crisis,” the summary states. “Local jurisdictions working on their Housing Elements are including creative and forward-thinking solutions to encourage production of affordable housing. Local government should incentivize implementing these solutions.”
While noting in a press release that there is no “silver bullet that will eradicate homelessness in Humboldt County,” the grand jury puts forward 10 recommendations that “if implemented, could significantly improve the quality of life for many of the County’s residents—both homeless and housed—while the affordable housing crisis persists.”
These recommendations include that the county board of supervisors revise the housing element to provide for shelter solutions and affordable housing, work to reduce barriers at existing shelters (like accommodating partners and significant others, providing space to store personal property) and find an ongoing funding source for the Housing Trust Fund. Additionally, the grand jury recommends expanding the role of the county’s Homeless Solutions Committee to include both looking at shelter projects and affordable housing, that the city and county work together to find suitable locations for both a homeless day center and a supervised safe parking program, that the county and city resume monthly meetings on shared issues related to homelessness and that they both work to develop plans to provide financial incentives for homeowners to build accessory dwelling units to house very-low income residents on their properties.
Read the full report here.
Editor’s note: This story was updated from a previous version to clarify that a quote included came from a Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury press release, not the full report, and to include more information about the grand jury’s recommendations.
This article appears in McKinleyopolis.
When the exemption from permitting is raised to 800 interior square feet in rural areas, your rural cousins will build cabins for half of those in need of housing. The other half should be provided apartments in modest sized 3 and 4 unit buildings in the greater metropolises of Humboldt.
Oddly, our planners and supervisors do not yet feel compelled to act.
Fantastic piece of work by the Grand Jury. A couple items to add to Bibliography:
Housing First: Tanya Tull & Sam Tsemberis by Tom Peterson | Feb 15, 2017
“Housing First began when people asked: What if something else worked better?”
https://stakeholderhealth.org/tanya-tull-s…;
Aligning Affordable Housing Efforts with Actions to End Homelessness, U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness;
“To follow through on public messaging that connects affordable housing efforts to the ability to end homelessness, it is essential that people experiencing or with histories of homelessness have genuine and meaningful access to existing and new affordable rental units. For there to be true access to housing for this population, there must be enough units that are both affordable and available to households at the lowest income levels and there must be concerted efforts to connect people experiencing homelessness to those units and to identify and remove barriers to such access.”
https://www.usich.gov/resources/uploads/as…
All the police officers do is chase people around and mess with the homeless where you can’t work because all your stuff will be thrown into the trash and you don’t have anything but the clothes on your back we are treated like shit. I would have 2 jobs right know but I’m fucked because of real property management fucked me and my disabled mother over.
Help us