In the past decade, the mortality rate among homeless Californians has soared — with an estimated 50,000 paying the ultimate price for our state’s failure to act compassionately to bring everyone indoors.
The cost is not counted only in lives. California has spent more than $24 billion in the past five years, only to see homelessness rise while the state population shrank. In spite of all this spending, nearly half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless population is in California.
In the face of this costly and deadly failure, San Jose and other cities are adopting new tools to protect the homeless and the housed. In San Jose, we are proposing a “Responsibility to Shelter” ordinance that would require people to accept offers of shelter. This is part of our effort to reform our homeless policies, including creating safe parking and camping sites and, most of all, investing in motel conversions and modular units that can be built at a fraction of the cost and time of the legacy “housing-first” model (just over $100,000 per door, versus $1 million)…