Housing is a Human Right Orange County
When Katrina Foley was elevated by the voters in 2021 from mayor of Costa Mesa to the Orange County Board of Supervisors, the volunteer members (myself among them) of Housing is a Human Right Orange County (HHROC) were cautiously optimistic. We saw someone whose family has lived experience with homelessness, someone with plans to build housing on the site of the Fairview Developmental Center, and someone who seemed to be to the left of Doug Chaffee, the only other Democrat on the board. We hoped that she would help the rest of the board find the compassion and heart to finally do something significant to increase the amount of low-income and permanent supportive housing.
Now, in 2025, we are still waiting for the board to do anything of real substance. In 2018, the county determined that their goal should be to build 2700 units of permanent supportive housing (PSH), despite facing a funding gap of around 900 million dollars per their own analysis. As of August of 2024, they had managed to complete 858 PSH units. At this rate, it will be another 15 years before the original goal of 2700 PSH units is achieved. Does the board really think that the number of units needed will still be 2700 by then?
On January 28, 2025, HHROC and its coalition of supporters attended the Board of Supervisors meeting to read the names of the nearly 400 people who died unhoused in OC in 2024. As always, we implored the board to do more with its discretionary budget of nearly a billion dollars, and to put a housing bond of at least a billion dollars on the ballot (which they can do if 2/3 of them vote for it). In response, the supervisors spent a full 20 minutes defending their efforts. Saying she was upset by the tone of the speakers, Foley insisted several times that funding is not the issue, stating “this is not a funding problem” and “the funding is there” but they can’t find sites to build out. No mention was made of the 90-acre site of the old Chet Holifield Federal Building, or the 114 acres of the (currently unoccupied) Fairview Developmental Center. (Video of the meeting can be viewed here, Foley’s comments begin at 2 hours and 12 minutes into the meeting.)
Curiously, the very next day, during a United Way webinar (Fourth Annual Orange County State of Homelessness Address), Supervisor Foley declared that “we have a couple of challenges, funding being one.”
Since you seem to be ambivalent about it, Ms. Foley, let me assure you that funding for low-income and permanent supportive housing projects is indeed a problem. However, you and your fellow Supervisors have the power to solve this problem by committing more of your discretionary budget to housing and by putting a housing bond on the ballot. You don’t have to wait for cities to identify building sites. Land is immediately available in the county’s so-called SB2 zones.
In one of the richest counties in California, we should be able to build permanent supportive housing at a rate faster than that at which unhoused people are dying. Orange County can and must do better, and it starts with the Board of Supervisors.
Thomas Fielder has been a volunteer with Housing is a Human Right Orange County since 2018. He has lived in Orange County since 1980.
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