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Volunteers and friends of the homeless advocacy group Housing is A Human Right OC recently presented to the Orange County Board of Supervisors their annual Reading of Names in open session.
Compiled primarily from the county coroner’s list of the homeless who died last year Without Fixed Abode, this annual public reading of names not only memorializes the passing of homeless persons in 2024 but also gives notice of their passing to family, friends and acquaintances who might not otherwise have known.
It was fitting on this day that the first speaker to the podium was Fr. Dennis Kriz, who publishes the names of the dead on a monthly basis. Reading the first of some 380 names he set the tone for more than two dozen other “namers” who followed him to the podium, by telling the board he was compelled by his conscience to honor these dead. Otherwise, as he put it, being a Catholic, he would have to confess later to his inaction.
One by one a slow procession of volunteer speakers from all walks of life took their turn reading the names. Street advocates and political activists. Medical personnel and social workers. Relatives and friends of those who passed. And some who were formerly homeless themselves, like Jennifer Lavorin, who told the board that after fleeing domestic violence with her two children they had to sleep on a floor while she worked full time and pursued her education, unable to afford rent anywhere in OC.
Many came to the podium not only to recite the names of the dead, but to tell their stories on behalf of those who no longer could. All with the unified message “housing is healthcare” they challenge the board to “do more” to embrace the housing first model.
HHROC volunteer Sean Drexler noted that this homeless crisis in OC is a housing crisis . . . ”completely manufactured” by the county’s inaction.
South County social worker Maura Mikulek informed the board there are over 9,000 individuals in Orange County’s coordinated entry system experiencing homelessness, waiting for housing and other services, often for years she said, “Some of them die waiting.”
HHROC coordinator Dave Duran confronted the board with, “how do you sleep at night, knowing you actually have the power to make a difference. Only about a million of each one of your [almost 10 million dollar] discretionary budgets goes to housing. Instead, 300 million of it goes to law enforcement. . . .All of these lives matter.”
Street medicine triage nurse Kat White posed this more direct question to the board: “Where is the housing . . . the shelter beds, medical rehab beds, and detox centers we are told are available, but aren’t. . . . Why are we pretending we can arrest our way out of a health and housing crisis. . . we need actions, not words.”
Speaker Rhonda Moore, read tearfully from the list of those who passed, with some of her own relatives on it, then abruptly addressed the board, “you just don’t seem to care . . . to pay attention while we read these names. . . . It would be more respectful if you stop looking down at your phones and just pay attention.”
Unhoused and Uncounted
One formerly homeless person originally displaced from the Santa Ana Riverbed roll ups of 2018, Denise Lindstrom spoke of those whom the county simply lost track of. Still in contact with the unhoused on the streets, Denise named several who died on the street, in hospitals, in custody, or on someone else’s borrowed couch. She reminded the board that there were many who passed in 2024 never to be counted on the coroner’s narrowly defined No Fixed Abode list.
Denise’s personal knowledge of the homeless who slip away into oblivion unassisted and unaccounted for is an accepted fact shared by many of the advocates in the room that day and for those who continue to work the streets. They know that the county’s homeless Point in Time Count every two years is a gross undercount. In 2024 the PIT count collected by the county’s Continuum of Care and contracted 211 services counted 7,322 sheltered and unsheltered homeless in OC, a 37% rise in the homeless rate in just two years. And that is just the official PIT count. Such parallel county homeless services as Cal Optima have estimated that the homeless count of just homeless MediCal recipients was over 10,000.
Many homeless cycle through the county’s mostly dead-end shelter system and out again to be lost on the streets, or through revolving doors of our hospital ERs, or isolated and sequestered in squalid county-funded motels, or caught up in the street to prison pipeline, or into the custodial straitjackets of court appointed conservatorships. Never to be heard from, or counted again by a coordinated entry system that is all too often neither coordinated, or caring. The only verifiable success rates our county coordinate entry system can claim are among the unhoused who manage to persevere through a maze of overlapping bureaucracies to acquire permanent supportive housing. Only then do the statistics support the trend for long term stabilization where the previously unhoused are able rise above their cycle of homelessness. Unfortunately, this county has never managed to meet its even modest permanent supportive housing goals. Development of PSH units have stalled, to such an extent that the county system of care must now ration and restrict housing placements to only the most relentless and determined among their homeless clients.
But a system of care is only a reflection of the leadership that drives it to succeed, or allows it to stall, and ultimately fail to protect its most vulnerable. Nowhere among Southland regional governments is leadership more concentrated, and therefore more accountable, than in the 5 supervisors of Orange County, nor seemingly more distracted, dismissive, or even antagonistic toward the advocates who came to the podium to speak on this solemn day of recollection for those who passed unhoused and, in many cases, uncounted.
Cold Comfort at the BOS
With individual speaker time reduced at the last minute to a meagre two minutes to recite the names of the dead and tell their stories, readers at the January 28th BOS meeting struggled to elicit from the board, if not their compassion, at least their attention. Distracted with paperwork or their phones, board members at one point in the readings had to be reminded by advocates to put down those phones, look up and “pay attention.”
That kind of apparent disinterest at the highest level has a way of percolating down through the ranks of county government to its agencies and contractors who get the message, if not the memo, that ending homelessness in Orange County is not necessarily the goal anymore, but rather, as a current board agenda item proposes, to simply “address” it. A subtle change in wording that carries a much different message.
At the end of the public reading of names each of the supervisors had an opportunity to respond to the speakers. Each of them who did address the public found ways to deflect accountability for the county’s housing and homeless crisis from away from themselves.
Chair Doug Chaffee began the board’s response by immediately pivoting away from public call for increased housing, deferring instead to a small tenant retention pilot program he launched in 2024 targeting some 300 families “at risk” of homelessness with an eviction diversion program that turns out to be extremely temporary in services and with unrealistic deadlines, never addressing the over 3000 actual homeless in his district steadily increasing in numbers on his streets and in his shelters, with nowhere to go in terms of available housing which has remained almost static for the past two years. Many of the unhoused and those languishing in the shelters have been waiting years for a housing placement, even as emergency shelters, overnight parking programs and even cold weather overnight shelters have been forestalled or completely shuttered in Chaffee’s District.
Supervisor Vince Sarmiento deflected away from speakers demands for more permanent supportive housing by concentrating on a receive and file report attached to the day’s agenda, considering instead so-called small scale housing (“tiny houses”) and declaring it “the missing piece in the middle” on the spectrum of options from mass shelters to supportive housing, which he confidently claimed are already available to the homeless.
“We know we have congregate shelters. . . .” Sarmiento assured us, “And we have permanent supportive housing.. . .as options. . . . So this is really to create [small scale housing] that is the transition piece in the middle we can stand up quicker,” failing to acknowledge that the shelter first model at one end of the county’s system of care is overburdened and underproductive in advancing the unhoused into permanent supportive housing units that are still largely unavailable to them. According to the federal agency Housing and Urban Development in 2023 about one in 3 of all who entered the OC’s shelter system ended up in supportive housing (see HUD performance Measurement Module item 7). In 2024 it was about one in 12. Fewer successful exits out of the shelters, and homelessness, than the year before. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the total 2024 OC homeless housing inventory in all of OC’s districts was also less than the year before.
Small scale housing might be a welcome, if temporary, solution for some, but the” tiny house” alternative in Orange County was floated by Federal Judge David Carter himself back in 2018, and summarily dismissed by the BOS and county counsel as a non-starter for homeless housing in OC. The same county counsel who advises the board today. How many more years will it take for this “small-scale” housing report to become policy, and for policy to become actual shelter for the desperately unhoused?
Remember the county’s modest 2018 goal of building 2700 permanent supportive housing units in OC by 2025? Well, it’s 2025 and little more than half of that goal has been realized. With a county housing finance trust “funding gap” of close to a billion dollars needed to pursue its even modified housing goals of an additional 2,396 units going forward (according to the county’s own 2024 Strategic Financial Plan. Page 128), what are the chances the homeless will ever see those small-scale “tiny houses” in their lifetime, let alone permanent supportive housing which every nationally recognized housing authority (HUD performance module 7b) has affirmed is the only outcome that has proven to end the cycle of homelessness spinning out of control in this county, the one remedy this board doesn’t seem to want to talk about.
In her afterthoughts, Supervisor Katrina Foley dodged accountability altogether for the county’s supportive housing shortage, perhaps unaware that there is a Housing Trust “funding gap,” stating, “This is not a funding problem, It’s a problem of identifying where cities will allow us to build affordable housing.”
Claiming the county has no access to surplus property for homeless housing, Supervisor Foley shifted the blame for the affordable housing deficit onto the cities. “Unfortunately, in district 5 [coastal OC], there is mostly planned communities and mostly parks . . . There is not land sitting around we can build on. We are here to provide the funds but if the cities aren’t asking us to build housing, we can’t do it.” But even as she spoke, otherwise informed advocates in the audience called out state and county controlled properties in her district that could be developed for emergency housing, including portions of the 114 acre old Fairview Developmental property now sitting dormant, but still in state hands and declared “surplus property” along with other state and county properties including CalTrans and even OCTA parcels in Supervisor Foley’s district from San Clemente to Costa Mesa also identified as surplus and available, especially for low income housing developments, a priority for the state.
The last longstanding board member to be offered a chance to respond to advocate comments was District 3 South County Supervisor Don Wagner. The largest of the 5 districts with fewest homeless services, the smallest number of permanent supportive housing units, and still the only district without a large scale county supported homeless shelter, he elected to pass on any response. Sometimes silence says it all. Inaction, like silence, is a policy decision the unhoused of Orange County pay for on the streets every day, often as we noted, with their lives.
On this day of reckoning HHROC volunteers had a rare opportunity to address county leadership directly, calling out the names of those who died unhoused, and those yet uncounted, not to shame, but to demand accountability for those deaths from our lop country officials who could have, and still can, do something about it.
It was also an opportunity for the supervisors to hear the unfiltered effects of their flawed policies and programs for the homeless of Orange County that would allow as many of our unhoused to die on the streets as those it can manage to put into housing. And to hear it directly from the mouths of those who live it and observe it on the streets. Were they listening? The only thing we know for sure is that it will take more than denials, deflections, excuses or silence from the BOS to convince the streetwise advocates assembled on this day, that their message had been heard. Because before you can really hear the stories of those this system has left behind, you first had to be “paying attention.”
John Underwood /Housing Is A Human Right OC
Opinions expressed in community opinion pieces belong to the authors and not Voice of OC.
Voice of OC is interested in hearing different perspectives and voices. If you want to weigh in on this issue or others please email opinions@voiceofoc.org.
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