The housing issue is so great that even Santa Barbara County staff were calling the housing hotline asking for help when the pandemic's eviction moratorium ended in March 2022. That is what Dinah Lockhart, the county’s retiring deputy director of housing and community development, told the county supervisors on Tuesday, as part of the county housing division's report on ending homelessness.
The two-pronged plans are government programs that have actually worked, to some extent: The homeless Encampment Resolution Strategy decreased the number of camps along the highways and in towns, and Community Action Plan placed the regulars on State Street panhandling or offering friendly "I like your smile" comments in housing.
The encampments program outlines the difficulties in a nutshell: 961 individual camps were identified across the county, 380 of them were assessed, and 154 of them are considered "resolved," meaning the people living in them either accepted shelter (15 percent temporary; 4 percent permanent) or moved on to another camp. Without existing housing for the campers to move to, the program could do little more than clean up the camps, work on referrals, and build trust, though calls for police and fire services decreased 13 percent over the two-year program period. To continue the effort, the county is applying for a $6 million grant from the state's Encampment Resolution Fund, with an emphasis on camps near waterways and highways.