Orange County officials are doing something they’ve never tried before during the hot summer months ahead.
Prepare cold weather emergency shelters for homeless people – ones that people can simply walk into without making appointments.
In recent years, local elected officials and public sector executives seem to wait for cold spells and rainstorms to actually hit – along with calls from reporters – before figuring out where homeless people can go.
It’s a clumsy approach that often takes too long.
Note that over the past decade, homeless deaths have skyrocketed — soaring from 103 in 2012 to 395 in 2021.
And Orange County’s homeless population has increased, according to recent estimates.
[Read: Orange County Homeless Population Continues Growing]
Because of the work of Father Dennis Kriz, Pastor of St. Philip Benizi Catholic Church in Fullerton, Orange County residents are publicly reminded of homeless deaths in memorials he posts every month.
[Read: Kriz: Another 33 People “Died Without Fixed Abode” in OC in March 2024]
It’s noteworthy that, according to the official tally, the deaths seem to go up in winter months.
The hard political reality is that when it comes to walk-up shelters, options are limited.
The homeless people those shelters typically serve are a demographic that few people want near them – many are often grappling with mental health and drug abuse issues.
That means there’s virtually no elected officials willing to take a chance on those kinds of shelters.
In recent years across OC, only a few cities – like Santa Ana, Anaheim and Fullerton – stepped up to provide cold weather shelters during winter months.
At the 11th hour last winter, Anaheim city officials were the only ones to step up, coming up with a unique approach by working with a network of churches to establish a shelter network that only triggers when the weather gets cold or wet enough.
According to a recent public tally by county officials, that network put together 50 beds and was activated six times between Feb. 1 and March 30, mostly due to heavy rains.
In all, 67 people who may have ended up in the morgue instead got emergency shelter.
The year before, Fullerton stepped up with a shelter that saved a similar number.
Before that, Santa Ana and Fullerton both offered cold weather shelters at two local National Guard armories.
Yet since then city officials, fearful of becoming a hot spot for chronically homeless people, have largely left the cold weather shelter business.
That triggered a public callout from District Attorney Todd Spitzer at February’s Orange County Homelessness Commission meeting, where he challenged local city managers to step up to figure out a basic emergency shelter system once and for all.
A commission subcommittee led by Orange County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento and several city managers have been working on the issue since March and are expected to deliver a public strategy by June.
At a recent public meeting of the county homeless commission that Sarmiento chairs, he acknowledged there’s a major challenge in motivating potential partners for cold weather shelters.
Sarmiento noted officials are trying to figure out how to “lighten the load” for potential partners.
Public shelters are risky, he said.
You’re lowering the barrier of the people you are letting in because of the weather.
And the impact to the surrounding area is where the rub is.
That’s what makes elected officials nervous.
“Those are things we need to be sensitive to,” Sarmiento noted.
While officials note that while Orange County today has more large shelters and city navigation centers than ever, most are full.
Given the lack of affordable housing, many homeless people ready for housing are staying at the shelters longer.
[Read: How Are Orange County’s Cities Doing At Building Affordable Housing?]
And that means that during cold weather, it’s not just the hardest to reach homeless people that are staying outside and in some cases dying.
County commissioners have said there may be a network of local churches that could be tapped in a similar fashion to provide an emergency network of cold weather shelters that could be activated in a similar fashion to what was innovated in Anaheim.
Big question is whether local city officials would allow that?
DA Spitzer also noted publicly that insurance liability is another big challenge for any partner stepping up to shelter the most difficult homeless cases, which can often result in injuries or deaths and trigger lawsuits.
Officials quietly acknowledge the risk management side of cold weather shelters is among the steepest hills to climb, especially with recent insurance pullouts from California.
Insurance is a big key in getting more partners to step up.
Spitzer publicly noted that the county is self-insured and the most likely candidate to step up and offer partners the needed financial security to effectively offer a stable cold weather sheltering network.
Would county supervisors agree to take on that responsibility?
Taking on such hard homework this summer may stimulate a nimble and effective cold weather shelter network that saves lives next winter.
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