“The beauty of having people inside [shelters] is that they can detox
from the survival mode of the streets.”

It took 20 deaths from a Hepatitis A outbreak among San Diego’s homeless population for city officials to realize their efforts to address a mushrooming crisis were failing. Besides being an eyesore for housed residents, the squalor on the streets had become an infectious disease crisis with hundreds of hospitalizations, mostly on the public’s dime.

As the crisis unfolded late in 2017, San Diego’s city council took an unprecedented action among West Coast cities to allocate $6.5 million for three large, semi-permanent rigid tent shelters. Though the shelters serve now as nodes for addiction rehabilitation and employment connection services, the most fundamental service the shelters provide for San Diego’s homeless is a chance to wash their bodies, and a safe, clean place to sleep.

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“Since then, we’ve had 14 cities come down here begging us to do in their communities what we do in San Diego,” boasts Bob McElroy, CEO of the Alpha Project, which operates the largest of the shelters that are home to 325 men and women. “You have to have a starting point. Allowing people to lie on their ass in the street is not a starting point. The simple reality is that it’s better to have people inside as opposed to outside.”

But McElroy’s no-nonsense tone betrays how he views homeless policy “dictated,” as he says, “by paperhangers who don’t understand or have a relationship to the homeless population.” Without bringing people inside—where they can keep their bodies clean and need not worry about getting robbed or assaulted—McElroy expects little about the present homeless crisis to change.

Although cities and counties across California and up the West Coast are spending more money on homelessness than ever before, the problem continues to worsen. Pending the results of this year’s annual homeless census, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti warned Angelenos in early May to expect an increase in 2018 over the previous year.

At the center of the homeless crisis are the filthy encampments where people eat, sleep and relieve themselves, all within the same few square yards. In most jurisdictions, the dominant strategy has been simply to “clean-up” the encampments by shoveling their contents into garbage trucks and dispersing the residents—as San Francisco and Orange County have demonstrated on a massive scale over the past few months. Invariably, however, the camps return after a few weeks.

Public backlash forced Orange County supervisors to backpedal a plan to erect a serviced shelter on county property in Irvine.

Although San Diego has recently emerged as a leader in fostering “sanctioned” homeless camps, where residents are both allowed to stay put and provided with basic services, the idea behind them is not new. Oakland piloted a program that supplied one of the city’s largest encampments with portable toilets and regular trash pick-up. More than a year later, Oakland has moved on to providing some of its homeless with rigid “tuff-shed” shelters on publicly owned sites, with access to city services.

“The beauty of having people inside is that they can detox from the survival mode of the streets,” says McElroy. “It gives us time to develop the relationships and the trust necessary to get people to seek mental health services, get them back on their prescribed medications.”

But sanctioned camps are extremely controversial among housed residents who live near their proposed locations. Public backlash forced Orange County supervisors to backpedal a plan that would have erected a serviced shelter on county property in Irvine.

After Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti announced that the first of 15 proposed large-scale shelters for the city would be built in Koreatown, local residents held a rally to protest it, citing concerns over public safety. (The mayor’s office did not respond to requests for details about the shelters.)

The challenge of scaling shower pilot programs across a four-county region with more than 60,000 homeless looms large.

In the meantime, city and county leaders are working to expand a series of programs intended to provide homeless residents with, at the very least, a chance to clean up. Prompted by San Diego’s hepatitis outbreak, L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis pushed to establish a mobile shower pilot program at a pair of locations around Los Angeles County. Aside from offering L.A.’s unhoused a chance to get clean, the shower stations also serve as a connecting point to services to help those experiencing homelessness.

“For those of us who are housed, it might be hard to imagine, but it is fundamentally transformative for someone who has been living on the streets to be able to take a shower, or to have a place other than an alleyway or behind a bush to go to the bathroom,” said Metro transportation director and L.A. City Councilmember Mike Bonin, when other Metro directors recently voted to study adding bathrooms and showers to the county rail system.

The two existing sites that are a part of the L.A. County pilot program can serve up to about 90 people each week per site, according to Supervisor Solis’ office. Still, the challenge of scaling the shower pilot programs across a four-county region with more than 60,000 homeless looms large.

McElroy doesn’t want to criticize mobile shower programs that Los Angeles has rolled out so far, but questions whether giving people a place to shower will have any meaningful effect if they return to an unhealthy outdoor camp.

“I hate using cliches, but it’s a Band-Aid,” he says. “I would not want to say that’s not a cool thing to do, because it is. But, when you’re dealing with human beings and you take things in pieces, it doesn’t work. Come on, put up a structure and get a couple hundred people in there, and start transitioning them through. Give people time to detox from the street. That’s the only way change is going to happen.”

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