A New Plan to Combat Growing Homelessness

Orange County is battling its homeless problem head-on. With a homeless population of nearly 10,000, Orange County has a plan to develop 2,700 units of permanent supportive housing for low-income residents that are currently using emergency housing to stay off the streets. The housing will provide a stepping-stone for low-income residents to move out of emergency care. Of course, building 2,700 units is not an easy feat. The Association of California Cities-Orange County has introduced AB 448 to create the Orange County Housing Trust, a single-purpose joint powers authority or JPA that will allow the county to mix public and private funds to capitalize permanent supportive housing projects. The legislation has recieved tremendous support in Sacramento, and if passed next month, the 2,700 units will be delivered to market within the next two to seven years. We sat down with Heather Stratman, CEO of the Association of California Cities-Orange County, to talk about the Orange County Housing Trust, the 2,700-unit housing goal and how the community has responded to the concept.

GlobeSt.com: Tell me about the impetus to create the trust and find a solution to homeless housing in Orange County.

Heather Stratman: The Association represents the interests of the 34 cities in Orange County, and we were invited to participate in a cost study to determine how much money was spent on homelessness services and housing. Our role was to pull the data from our cities. The 13 of 34 cities that reported in were spending roughly $120 million to watch our problem in Orange County increase by 53% since 2014. We knew because of our advocacy and interest in supporting the cities, both to create financial efficiencies and creating tools for them to deal with the challenges that we are facing, that if cities could get their hands around these issues, it would benefit them financially in the long run. From the cost study and the analysis, we knew that if we could put 2,700 units of permanent supportive housing in place over the next two to seven years, we could create a significant amount of flow within our continuum of care system that would ultimately move hundreds of people out of emergency shelters and into permanent supportive housing. Our emergency beds are currently at capacity, and those beds have become transitional and supportive housing because we don’t have permanent supportive housing on the back end. We don’t have a system in place. That is problematic because our situation will be duplicative of L.A. and San Diego if we don’t create this system and create it quickly.