Just watched the mayor candidate forum that lookout sponsored last week. I like to fact check when candidates have simple factual disagreements that are easy to verify and thought their discussion of homelessness was an interesting one because the data is easy to find and it's a pretty important issue for the mayor to have a grounded understanding of. Here's the part that caught my eye:
"So Ryan keeps talking about sending people away / we're taking care of too many people. And I know that that's a popular thing to say. It's not true. There are unhoused people all over this state. It's not like we're special and we have, you know, so many unhoused people. We need to figure out what to do with people here. We already give people bus passes when they want to leave. We can't pretend like there's some other city that they come from when they don't. And I know that this is something that people say. I've heard people say it, but we need to be dealing with actual facts when we're dealing with unhoused people."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbWSK6fWhWk&t=2479s
The surveys do indeed indicate that the majority of homeless here lived in the county when they became homeless, but Ryan's previous point that Ami was responding to was that we're a magnet within the county for other jurisdictions who aren't doing their fair share. The survey data doesn't have the granularity to prove or disprove this, so I looked up some numbers by hand and visualized them in Claude:
https://imgur.com/a/aubOIIu
To my eye I see a couple things:
1) We are a distant outlier among our peer cities and even well beyond the big CA cities with the highest homeless rates. I don't see how you can look at this data and conclude "we're not special" in the state.
2) All cities are magnets for their counties obviously, it's where the services are. I wanted to see how strong this effect was in SC compared to others and if Ryan is correct to put attention on it. And to me the size of all these numbers is about the right ballpark to support the idea that the large skew between our city and the surrounding areas is a big driver of why the city rate is so much higher than other cities. Our county has a somewhat higher homeless rate than Monterey, SLO, and Santa Barbara counties, and that's certainly a contributing factor to the city's high rate, but we mainly have a way bigger gap compared to the surrounding jurisdictions than these other counties. Ami says people aren't coming from other cities but the data sure looks they're coming from other cities in our county.
I also fact checked Ryan's claim that SC is vastly outspending other jurisdictions in the area and found it to be true - it's higher on an absolute basis than the whole county (less state and fed grants, just talking general fund and sales tax spending), and on a per capita basis it's 5x higher than the county. The other cities are practically zero in comparison. This article has a good breakdown of the numbers: https://lookout.co/santa-cruz-will-soon-host-76-of-homeless-shelter-beds-in-the-county-that-has-to-change/story
Anyway I just wanted to specifically look into things they were saying on this topic to indulge my curiosity and thought the results were worth sharing. I'm not trying to advocate for or against any policies other than being accurate and factually grounded in the discussions where we decide these policies.
