Cat Neushul
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Let’s face it. If you had to live on the street, you might pick Isla Vista as your residence of choice. It’s a beautiful place to park your shopping cart, and lay down your sleeping bag for the night. It’s the type of place where students, residents, and the homeless coexist, and, notwithstanding certain incidents of apparent violence against I.V. homeless , get along without too much trouble.
Cat Neushul
Just last weekend I spent an evening in the park at Coopula listening to a live band. On my right were college students, and on my left were a row of homeless men, sitting in plastic chairs, and drinking their alcohol from a paper bag. Did I feel uncomfortable being right next to these rather enthusiastic music lovers? No. They have as much right as I do to appreciate the beauty of the evening. I got a kick out of the fact that they seemed to think the band was as good as I did.
While downtown I.V. seems to be the hangout of choice for many of the homeless, you can find them just about anywhere. Many mornings I look out my front window and see a homeless woman pushing her shopping cart full of worldly goods through the open space. I’m not sure where she’s coming from, and I definitely don’t know where she’s going, but she’s a part of my morning ritual.
As far as students are concerned, they seem to think of the homeless as a way to round out their resume. They can check off the” I know a homeless person” on the list of things to do. They seem to think they are doing their good deed for the day by giving them beers or inviting them to their parties.
But the homeless are anything but a joke. They can definitely make things difficult for residents. They sometimes camp underneath the oak trees in the Camino Corto Open Space where Isla Vista Elementary School is located. That’s not a good thing. You want to be sure that children can walk to school without having to pass homeless encampments. In the past I’ve seen someone try to light a fire beneath those trees. I can’t say for sure that the person was homeless — it could have been a misguided, disheveled student — but it still got me thinking: With all the fire trouble we’ve had, the last thing we need is a campfire in an open field.
The ability to set up camp underneath the trees is one of those only-in-I.V. type of things. Try camping near a creek in Santa Barbara. I had a friend who parked his camper outside my previous house on the Mesa. Within two hours. a police officer was at his door, asking him to move along.
Recently, there was an e-mail chain that got me thinking about the homeless in a more negative light. Some I.V. residents were upset about an incident involving a long time local, and a supposed homeless person. According to the e-mail I was sent, a woman had been threatened by someone holding a baseball bat when she confronted what she thought was a homeless person near the row of trees before the steps to Devereaux Beach. I followed the e-mail trail for days as residents gave their opinions, and offered their suggestions to solve this problem.
I called Lieutenant Brian Olmstead, from the Isla Vista Foot Patrol, to find out what had happened. Olmstead said, “We are still trying to figure that out.” He had talked to the resident involved, and in the end, wasn’t sure it had involved one of the I.V. homeless. He said that officers know the 30 to 40 regulars in the area. He suspected that it could have been the other kind of “housing challenged” person often found in I.V. — the “I live in my van, bus, or decades-old trailer type” who was just passing through. He also said the victims of homeless crimes are usually other homeless. It’s not usually students or residents, according to Olmstead. But that doesn’t mean the homeless don’t pose challenges for residents.
“It’s hard to find a solution,” Olmstead said. He said that officers can go out and enforce the law by issuing citations, or taking homeless people to jail for breaking the laws, but he said that this doesn’t solve the problem. Hearings are continued. The jails are overcrowded, and the homeless people are eventually let out. “This is a neverending cycle,” he added.
So what’s the solution? Better people than I tried to solve this issue. But as with all the other challenges in I.V., residents need to make sure that the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors and other government officials understand that there’s a problem. They should have a chance to sit down with government representatives, police officers, mental health professions, and shelter experts to come up with some ground rules that can make everyone feel more comfortable. No one wants homeless people camping beneath the trees near an elementary school, nor do we want people to have free reign to park their camper on a street overlooking the beach as though it were a trailer park. These things are out-and-out unacceptable. There has to be a line drawn in the name of public safety. Where that line is drawn should be up to a committee of interested parties. But this does have to involve compromise. We could make I.V. so inhospitable to the homeless that they moved to another location. But as Lt. Olmstead said, “You are just moving this problem from one place to another. That’s not solving the homeless problem at all.”