Should We Listen to Our Unhoused Citizens?

So … you think you know better than we do how to live our lives?

What gives the right for any man to tell another man how he should be? Has that man walked into the shoes of the homeless?

Has that man taken steps to improve his own life? And if he has does he have the right to push others into his way of thinking. Is this the way to salvation?

We all live our lives. We are born and then we die. We are not supreme beings. So does controlling others show a lack of control for ourselves?

Can we not all think about this?

We all know that we need shelter from the elements. It really should be a constitutional right to shelter oneself. But somewhere down the line, we have turned housing into a commodity. A basic need that some of us could make plenty of money off others. We started to change the structure of how we look at housing people.

In the past, it started with demolishing a row of affordable cottages on the east side of Carrillo Street. A friend who had it hard finding housing that would allow her champion samoyed dogs was presented with a knock on the door and found herself evicted. Ahh! The developers said: “More money can be had per square inch of our newly modeled office buildings.”

Next came the single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotels. The Garvey on lower State and the Virginia Hotel were next. The Garvey held the Scientology building for many years. The Virginia? A tourist hotel on old town Haley Street. The rents in the SROs were affordable for many of the downtown workers, those who were nearly homeless, and those who were unable to find conventional shelter. They are gone now. Where did those people go? If they were lucky ,they had a vehicle to go to, or if they were lucky their time came up on the affordable housing list. We know that some were placed in the Faulding, the last remaining SRO hotel.

For those who were not as lucky, people started building hootches down there by the railroad tracks. Hootches made out of cardboard, lumber scraps, and pallets. People living in vehicles started to appear. Tents cropped up. Victims of the housing crisis in Santa Barbara, folks.

Rents were growing far above the wages of our service workers. We were joined by returning Viet Nam vets who gathered together to make a home in the “Jungle,” a forested place along Cabrillo Boulevard. People slept in the box cars that were parked along the holding tracks. We were joined by people who were evicted out of the mental hospitals that sent people to their own communities that had no safety net for them.

People hoped beyond hope that they could get back into conventional housing once again. Could they qualify for the city’s Housing Authority so that they did not have to come up with first, and last, deposit, no pool, no pets, no children, and of course pass a background credit check?

Some developers took a chance and rented out run-down, molded-out, cockroach-infested housing to people because they could. Wings of Love, a nonprofit that worked to provide for homeless people, rented out their junkyard cars to sleep in for $300 a month. It wasn’t looking too good for Santa Barbara then and it has only perpetuated itself by an amazing growth of people on the streets. We wonder why? Let’s just do the math, why don’t we?

Santa Barbara Housing Authority and the city created El Carrillo Apartments in response to the Housing Now Campaign. It was a wonderful 246-square-feet of housing. A full bathroom with tub and shower, a microwave kitchen, a studio bed, and a desk for computer. It housed 60 people. Amazing to see so many happy people learning to live inside again. It started with wrap-around services on-site and later used a protective manager to run the show. No curfews, nor were there any rules that said friends could not come to visit. People were able to move freely about. No lockdown, chain-link fences, no voices saying that we will only allow certain social workers to come into the compound. The El Carrillo was made famous by Huell Howser’s California Gold show on PBS.

Why is El Carrillo so successful? One of the reasons was that the City Council at the time was listening to the homeless. They were invited to the table to talk about their desires for architectural design and their needs for this place. Other housing has been built for permanent places for people. They work well.

Unfortunately, our voices are no longer being heard. We are no longer invited to come to the table to help design the place we would like to be part of. It is as if we are separated from the rest of our community to sit and watch others design a place that is an extension of a jail. We watch the abusiveness to human psychology, as a new housing structure is designed.

We are not made to live in a situation where others are telling us how to live our lives. We are not made to live in a compound that is separated from the rest of our community. This does not give us the ability to think for ourselves. We will continue to wallow in self degradation as the developers create what they think is good for us.

Why is it that we are criminalized for the way we have to live? We live only as we can in the present as we create housing, although unconventional.

Why are we objects for the media, the police, and people with NIMBY attitudes to abuse? They call us Transients, Bums, etc., not realizing the depression we go through surviving on the streets. Some are unable to even progress because of fear and self-medication.

We need to be part of our community. We are not structured to have to live in a situation where others are telling us how to run our lives. We are not structured to live in a compound encampment which is separated from the rest of our community. It does not give us choices to make for ourselves.

Please start bringing us to the table. It is only fair to allow us to speak of our dreams and our futures. Please stop trying to control us. Start to understand through the education of our voices. LISTEN.