Second of two parts
During the last 20 years, Santa Monica has carefully, and proudly, cultivated its image as the capital of homelessness in the United States.
Coming closer to offering year-around perfect weather than 99 percent of America, Santa Monica has steadfastly, proudly maintained its reputation for taking better care of the “unhoused,” as they say, than anyone else.
[img]249|left|Richard Bloom||no_popup[/img]
Santa Monica educated the world, sensitized millions.
If Santa Monica is not the only City Hall in the country to make the claim, then it surely was the first City Hall to scientifically convert homelessness into a work of exquisite art, culturally and politically.
Under its nurturing supervision, homelessness, practically overnight, evolved from shabby, bum-level living, into chic.
Not that it is becoming a career destination for the fashionable.
Population of Santa Monica
From a distance, it may be difficult to discern, but four-term City Councilman Richard Bloom said the state of homelessness has “changed” during his nine years. He means improved.
He is in the process of becoming an expert — from the inside — which, so far, feels like stepping off the globe into a gigantic, dimly lighted universe of immense possibilities and trapdoors.
Mr. Bloom is treading a fragile career path this week, his fifth week as Executive Director of Path Partners (pathpartners.org), a 25-year-old private agency that seeks to make homelessness more palatable for its victims while working to whittle its vast but unidentified population.
Mr. Bloom practiced family law for 30 years before leaping last month over a swaying bridge into a new and heavily undefined professional life. He is charged with helping lead the homeless back toward acceptance of a more traditional lifestyle.
His election, in 1999, to fill out an unexpired term, brought him face to face with homelessness for the first time. Gradually, his views became clarified, and his determination to take a more direct role rose in proportion to his education on the subject.
What Form Should a Cure Take?
“When I came to the City Council, and for many years before,” Mr. Bloom said, “we were focused on the same traditional kind of model many communities were following, shelter-care and continual care. The idea was to provide immediate shelter. Then, if you could, you would get them into a transitional housing program and off the streets.
“Because of a lack of resources, and because the problem is so enormous here in Los Angeles, the end result was sheltering people, but not, programatically, ending homelessness.”
In different words, wheel-spinning, minimal progress.
Mr. Bloom pointed out that “not only in Los Angeles but across the country, we have developed an enormous homeless problem, people who have been on the street for two or more years. In recent years, we have focused much more energy on the chronic homeless population, people on the street for a long time.
Juggling Numbers
“One program identified 131 vulnerable people in the community. Some of these people had been on the street for 25 years.
“If you live in a place long enough, you get to know the faces of these people and the corners where you will find them. Since March, we have put 51 of these 131 people in transitional or permanent housing.
“This is just a step. But it really is incredible. If you add up the years these people have been on the street, it is the more remarkable.”
In raw numbers, the Councilman placed Santa Monica’s homeless community between 1300 and 1500 on a daily basis.
As a point of curiosity, similar numbers were given in 1999. “The numbers have shifted over time,” Mr. Bloom said, but that owes more to flaws in counting than in a change in the population.
“I was just shocked,” said the Councilman, “when I found out that the earliest count I saw had a margin- of-error of plus or minus 50 percent. The reason for that is, there aren’t enough people to go out on the street and count the homeless one by one. Plus you have people living in the hills. Others are living in a shelter, or they are going out of shelters. Very difficult to track.
How Do You Know How Many?
“Eventually, a model was developed where they would extrapolate numbers. ‘We’ll count this sector,’ they said. ‘There are so-many people in this sector. Therefore there must be this many in people in the rest of the sector.’”
The vague counting method was “not completely haphazard,” Mr. Bloom said. Fortunately, a more reliable system has been found, and it will be employed this winter. “We are going to count actual numbers,” he said.
Mr. Bloom describes Path Partners, his new employer, as “an agency that responds to homelessness. It has its fingers in a lot of places, and it offers a range of services. Part of my job is to build advocacy for doing more for homelessness. More than just raising consciousness, I want to raise political will.
“Part of my job is organizing. Path Partners is so big that after 4 1/2 weeks, I am still trying to get my arms around it. You can’t organize Los Angeles County. You can’t organize all the churches and synagogues in the County.”
You Are Winning the Battle When?
There is nothing mysterious to Mr. Bloom about how to measure the job he will be doing.
“We need to judge success by a reduction in the homeless population,” he says. “That is how I will judge my success. We never did that before.
“For example, our programs would report back and say, ‘We provided services to 500 people last year.’ Those were good and valid services.
“But our objective now in Santa Monica is to reduce the homeless population.
“At the same time, the concept I have driven home is — and this is where my new job dovetails with what I do in Santa Monica — homelessness is not Santa Monica’s problem alone. We can go full-out on homelessness in Santa Monica forever. But we will never, as one small city acting alone, end homelessness.
“Let’s make a commitment to end homelessness in Santa Monica,” Mr. Bloom said, “and insist that every other community do the same.
“One thing that has always troubled me about the way some people approach homelessness is that too often the end result is sustaining a person’s life on the street. There are those who actually defend the right of people to exist on the street.”
Mr. Bloom acknowledged there are homeless persons who favor a hobo lifestyle. But great segments suffer from mental illness, and rescuing them is his goal.
