Opinion By Samuel Strait – February 17, 2023 Recently I attended the local Board of Supervisors meeting, Tuesday, February 14th, and dutifully wrote a piece for the Crescent City Times giving my impressions of said meeting. As usual, there is often much more to say about certain decisions made by the Board, likely as not the decision was a poor one and will unfortunately accelerate the decline of the quality of living here locally. This unfortunately is not a new phenomena, as the past Board and even the most recent changes have made little difference when it comes to poor decision making. One might chalk it up to the disaster that has afflicted the Board in the name of its Chair, Darren Short, but that is only the most obvious of the inevitable bad decisions made by the current Board. During the February 14th meeting of the Board, Item #16 of the Scheduled Items was a rather harmless sounding item described as: 1)" Receive a presentation from Alison Ramsey and Kevin Malone; 2) authorize the Department of Health and Human Services to submit an application and receive funding from the Encampment Resolution Funding Program; and 3) authorize the Director of the Department of Health and Human Services to sign any future documents for this grant, as requested by the Director of Health and Human Services." This item was approved 4-1, Supervisor Borges opposed, after a relatively short presentation and discussion. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of what this means for the County, let us look at the players involved. Alison Ramsey is affiliated with True North, a group that has championed the notion that housing is the key element for solving the problem for better than a decade with little to no success. Kevin Malone came in the form of Daphne Cortese-Lambert, who heads up Mission Possible, and is currently housing the Homeless in a shelter on Hoover Street. Originally founded to be an emergency shelter that has gradually evolved into partnership with County government. Aside from Health and Human Services, the other player in the cabal is the Arcata Housing Project also a ward of the state. The fantasy is to create a Pallet Housing project in Del Norte County on Williams Drive, site of the County's Juvenile Hall, and eventually, pending Coastal Commission approval, clean up a couple of places off Elk Valley Road for, I am assuming some sort of low income permanent housing. The project of $7 to $8 million is planned to site 30 sleeping sheds and support facilities which will house 30 of the County's homeless population and create a central location for support services which apparently DHHS is unable to accomplish a few blocks away. At some time in the future it is the intent of the County to "clean up" two large homeless encampments off Waldo Street and eventually produce permanent low cost housing for the homeless. Not sure where that is going to happen in this area which is bordering a relatively family occupied large mobile home park as well as a great deal of residential housing. Now that you have the short version of the fantasy, it is the time when we should regret this hasty decision in the name of chasing an illusive grant. As I have mention many times in the pages of the Crescent City Times, homelessness is an age old problem that has been tackled without success for centuries. Government solutions are inevitably "one size fits all" solutions. Homelessness is born out of problems in an individual's life that seldom will be solved with "Cookie Cutter" solutions. As Supervisor Borges pointed out, this particular solution did not succeed in Butte County and several others as well of which he was unaware of. Homelessness will not be solved, especially by government, or affiliated agencies. The current homeless population is well over a thousand people and this addresses 30. Even if you include the other 40 housed in Project Home Key, government will have spent $11 to $12 million to temporarily house 70 individuals. In case you are doing the math, that is $157,000.00 and change per person, or $157,000,000 to house 1000 homeless individuals. I can hear it being said already, "it's only money, and think of all the souls being saved". Prepare yourself for the flood. Since 2017 when our illustrious Governor Newsom took office the percentage of the nation's homeless in California has surged from 25% to just over 30%. Thus far Newsom, has spent billion of dollars to house the homeless and has reached the rarefied plateau of just over 5% of that original population. Efforts to control the number of homeless are in retrograde and cannot even keep up with the new numbers joining the ranks. At the same time, those that were previously home owners and business owners in the State reached an all time high of over 330,000 departures. Housing costs have inflated to the point that low income housing cannot even be built without yet more massive funding by the state's government. Since the problem began to encroach on the state's elite in the Sacramento comfort zone, the problem has gotten much worse as it has here locally. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that when the government takes a hand in a societal problem, the problem only becomes worse. Our local government has been pandering to the homeless for years and only has seen the problem increase in numbers to the point that if anyone is looking it isn't working. There are too many individual problems surrounding each individual that is homeless that will not be corrected unless the homeless individual realizes they are the only solution to their problems. Housing will not solve that problem. Support services will not solve their problems. They must be the arbiter of their own fate no matter how painful it becomes, because believe it or not, housing is not a silver bullet to success. and more than you will believe are quite satisfied with a life style of being homeless particularly when the ameliorating solution to the worst of homelessness is a quick government hand out.