While the Homeless Services Center’s innovations are winning it ‘Best Practices’ awards, Executive Director Monica Martinez says its successes have gone mostly unnoticed in its own community.
Within the walls of Monica Martinez’s office at the Homeless Services Center, the executive director excitedly scrolls through emails announcing various national awards the center has received for its work. There’s one for an invitation to lead a workshop at the 2014 National Health Care for the Homeless Conference in New Orleans. “Respond by December 6,” she reads aloud. “I’ve got to remember to do that.”
But outside of her office, there is not much celebrating. In the three years she has held this position—after moving from Los Angeles where she worked to fight homelessness on Skid Row—she says the public dialogue locally around homelessness has gotten “progressively heated.” And yes, it has affected her work. “It is really resource-heavy to constantly be in a position of defense, and facing opposition,” she admits.
There is a perception that Santa Cruz attracts homeless people because of the services the center offers, and many locals blame the homeless population for the city’s high crime rates and drug problem—including a number of hypodermic needles that have reportedly been found in the Harvey West neighborhood where the center is located.
Indeed, the Public Safety Citizen Task Force, a group of 15 residents appointed by the City Council, reported in its draft recommendations last week that the homeless population in Santa Cruz was responsible for 40 percent of arrests and 30 percent of citations in 2012. The Task Force went on to implore the Homeless Services Center to “cooperate with SCPD in recommendations to modify or eliminate services to persons identified as chronic offenders who threaten public safety.”
Martinez says this language is indicative of one of many misconceptions about HSC—that they need to do a better job of cooperating with the police department. In reality, Martinez says, HSC and the police force work as a partnership; since taking over, she has brought a representative from the SCPD into each of their staff meetings, and the department regularly makes recommendations about the safest way for HSC to operate.
“Since Monica’s come into play, we’ve established an unprecedented relationship with the Homeless Services Center,” says Santa Cruz Police Deputy Chief Rick Martinez. “She’s very receptive, and her staff has been very receptive to changes in regards to security at the site.”
The SCPD has been instrumental in implementing an ID card system at HSC, as well as closing the campus to individuals who aren’t there for services. Before Martinez became executive director, he says, the department’s relationship with HSC was “very adversarial.”
At the same time that public safety concerns have boiled over, Monica Martinez says, HSC has shifted its focus, embracing the concept of ending homelessness rather than just managing it. This change in approach is in accordance with national recommendations for practices being embraced across the U.S. However, she worries that many Santa Cruz residents are misinformed about the progress she and other community leaders have made in recent years to end homelessness.
“It feels like a lot of the [public response] is almost blinded by emotion, so then it’s not open or not seeing some of the really progressive and innovative things that are happening today. And when people are really blinded by their own fear or their own emotional response to what they see happening in their community, they’re less inclined to get engaged with solutions. And at this point it’s creating a polarization in our community about how to resolve issues that we all share and issues we all want to see resolved.”
Off the Streets
But some community members have gotten involved in a productive way, she says. For the 180/180 program, a community-wide effort to provide housing for 180 of the county’s most vulnerable homeless individuals, Martinez and her staff developed the idea of a “housing navigator”—a community member who volunteers to helps homeless individuals look through apartment listings, meet with landlords and stay housed. This role was recently featured as a “best practice” by the nationwide 100,000 Homes Campaign, of which 180/180 is a part.
Elana Yannotti, a formerly homeless 42-year-old woman who received an apartment three months ago through the 180/180 program with the help of a housing navigator, says having a warm place to rest each night has helped her chronic pain immensely. “I actually feel like I’m going to live longer,” she says. Yannotti used to have to wear a knee brace daily as she walked her route from her camp behind the Tannery to HSC and to the beach, but she has only worn it two or three times since she’s been inside.
Now Yannotti is healthy enough to volunteer several days a week at HSC, and in that time she says she has witnessed a great deal of community resistance to the idea of personally working to end homelessness. “They’ll call [HSC] because someone’s sleeping in the car in front of their house. You know what? Just go knock on that person’s door. For all you know, it could be someone you used to live next door to 10 years ago.”
Not Alone
The backlash that Martinez has faced in the last few years isn’t exclusive to Santa Cruz. Jennifer Loving, the executive director of Destination Home, an organization working to end chronic homelessness in Santa Clara County, says many communities are facing the exact same frustrations as Santa Cruz.
“There is an understandable amount of fatigue and weariness. I totally get it. No one wants a homeless encampment in front of their business or in their backyard,” she says. “But then we walk a fine line between that and sort of criminalizing being poor by banning sleeping in cars, making it illegal to sleep in a park, to walk on a median.”
Deputy Chief Martinez says he understands the reaction to homelessness outlined in the Public Safety Task Force recommendations, with the call to eliminate services to particularly troublesome offenders. However, he says, “it’s kind of a double-edged sword. Sure you want to send a message that those behaviors aren’t tolerated, but are you really going to stop that behavior just by turning them away?”
