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Dignifying The Unsheltered With Elizabeth Funk

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Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order authorizing state officials to dismantle thousands of homeless encampments throughout the state. DignityMoves has been at the forefront of providing dignified, supportive housing for those in need, making Elizabeth Funk uniquely positioned to discuss the ramifications of the executive order and the impact it will have on California's homelessness strategy.

Elizabeth Funk is the Founder of Dignity Moves, a philanthropy that designs and implements housing communities at scale. It is the first homeless advocacy group started by Silicon Alley execs. These entrepreneurs think way outside the box to apply real-life solutions to a solvable homelessness crisis, beginning in California, where there are 172,000 homeless people – 30% of the U.S. homeless population.

 

About Guest:

Elizabeth Funk is the Founder of Dignity Moves — a philanthropy that designs and implements housing communities at scale. It is the first homeless advocacy group started by Silicon Alley execs. This is a group of entrepreneurs that think way outside the box—applying real life solutions to a solvable homelessness crisis, beginning in California, where there are 172,000 homeless people—30% of the U.S. homeless population.

 

 

 

Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dignitymoves

Guest Website: https://dignitymoves.org/

Guest Social: https://www.instagram.com/dignitymoves/

 

Show Notes:

03: 48 - Before The EO 

07:57 - Homeless Assistance

16:12 - Executive Order

23:01 - Homeless Vs. Unsheltered

29:05 - DignityMoves

37:49 - Verge Of Homelessness

42:21 - Encampment Clearing

45:56 - Episode Wrap-Up

 

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Dignifying The Unsheltered With Elizabeth Funk

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In the last episode, you got to meet my niece, Arianna Bellizzi. We talked about community engagement. We also opened a discussion specifically about the problems of homelessness and unsheltered living even in the world of Alaska, where it's far colder than it is here in California. I wanted to go ahead and open this discussion more deeply.

You may or may not already know that Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order authorizing California state officials to dismantle thousands of homeless encampments throughout the state. Dignity Moves has been at the forefront of providing dignified support housing and more for those in need. This makes my guest, Elizabeth Funk, uniquely positioned to discuss the ramifications of this executive order and the impact it will have on California's homelessness strategy. I hope you'll welcome her to the show. I'm happy to have you here.

Thank you for having me.

I understand that you've been working hard in California, where there are 172,000 homeless people, which is 30% of the US homeless population. I live here in Santa Cruz County. I have seen the homeless camps get moved from one part of the county to another and back again. I've seen the issues that they've faced, including flooding and other challenges, and even being displaced by the fire, as much of the county was displaced by the fire. I wonder if you could talk about the present state before this particular executive order went through and what's happened since.

It's tragic. One thing even more powerful than that is that the unsheltered problem is uniquely a Californian problem. Half of the unsheltered in the nation are in California, which is in contrast to the wealth and generosity that our state is known for. It's systemic, which is that it's been a long time since the housing supply and housing shortage. The more expensive housing gets, the more people end up being priced out of their homes and rents. They end up being left to languish on the streets, largely because we don't have enough shelter for people.

 

The more people end up being priced out of their homes and their rents, the more they end up being left to languish on the streets due to the lack of shelter.

 

If you take into account the wildfires that we've experienced, a lot of these people are victims of fire. These are the people who lived in paradise whose homes and all of their savings were tied up in their properties that may not have had the type of insurance that could protect them, or they could have been renters and now forced out of an affordable living situation because the supply issue is prevalent.

I know people who are living out of their vans and championing van life. As it stands now, we hear this vernacular in our society that it's drug-addicted and alcoholics who are crazy and are on the streets. That isn't the reality any longer. What would you say to people to get them thinking about this as a humanitarian issue? Walk away from that dismissive attitude.

The problem is when people have stereotypes that folks on the streets are drug-addicted and mentally ill, they're right, but they didn't start that way. The important thing to understand is that when people first become homeless, only about 20% have a severe enough mental or behavioral health issue that would prevent them from returning to stability.

We all have a mental health issue, particularly people who have been struggling. They were drinking too much. It's being on the streets that exacerbates that quickly. If you think about what it's like not to sleep more than two hours a night and spend your week in wet socks, the mental health goes downhill. They're turning to drugs to stabilize. We're letting that happen, which is the problem. They weren't drug addicts to begin with. They're becoming reliant on things to get them through this crisis that we're allowing to happen.

Your point about how this could happen to anyone has been the most eye-opening to me. We've got middle school teachers staying in our shelters. We've got the guy who used to drive me to the airport with my children before Uber. He recognized me. These are hardworking folks who are one paycheck away from having some disaster in their life and losing their footing. The next thing you know, they're on the streets.

That's a major downfall because once you're on the streets, getting back up from that fall is almost impossible. If you think about it, you don't have a place to plug in your cell phone. You don't have a place to shower or have a good night's sleep. We walk by and think, “Why don't these people get jobs?” How? They have to have a place to start. They have to have a place so they can start to rebuild their lives. That's why we, as a society, have not had the generosity of heart to think that we owe that to them.

Homeless Assistance

You know far more about this than I do. I grant that you do. I have read about different projects where there was a pilot program in Europe where they were trying to set people up with a lump sum as opposed to this little nursing or sucking at the teeth of America to try and get a little bit each month and justify it along the way where they gave individuals enough to cover living expenses for three months at a time. They could get some stability, have a shower every day, be able to buy food, not have to worry about paying their bills for that time and focus on rebuilding.

They found that while it was a bigger outlay of cash all at once to one individual, the recidivism rate or the rate at which they ended up back on the street was reduced. They're able to get to this place where they're paying their bills, supporting themselves and their family, and paying taxes. They're part of the system again. They're not a drain on it any longer. That safety net needed to be there to help them get back on their feet and do so without resorting to the crutches of drugs and alcohol that are escapist tactics. There's something to that. I wonder if there are other things like that you're aware of that are in the work now. Maybe you're championing them.

There are a couple of things to the studies that you've shown. I know born in Canada, for instance, where they give you the full year's worth of support that you were going to get, but they give it to you in one chunk. They've studied the differences in outcomes that people haven’t. We have our stereotypes that when somebody is given a lot of money, they'll spend it all on drugs. The results are contrary to the kinds of things they're able to spend it on.

If you think about it, if you only have a little bit of money each month, you have to spend it on food and clothes. If you have excess that month, you can invest it, figuratively, in education or in a car that could get you a job. You've got the luxury upfront of having an amount, and you could do something substantive with it.

Care More Be Better | Elizabeth Funk | Unsheltered

 

The other thing that we take for granted is the mental psyche; when you're in fight or flight mode or panic, you can't think about the systems changing your life. We learned that in eighth-grade science. When you're on the streets, or even when you're getting a small amount of money each month, you're still in crisis mode. If you can get people's brains out of there where they're going to take a deep breath and for a moment start thinking about their life goals, you have to have that shift in the mentality and get them in a place where they can think that way before we can expect them to return to being contributing members of society.

Care More Be Better | Elizabeth Funk | Unsheltered

 

It's hard for me not to get emotional as I hear people talk about this stuff because I have the ability to think about what it's like to live in those shoes, partially because I grew up poor. I remember my mother crying over not being able to afford the right groceries. I remember complaining about not being able to have fresh milk in my cereal and having the powdered stuff that I had to reconstitute that I didn't like as much.

I think back now to those moments and feel guilty about it because I made my mom feel terrible for those things. It wasn't a personal assault that she didn't have real milk in the fridge. As kids, we don't know, but it was hard. There were moments when it felt like that was a breath away. If we didn't own our home, we would've been screwed.

That's one of the problems that people in America who grow up with a little bit more privilege don't have a connection to that. It is easier to think about it, therefore, as an outsider's problem. These are the types of people who are opposed to thinking about the importance of having dignity. Dignity Moves is a good branding name.

When the government shows you that they have faith in you, that does something for your sense of worth. When people end up in this dire situation where suddenly they're having a hard time putting food on the table and keeping a shelter over their heads, often it's a family too. It's not one individual who can do something for their mental state and their ability to tackle the hard work of getting back on track.

I have so much empathy for what it's like to be there. In the midst of COVID, we saw the homelessness boom. People are living unsheltered. There was this section over by the Ross Dress for Less at the intersection of Highway 1 and Highway 17 in Santa Cruz County, where the tents went up like gangbusters. They'd fenced in an area. I had to drive by it to go to my grocery store and drive into town. I had to because it was painful to see, and it was unavoidable.

One of the things that broke my heart every time was when I saw this larger tent with a tricycle and some kids' toys right out in front of it for me. For me, this is us staring at the hard, cold truth. There's a family here. Sometimes, they choose not to go to the shelter because they also have a family dog. The family dog can't come with them into the shelter. Where's it going to go? Their kids love it so much.

The one that gets me the most emotional is because we tell ourselves that these people deserve it. They're not worthy. They're bad. Anything we can do to tell ourselves that this is not our fault and let ourselves off emotionally. The one that gets me is the community college students. Nobody is trying harder in life than someone trying to get their way up. Community college students are heroes. One in five in California is homeless. Can you imagine trying to study out your car? My son is studying Physics in his wonderful room with a heater and a blanket. We wonder why people don't get ahead.

 

Nobody is trying harder in life than someone trying to get their way up.

 

I'm a hardworking, determined person. I don't like wet socks. I have wet socks on all of my self-determination, and all of my hard work would be focused on, “I hate my wet socks. The reality is these are not lazy people. The folks who have been at the bottom of society's wealth pyramid are the most resourceful. They have figured stuff out. They have gotten through so much stuff, but there is a point beyond which there's nothing they can do from a sidewalk.

They're men's and women's shelters. A couple can't be together. I understand all of the reasons why, systems-wise, you get assigned to a shelter. We're about trying to rethink. We don't even call it shelter. We call it interim housing because the shelter has conjured such negative words, and there's not enough shelter. We need to rethink the solutions for people between the streets and when they finally get their permanent homes. There needs to be a launching pad.

Executive Order

Let's talk about how this all started. There was a case that made its way to the Supreme Court that started in Grants Pass, Oregon. This is something you didn't know because I didn't share it. I grew up in Rogue Valley. Grants Pass is right there. Grants Pass was a lower economic region, largely blue-collar. This part of Southern Oregon used to be Lumbertown USA. When a lot of the lumber jobs went away, a lot of the jobs and resources went away.

Ashland, Oregon, and Medford are in that county. We used to have this stretch between Ashland and Medford, where it was Talent and Phoenix, where most of the homeless encampment or low-rent property was. That area has now been completely remodeled and re-skinned. It looks beautiful. It's like Ashland 2.0 now. That means that a lot of the poorer people are further off in Grants Pass and Gold Hill. That's where a lot of the homelessness issue was faced more by those communities than by the communities of Ashland and Medford because they're further out.

We've kicked the can down the road. This is the constant problem of how we deal with an unsheltered population. The people of Grants Pass, Oregon, had to confront this issue and made some onerous fines and restrictions on these people. How are you going to pay them when you don't have an address? How are you going to take care of this stuff? Criminalizing homelessness made its way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Grants Pass.

Yes.

We're here, and Gavin Newsom is issuing this executive order. Can you summarize what this means and what's being done?

We need to have some empathy, which is that governments are put in a difficult position. We need to acknowledge that taxpayers pay money. We live in a society because we want to have public spaces. It's part of our culture to have parks and shared public spaces. Governments are expected to keep those clean and safe. We need to start by acknowledging that.

They're not doing this because they're mean people. They're torn. There are legitimate arguments on both sides, and they have conflicting goals. I want to start by acknowledging that. The reality is that if somebody is unsheltered, they're not there by choice. We have let ourselves believe that they're there by choice. If they were there by choice, this would make sense, which would be to punish them and get back out of their wayward ways. The reality is they're not. Punishing them or threatening them and saying, “If you don't behave, you're going to get a fine.” There's nothing they can do.

They're there for a lack of choices. It is what it comes down to. It's the opposite of being there because you have a choice. You're there because you have no choices.

If you are fine, you're going to be more in debt. If we put something on your record, it's going to be harder for you to get a job. All we're doing is making our current problem more deeply entrenched rather than working towards helping it become less entrenched in solving the problem. Grant Pass was built on an earlier case called Martin versus Boise in the city of Boise, Idaho. The premise was that it's cruel and unusual to punish someone for doing something they can't avoid. That was originally upheld by the Supreme Court. Grant Pass over overruled it.

What Martin versus Boise said is you shouldn't be able to arrest someone unless they have a place to go. You can't enforce your laws unless the person doesn't have an alternative. We focus on the first half of that and not the second half. There's always been an answer. You can enforce anti-camping laws if the person has a place to go.

What cities have done is used this Supreme Court precedent almost as an excuse to say, “We can't clear the encampment. Sorry, we can't.” You can if you have built enough places for them to be, but you're off the hook on doing that. The silver lining to these rulings is that cities are back in their court, which is that you can end unsheltered homelessness. Nobody is stopping you. The courts aren't stopping you. They weren't stopping you before, to be clear, but you can end it and hold people accountable for accepting the beds. You need to build the beds.

Cities are going to be shortsighted. There will be shortsighted cities that will say, “We're going to arrest people.” Let them go down that path. They will quickly learn how fast their jails fill up and what it costs to keep a person in jail. It is about twice what it would cost to put them in a dignified interim housing or shelter. They're welcome to try that. They will learn that it didn't work.

Care More Be Better | Elizabeth Funk | Unsheltered

 

The other solution is to run them out of town. When they run out of town, where do they go? They go into our waterways and forests. They have to keep warm at night. They light wildfires. There's excrement in our rivers. Our environmental degradation is what's going to happen. There will always be a worse downstream effect. Doing the right thing, to begin with, is to get them a place to go, where they can be indoors.

It seems straightforward, and you think, “Why is there so much resistance?” There are good reasons why there is resistance, but this is going to force that to change. The resistance is fundamental, which is when you get people indoors, they're still homeless. If a city doesn't have any incentive, its homeless count doesn't go down. They would rather get somebody in a $1 million apartment than 50 off of the streets into interim housing because at least their homeless count went down by one.

When you start to uncover that, you say, “Our metrics are wrong. That's simple to solve. Our metrics should be the number of nights spent languishing on our city streets per year. That could be zero, even if those people are technically still homeless. We don't care if they get to stay somewhere for six months, four years, or 60 years. If they're off of the streets, and they're somewhere warm, safe, and thriving, why are we obsessed with the idea that there has to be a permanent solution there? Our metrics are outdated.

Homeless Vs. Unsheltered

Can you offer us a distinction? Is there a distinction between unsheltered and homeless?

Homeless is a much bigger pie of people who have lost their primary residence but they are in a shelter or transitional housing or are registered with the system. They're receiving a subsidy that is intended then to get them back to permanent housing. When they're in permanent housing, they are no longer homeless and in the homelessness system. When someone is unsheltered, they are in their car, tent, or sidewalk in front of Starbucks.

That unsheltered portion is about a third nationally. In California, it's two-thirds. About 60% or 70% of the people experiencing homelessness in California are unsheltered. There are some obvious reasons, like the weather on the East Coast. We have enough shelter for people because otherwise, they would die on our streets of the cold.

East Coast tends to have quite a bit of shelter. In New York, there's a law that is a right to shelter where they have to have enough shelter beds for people. Now, albeit they aren't nice. They're a place where you stand in line all day, you get a room, and you have to be out by 10:00 in the morning. There is technically shelter. On the West Coast, we decided we'd be smarter than that. We wouldn't invest in the shelter because the shelter doesn't work.

We still do have them. There's one in Santa Cruz. It's another one of those where you're out by 10:00 in the morning. My husband calls it the Walking Dead because he worked downtown. You see a bunch of people who don't seem to have access to a lot of showers or services. He’s walking out right around that time when they're kicked out of the shelter. They can't come back until 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening. They have to spend all day on the streets or off the property. That's not a solution. It makes you feel like you have no sense that you're protected. You have no stability, and we have no dignity.

We've invested as little as we can in shelter because shelter gets you out of the elements. Systems level fixes anything. The person is not in a mindset where they can't give you case management and help and work with you when you're in for twelve hours. The conclusion has been to invest as little in shelter as possible and put all the money in permanent housing.

We, as Dignity Moves, are saying, “There is a middle ground here where you can create something that is intended to be a temporary solution, but that's dignified and stable.” Start with everyone getting their own room with a door that locks. You and I take for granted the mental change that happens when you can be alone for a minute. Imagine never being able to be alone. Your brain never calms down.

 

Having your own space leads to good mental health. If you cannot be alone by yourself, even for a minute, your brain never really calms down.

 

What happens to people with pets? That's the other question I have.

The beautiful thing is that when you've got your own room and a door that locks, you can bring your pet and partner. What if we think about privacy with partners? These folks do not get that dignity. You can lock your door, and you're not worried about your possessions being stolen, which is a big thing in shelters. People don't even want to go to the bathroom in the shelter because they come back with their duffel bags rifled with them.

Having your own space where you're in control is an amazingly important mental shape that we don't appreciate. You get to stay for six months or two years. This is your place. You're stable. All of a sudden, after eight hours of sleep for a few nights or weeks in a row, you are ready to talk about a resume. You're ready to talk about reuniting with family or job skills training. We can't get you in that mindset when you're going to be out by 10:00 tomorrow morning.

You have an outlet to plug in. You can plug your laptop or a cell phone, and you can engage with society in that way.

It's a game-changer.

Libraries check out laptops.

There are 3 or 4 computers in the computer lab. People can use them. If somebody is doing an online course, there are laptops that we can lend them. That's a foot in the middle.

When we get to thinking about the granular challenges that these people face, there are resources available when you have a physical address. You can get that library card. You can go to the library in Half Moon Bay or Santa Cruz. They check out things like Wi-Fi hotspots. You have an internet connection. You can check out a laptop and other resources. I don't think they provide cell phones. I've never seen that. Low-cost plans are available. There's a way to navigate that challenge. It's step one.

President Obama created a program called Obama Phone for people who qualify for free cellphones and Wi-Fi services. We have to know how to sign up for it. One of the first things when people get into our communities. First of all, you have to have a current legal ID. Imagine trying to get ahead in life with your driver's license expired. You're not going anywhere in the world without that. You need somebody to help you fill out the forms and get to the DMV.

The second one is to help them apply for any benefits they're eligible for because now they do have an address. They're eligible for a lot more money than they know or know how to apply for. They're also eligible for free medical care. Let's fill out those forms. I've sat with these people to try to help them fill out those forms. I can't figure it out. I'm a computer-savvy person. It gets two-factor authentication. You have to have a cell phone to two-factor authentication and log into your medical account. You need help doing that. You need a place that you can plug in and a computer. Once you've got all those resources and an address, things start coming together.

DignityMoves

I have to wonder what brought you to this particular challenge and founding this third party. It's an organization. You're a not-for-profit. What brought you to this moment? What inspired you to create this?

I come from Silicon Valley, and I love solving puzzles. We're all curious about what's going on with homelessness, starting with the premise that I know one thing. Whatever we're doing isn't working because we keep spending more money, and the problem keeps getting worse. It becomes more of an existential crisis.

I started looking at it with some friends that took a big step back. When you look at something with a fresh eye, there are a couple of fundamental things that become apparent if we shift a little. This problem is solvable. When I say this problem, I mean unsheltered homelessness. They're much more complex issues of mental health, racial disparities, and jobs. Unsheltered homelessness, that finite piece of this puzzle, is solvable. There are a few simple things, and I say simple, standing in the way of ending them, one of which is the metrics that we talked about. If cities were measured by how many nights they sleep on their streets, unsheltered homelessness would suddenly become a priority.

The second one is that there needs to be funding for interim housing. The reason cities are obsessed with getting people into permanent housing is because it's paid for by section eight vouchers. There's no such funding for interim housing. Cities want to get you into permanent housing. Let's shift the way. The subsidies are structured. There are a couple of simple tweaks. All of a sudden, things could align where this would solve itself.

When I see answers to solutions like that, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur in me eats at me. I'm like, “We have to talk about this and see if we can't fix this piece.” Once you get everyone indoors, all the other harder problems are going to be a lot easier to solve. The pressure is off the system. We don't try to claim that getting everyone indoors ends homelessness, but it's certainly a big step forward.

Care More Be Better | Elizabeth Funk | Unsheltered

 

I grew up in Silicon Valley. I moved from Oregon to Cupertino when I was thirteen. I came to UC Santa Cruz for college and never wanted to leave the Santa Cruz area. I'm still here. I'm in Scotts Valley now, but my husband works in high-tech. I got my MBA from Santa Clara University. You got yours from Harvard. I know that you’re a bright individual who's had a long and storied career in tech and in Silicon Valley. You're transitioning those skills to be applicable to this space.

I personally would love to see the solutions that you're proposing work because the last several years have made me feel like we are approaching more of what you see in Jakarta, Indonesia, which is these shanty towns right next to some of the most expensive buildings in all of the lands around there. When you see this disparity of wealth between the people living in Menlo Park and Atherton and all the beautiful spaces they have, or even venturing down into downtown Palo Alto close to Stanford, you see a homeless encampment right at the intersection of a freeway.

It's encroaching to the point where the problem is unavoidable to see. The solutions are not as evident. The problem's only gotten worse over the last few years. I understand Gavin Newsom doing this whole executive order thing. I don't understand how it's being executed now, how it's being enforced, and what is changing.

I am an optimist. I am going to tell you, but it's not started optimism. It's going to get better fast. I can tell you where that comes from. First of all, as much as it's policy wonk stuff, it's fundamental, which is that there is a break in the system about to happen where we are no longer going to be saying the only valid use of taxpayer dollars is $800,000 apartments.

There's section 8 housing going up near me on Mission Street in Santa Cruz. My friend Doug Wallace owns a property, and he is putting a high rise there with no parking. I'm like, “How's this going to work?” The person who's analyzing it from the outside brain hurts badly. Section 8 housing says, “The person that lives in there has to earn less than $90,000 a year.” I'm like, “We have people on the streets who don't have any money like that. How is this considered affordable?” That's the bigger question I'm asking. You have the floor again. Sorry to interrupt

I'm going to tell you where the optimism comes from. First, it's because the public is aware of what our system says. The only thing we can do is $800,000 units. You're going to get more people saying, “What?” You start seeing things like Grant's Pass and the executive order saying, “We want immediate solutions.”

You and I both know section 8 housing is not going to be here. If we're going to call for immediate solutions, that's going to mean a policy shift. The reason unsheltered homelessness has been allowed to exist is because we've decided it is not possible to solve. When you look at a city and say, “I don't take that answer. What's it going to take to solve it?” Let's work backward. That's when, all of a sudden, we say, “We can solve it. Here's how.”

Your neighborhood is one of them. San Jose is going to be the first major city to solve this problem. They are taking it seriously. Matt Mahan believes he was elected on the promise of reclaiming public spaces. He's got the courage to put money towards things that aren't permanent solutions. The thing that's amazing is it's been working.

I don't know if anybody has been following, but in 2023, unsheltered homelessness in California surged over 10%. In the same several months, it went down over 10% in San Jose. It’s a 20% swing because he's had the courage to do interim solutions. Seventy percent of those people have stayed stably housed. That's a policy he's doubling down on. He's going to figure out how we are going to end this citywide. It is not far off. As soon as you start doing that, think about the savings to the city. It costs twice as much to let people languish on the streets than it does to bring them indoors.

It's gotten to the point where a lot of parks are no longer safe because there are heroin needles sitting in the parks. That's the unfortunate side effect of a lot of this. The problems are connected. Unhappy people who are forced to live in poor conditions for a long time are looking for comfort and release. A lot of these drugs that are hyper-addictive enable a moment of release, relief, and a moment of calm where you don't feel everything is frenetic. It's heartbreaking.

One of the women that's at our shelter in San Francisco was in a domestic violence environment and got out. As you know about domestic violence, one of the strategies is to disconnect you from your friends, resources, and support networks. She didn't have any place she could go. She ended up on the streets. She said she was too terrified to let herself fall asleep. She thought it was not safe.

The next morning, she woke up, went to the tenor, and started asking around. She said, “Does anybody know why I can get this stuff they call meth?” She made a conscious choice that it would be safer than letting herself sleep. Unfortunately, the women on the streets tell you she was right. It is safer. They do this to stay alive. She's in our community. She got connected to a doctor. We gave her a prescription for methadone. She's got her narcotics anonymous 30-day chip that she carries around proudly, and she's trying. She said, “I wouldn't have had to do this. I did this on purpose.”

Verge Of Homelessness

It's a slippery slope. It's not typically a one-time thing. I happen to be a woman. I'm 48 years old. I have a stable life. I have a college degree and a higher degree. I'm going to get my PhD in Sustainability because I want to focus my efforts on making a better world for the future, regardless of the fact that my skills in business, sales, marketing, and all that jazz, working in natural products have put me in this comfortable spot to be able to pursue this next stage.

I can't help but think back to the moments in time when I was perhaps a few steps away from homelessness or the fact that when things weren't going right at home, and I didn't feel like I had an option, I ran away from home and lived on the streets for a week. It was only five nights and six days. It’s less than a week. The things I saw that time being thirteen years old, it's harrowing to understand that people were going to give blood to get $12 so that they could have money to buy anything that they needed from the maxi pads and feminine care that some of the women on the streets. They don't have access to some of these things to drugs. There was a lot of drug use on the streets or buying a burger.

I understand how uncomfortable they were and have myself sampled a little bit. I had smoked pot. I tried LSD for the first time. A few years later, I smoked some pot that had some laced with something else like hashish. To understand how these mind-altering drugs can affect you and comfort you in a way when you feel so out of control and give you some sense of control, which is why I resonate with your particular case where you're saying, “This woman made a conscious choice to do this drug.” I made a conscious choice because I was trying to escape the horror of my present situation.

I've been able to escape that world. It wasn't through lack of trying and effort, but it puts me in a position where I feel I understand it and see what it must be like. My empathy is on overdrive for these people. When I see my community start to see this swell and the homeless or unsheltered population, when I hear young people saying things like, “I can't afford rent. I'm going to do the van life thing because the rents are too much money. I have to live with four people in this house, and rent is still going to be $1,000 a month.” I'm like, “It's not that long ago where the total rent for four people would be $1,000.” This is the reality of California. I don't think we're in a bubble because costs are up everywhere.

The thing is that you're talking about the escapism of the cold night, but imagine the desperation and the resignation that there's not going to be a way out of this. I'm here. You knew that you could go back home. The desperation and feeling like there's no end is what you have to experience. Think about folks who don't see any way out, and they're right. There isn't unless things change.

The drugs are a way to be resigned to fate. Once you've lost that, it's hard to get that back. That pride and that drive of I can do this, the determination. That's a precious resource we should not be squandering. These people can be valuable contributions to society. I say these people loosely. Your FedEx drivers aren't people you know. They're people's grandmothers. Everybody is somebody or something. We discount them quickly as a lump of worthless. We treat them like rodents. That is letting ourselves emotionally off the hook in an unfair way.

Encampment Clearing

We could keep going on talking about this for hours. I want to say how much I appreciate the work that you're doing. I'm going to keep tabs personally on how this is being enforced in my local community. I had heard that there's another move planned. I'm not sure what that means at the present time, but I'll come back and update my audience on what I learned about what's being tackled here and how it's working and not working in some cases. I'm hoping it's not more of this kicking the can down the road. We've heard about things like people buying bus tickets in Berkeley or Oakland and sending them to Santa Cruz. It is an example, but some of that is a myth.

When we hear about encampments being cleared, we shouldn't jump to conclusions that it's a bad thing. Matt Mahan in San Jose, for instance, I'm thrilled when he's clearing encampment because I know that means he's going out and offering them an alternative. The most inhumane thing is not clearing the encampment and not offering them a place to be instead. Souping them down the street is different. There's a difference between criminalizing and holding people accountable for accepting something you are offering. Encampment sweeps are my dream, I hope we have the luxury of clearing all encampments over the face of the earth, but the way to end encampments is to end the need for encampments.

I don't want to see us go from one tent city to another tent city.

That's not ending encampments. That's moving an encampment.

That's what we've been doing in my area. It's been moving from one spot to another. The community around this particular spot gets two up in arms, and it gets moved to another section. The one benefit of doing that is that the site gets cleaned up because there's a lot of garbage and things like that that need to be managed. When the move has happened, at least they've got a fresh camp.

The programs that we're initiating include enabling people to have lockers that can check out bike lockers because bicycle theft is such an issue for us in Santa Cruz County. All those things are being offered as services to help people get more control of their lives. The major problems have been like not being able to keep families together and not being able to keep people with their pets. Sometimes, they have a cat or a dog with them. This is love. They love this animal. If the animal has given up, where do they end up? That could be the thing tethering them to this life in a way.

All the things you've described cost so much. Those encampment sweeps are expensive. Putting people indoors is the least expensive solution, but the problem is the wrong pocket because the Department of Public Works and the street cleaning team aren't responsible. If we could put one level up and the city overall is going to cost half as much money, we're going to have to reallocate from encampment sweeps to proper toilets instead and a little bit of reallocation. We'd save ourselves a lot of money and get over the humanitarian crisis that we're trying to ignore, shift blame, and sweep it to be somebody else's problem. It is not going to go away unless we solve it.

Episode Wrap-Up

I love what you're doing. I'd like to have a conversation at some point offline to see how I might support your efforts outside of putting this episode into the world. Thank you so much for joining me. I'd like to offer you the floor if you have any closing thoughts, or if there's a question I haven't asked that you'd like to ask and answer yourself, you're free to do so.

What Dignity Moves does is build interim housing. We get tons of pushback and negative energy in the air around homeless shelters. The message I have is this problem is solvable. Let's start with that and work towards doing so. Don't resist having one in your neighborhood. Those people are already in your neighborhood. Let's treat them with respect and get them indoors. We need the public to be saying, “I want to shelter. That Walgreens that closed down, let's use that parking lot for the next several years. I've got a horse farm that we're not using.” If everybody raises their hand and contributes something rather than complaining, we can solve this problem. It's not a herculean effort. It's a change of mind.

Thank you again so much for joining me, Elizabeth. I appreciate you and the work you do. I look forward to hearing more about Dignity Moves and the things you're able to accomplish over the next year or so. Thank you.

Thank you for having me. It’s my pleasure.

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You can all see that I am perhaps more closely connected to this problem, at least from an emotional position, than you might have known before. I've shared moments of my past that I didn't expect. I hope that this helps you to see this problem differently. The reality is that anybody can end up unsheltered. Anybody can end up on the streets. If we start to look at it as less of an alienating problem and something more of a community problem, we can work to solve this together.

I want to remind everyone that you can visit our new website, CircleB.co. That is the site that now hosts Care More Be Better. When you sign up for our newsletter, we will plant a tree with Forest Planet. This is also now a purchasing site where you can find some products that we've talked about on this show from cause-oriented companies and offering solutions that are a little greener, which are not doing things like introducing excess plastic into the world.

I hope you'll give me that vote of confidence with your email address. We don't over-email. You'll get 1 or 2 emails a week about features on this show, people we're having on, like Elizabeth Funk, and potentially a promotion or two. Thank you, readers, now and always, for being a part of this community because together, we can do so much more. We can care more, we can be better, we can support the journey of unsheltered people and build a society that has at its core a sense of equanimity. Thank you.

 

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