Homeless, not Hopeless

By Alexander Stoeber

I was homeless before I knew what that meant. The place I remember most is Lake Tulloch – doing my homework by flashlight, shivering, my shoulders searing from sunburn so deep we packed it in mustard to draw the heat out. The smell of mustard is still the smell of those nights. I would lie there dreading the morning, working out how I’d get to school: walking if we were close enough, or knocking on doors in whatever community we’d landed in, asking whether anyone had a car and a few minutes to spare.

We moved so constantly, all over California, that I was held back in the first grade. The fear of being held back again made me independent. I learned to get myself to school, because school was where I wanted to be. It was warm. It had a hot breakfast and a hot lunch, and when my friends weren’t going to eat theirs, I stashed the extras. The classroom was the most stable thing in my life, so I held onto it with everything I had and made sure I excelled no matter what. That brought me to the land of opportunity, Santa Barbara, to study Political Science at UCSB and find a better way so others don’t have to experience hopelessness.

That is the first thing I need you to understand before I say a word about policy. A person without a home is not a person without hopes and dreams.

But hope is not the whole story. I grew up close enough to every kind of homelessness to know they are different countries, even when they share the same riverbank.

There is not one kind. There are three. Santa Barbara keeps trying to solve all three with a single answer, and then we act surprised when that answer doesn’t hold up.

The have-nots simply lack the resources to climb out or stay out. A medical bill, a lost job, a rent increase they couldn’t absorb. They are not broken. They are short. Given a bridge, they cross it, and they stay across. I was one of them. My bridge was a classroom and a hot tray of food.

The can-nots are different. Mental illness, or some other condition nobody chooses, keeps a stable life out of reach, and no amount of deciding will change that. Telling them to do better is telling a man with a broken leg to walk it off. What he needs is a doctor, and what they need is treatment from people who stay long enough for it to take.

Then there are the will-nots, who get offered the bed, the program, the caseworker, and still say no to a different life for themselves. Some of them love the open road more than they could ever love a lease. Others are so deep inside a drug that nothing the rest of us can offer competes with the next high. Nobody likes talking about this group, which is exactly why somebody should.

Trapped In Between

I won’t pretend the categories come with clear borders. People drift between them, and I have watched it happen. Soft boundaries don’t excuse us from defining the problem, and our city’s ledger shows what refusal of definition costs. Recently, Santa Barbara put around $1.65 million into services that actually move people off the street, and an estimated $6.5 million into cleaning up after the problem: enforcement, encampment removal, and repairs. Four dollars are spent on consequences for every dollar spent on a cure. We pay that bill every year, and every year the street looks about the same.

So, what would it mean to ask which problem we’re solving? For the have-nots, mostly money and speed. Rental help that arrives before the eviction notice does so because keeping a family housed costs a fraction of what it takes to rehouse them later. The can-nots need treatment first, then housing built around the treatment, with staff on site rather than a tent, and our belief in their recovery. The will-nots are the hard part. What they need from us is accountability, and I want to be careful with that word, because I don’t mean punishment. I mean a consequence with a door to an incentive.

I’ve watched that work from up close. My mother got clean only after a consequence finally landed, with a way out attached. The judge told her at her parole hearing that she was on her last strike. She had to choose between her old ways, landing her back in prison and misery, or her freedom and kids. It wasn’t easy to clutch her hand and feel the tears running down my face before going back to sixth grade the next day. But looking away from the needed change felt like watching someone slowly drown and calling it respect.

Now that she chose her freedom and our relationship, I know the hard thing turned out to be the loving thing. People hear the word “accountability” and hear coldness. I hear it as giving somebody a chance to choose a different path back to us.

When you hear the next homelessness proposal, ask one question: which of the three is it for? If the answer is all of them, it is probably built for none of them.

What moves a person out of any category is hope – a future worth standing up for. I found mine in a warm classroom, over homework finished by flashlight in the cold. The people I love found theirs in their own time. The people on our streets are homeless, not hopeless. Almost no one is beyond return.

•••

Alexander Stoeber is a Santa Barbara real estate agent with Compass. Homeless through much of his childhood and displaced again in high school, he graduated and moved to Santa Barbara to earn his degree in Political Science from UCSB. He now helps people find housing.

Community Calendar: