Tackling homelessness will take a decade, Oxnard city manager says

Oxnard spent nearly $3.3 million addressing homelessness these past two years. None of it went toward ending homelessness, said City Manager Alex Nguyen.

Most of it went toward police or code enforcement, responding to the impacts of the homeless population. Less than $1 million went toward services like operating the homeless shelter. But this kind of spending isn’t a solution, Nguyen said.

Shortly after he was hired last summer to lead the largest city of Ventura County and the one with the largest homeless population, Nguyen talked about proposing a housing-first approach to homelessness. At Tuesday’s City Council meeting, Nguyen led a conversation about a concept that goes beyond the homeless shelter.

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“We need to turn our bearing at sea here in this homeless crisis,” Nguyen said. “We need to add a component where we begin investing in ending homelessness because if we don’t, it’s like playing whack-a-mole. We continue spending our precious resources simply to address the impacts of homelessness.”

A housing-first model is one that gets homeless people into a home without preconditions. Local, state and federal funding would be used to offer landlords incentives to open up existing housing units. The city would also look for new housing sites to house the homeless.

“The more we do of this, the less we’ll have to do with policing and encampment clean-ups,” Nguyen said.

Currently, the model is to get homeless people into a shelter and offer social services so they’ll eventually move into transitional housing and then permanent housing. The housing-first model offers permanent housing up front in addition to social services and job placement so that the end goal is life stability, explained Nguyen.

Placing homeless people into shelters, which oftentimes require sobriety or other barriers, is a model that can’t keep up with a growing homeless population, Nguyen said. It’s also difficult to reach out to those who need mental or behavioral health help but aren’t housed.

“I challenge anyone doing any kind of therapy outdoors or in a shelter setting,” Nguyen said.

According to the homeless count conducted in January, 548 people were identified as homeless in Oxnard, nearly one-third of the county’s homeless.

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More details of the housing first plan will be unveiled and voted on by the City Council at a future date. Tuesday’s agenda item was to discuss the plan, which received general support from council members.

“I support this,” said Councilman Bert Perello. “The reason I support this is because what we’ve been doing isn’t working.”

Housing first is not a novel concept. Much of state and federal aid for homelessness programs require a housing-first approach. It’s also the strategy employed by the Ventura County Continuum of Care Alliance, which oversees U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and other homeless funding.

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Tara Carruth, coordinator for the alliance, said it was refreshing to hear Oxnard considering the housing-first model.

“We haven’t had a lot of conversations at the local policy level of what the model looks like,” she said. “Having our largest city with the largest homeless population align with best practices, it makes us stronger as a region.”

Carruth said while there is still a lot of work to do in terms of identifying the resources to implement a housing first model, it’s encouraging that the conversation is shifting from managing homelessness to actually solving it.

If the model is eventually adopted, Oxnard won’t likely see immediate results. Nguyen said it will take 10 years to get a handle on what has become a crisis.

“I’m not saying that housing first is a magic bullet. I’m not saying that housing first will get our numbers to zero,” Nguyen said. “But I am saying it’s the most effective model. It will get our numbers down and over time, because it will take time, it will get them down significantly.”