The results of this year's survey of Santa Cruz County's homeless population are in. It shows a striking decrease in homelessness in the city of Santa Cruz — the number of unhoused residents dropped by more than a third since 2023.
That trend shows the city’s efforts to tackle homelessness have been working, says Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KEELEY: The approaches we've been using in the city of Santa Cruz have real purchase to them. It's working. And so that then can give us at least some serious guidance on what we should be doing in the future.
Yeah, I mean a 36% decrease in the city over the course of one year, that's obviously pretty significant. What do you attribute that to?
KEELEY: The very unhealthy living environment in large unsanctioned camps doesn't exist in Santa Cruz anymore. That is not to say that there aren't gatherings of homeless folks in parts of the Pogonip or here or there around the city, but there's not 20 tents together or 10 tents together. Those were not healthy environments for the people in them or the community generally. So having dealt with those in a successful way I think is step number one. People had lots of notice and were told, “here are some options for sheltering for you.”
Something that stood out to me, in addition to the significant decrease in the city of Santa Cruz, was that the number of people experiencing homelessness went up in every other locality in the county — Capitola, Scotts Valley, and Watsonville. Why do you think that is?
KEELEY: A social science evaluation, only knowing those two things, may say, “well, it could likely be that Santa Cruz's reduction in homelessness is other people’s increase in homelessness, that they must be going from X to Y.” And I think it's more complicated than that. And I don't buy that as an argument, by the way. I don't buy it as an argument.
I think we need to see, what is Capitola doing? What is Scotts Valley doing? What is Watsonville doing? Right now, Watsonville City Council is aggressively trying to not have a navigation center located in their city. They have all kinds of issues, but they have a different approach. Their city is approaching this differently. And Scotts Valley, Capitola, when you look at their budget, what do they appropriate in their budget to deal with this issue? It's not an issue for them. They don't have a navigation center. They don't have shelters. They don't have permanent supportive housing. They don't do those things. We’re the county seat. We do those things. We have a larger population. The courts are here. A lot of the health and human service providers are here. There is no evidence to support the idea that our reduction in homelessness is now pushing homeless folks to other jurisdictions.
The report showed a 7% increase in homelessness among those age 55 and over in Santa Cruz County compared to last year, which mirrors national and statewide trends. Is the city doing anything to create a safety net for its aging population to prevent more older adults from falling into homelessness, especially as they leave the workforce?
KEELEY: There's an upstream problem here. And so that's why, in our budget this year, we allocated more funding to try to prevent evictions and other kinds of issues for folks where their personal economic circumstance is something where they’ve lost the floor and now have hit the ground. And that's one area where we've increased our commitment of general fund resources. A couple of thousand dollars here, a couple of thousand dollars there for a month or two would help them stabilize and they wouldn't fall into it. Because as soon as you fall into homelessness, a series of cascading, horrible things happen to you, and it's easier to do a little ounce of prevention at the front end here. So, I’ve worked with the community, the community has done a lot of work on this, and I suspect there will end up being a ballot measure in 2025 that does those things.
Fred Keeley is the mayor of Santa Cruz. You can find the second part of this interview here.
