A path to abate homelessness
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South Lake Tahoe can be scene from Berkely s Echo Lake Camp., Wednesday, June 14, 2017.Lance Iversen/San Francisco Chronicle
Have you given up hope that California will ever get its 150,000-person homeless population off the streets? Are you dubious that your hometown could ever reduce its homelessness to zero?
If so, then you should go jump in a lake.
Either Tahoe or Elsinore will do.
South Lake Tahoe and Lake Elsinore separated by 460 miles, 5,000 feet in elevation, and 25 degrees in average temperature have built such supportive housing infrastructures that within two years both could achieve “functional zero.” That’s the term for communities that have solved homelessness for a particular population, with systems comprehensive enough to assure that homelessness is rare, brief, and non-recurring.
Lake Tahoe and Lake Elsinore: rare success stories in helping unhoused residents MORE North Lake Boulevard (California State Route 28), in Tahoe City, California looking northeast. Photo by Finetooth/CC 2.0, via Wikimedia
Billions of dollars and good intentions have not been enough to solve California’s homelessness crisis. But some communities are faring better than others. Zocalo commentator Joe Mathews says that Lake Tahoe and Lake Elsinore are in that group. As cities, they don’t have much in common but in their approach to tackling a growing population of unhoused people within their borders, they are on the same page. Mathews says it starts with the recognition that community conflicts are often the biggest obstacle to getting people off the street.
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