Why Clearing Highway Encampments in California Takes So Long | Senator Catherine Blakespear

The homeless count went up by 3% over the last year in California. And this count may not be accurate because they only use a certain period of time to count the homeless that they can see at that time. So experts think the number is much higher. And out of this almost 187,000 people, 2 3rd of them are unsheltered, meaning they're on the streets. Californians were promised that they will see a lot less encampments because of their court ruling last year. And the governor asked a lot of the cities to clean up the homeless encampments. But there is no real change. My guest today is Katherine Brekspier, who's a state senator and has been working to figure out how to solve this homeless issue. Today she's gonna tell us what she's found and where the problem lies in the way we spend money on homelessness in California and a couple of laws that she's introducing this year. If you look at all the different pots of money and all the places they go, to counties, to cities, to continuums of care, to nonprofit organizations, you see that we've been unfocused. And what it's resulted in is that the homeless population is growing every single month. I'm Siamak Khorrami. Welcome to California Insider. Katherine, it's great to have you back on. Welcome back. Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. The homeless count came up and we added 3% more people. And it's now about 187,000 people in California that are homeless. The growth has been less than the rest of the country because there's a lot more people that are becoming homeless across the country because families are becoming homeless across the country. But what's happening now with homelessness? Is there any progress? There's been a lot of hope that some things will get resolved. What's been going on? Yes, well, in the big picture there is a lot going on, but unfortunately I don't see any of it as making a major difference in the short term. So we know that homelessness is going up every month. So more people fall into homelessness than exit homelessness. And that is really a bad trend because it means that people are losing their homes, but we're not able to find homes for people who have already lost them and are living on the streets or living in their cars. And I think from my perspective, one of the most important things is to focus on the most dire, the most urgent problem, which is unsheltered street homelessness. So people living in tents and downtowns, in canyons, the fire risks associated with that. We know the LA fires, of course, were devastating. We don't want to have more fires. And so focusing on that particular problem is I think where we need to be dedicating our attention and our focus. I think two thirds of the homeless are unsheltered. And what do you mean we have to focus there? Haven't we been focusing there? Well, yeah, I mean, so the question is, where is someone sleeping tonight? But then where are they in six months and where are they in six years? So the studies show that the most effective solution for homelessness is housing. When we build more housing and when we build permanent supportive housing for people who need it, so people who are drug addicted or mentally ill, they need support in an ongoing way. So that supportive services is a really important piece. But building that, building enough of it, building it at scale is not something that we're doing with, we just need substantially more of it and we just don't have it in the pipeline. So from my perspective, instead of saying, these are the long-term solutions, and in the meantime, we should have housing be built from the private market, that is all happening. But we also need to focus our attentions on what specifically is happening on our streets every single night and saying, you cannot sleep here. So you should not be sleeping in the Caltrans right-of-way on downtown streets and doorways and canyons, but you can sleep here. And to have shelters, and they can be shelters that are prefab homes, they can be tiny homes, they could be a congregate shelter, they could be a safe camping site, a safe sleeping site, anything that moves people from being outside unsheltered to being sheltered somewhere. But I think that there has been a wide disagreement about where the focus should be, because many people will say, unsheltered homelessness, that where are you sleeping tonight, is actually not our first priority. We also want to make sure that there are these permanent housing solutions. So if you look at all the different pots of money and all the places they go, to counties, to cities, to continuums of care, to nonprofit organizations, you see that we've been unfocused. And what it's resulted in is that the homeless population is growing every single month. So I personally find that to be unacceptable. I think this should be, we should be seeing this as the humanitarian crisis that it is. We should be working on solutions that are, that say this is an urgent emergency. So we've built barracks, we've built dormitories, we can build housing at scale when we want to, but we don't currently seem to have the will to do that. We still have this really distributed system where money goes out to all these different agencies and organizations, and then they are supposed to be bringing housing online. And in the meantime, it's just getting worse. And it's hard to tell where the money goes because a lot of people are concerned that billions of dollars are spent, but we can't really, we don't know what happens to it. Right, and so I have two bills about homelessness that I think are really important. So one of them forces Caltrans to work with cities better. So what we see is that cities, especially the big cities, they have been dealing with homelessness and are on the front lines of it, and they want to be providing solutions. Like, for example, in the city of San Diego, where I live in the county of San Diego and Encinitas, but in the city of San Diego, they receive more than 300 calls about homeless encampments on the Caltrans right-of-way a month. And these are ones that they can't deal with because it's not city property, it's state property, it's Caltrans. They're by freeways? They're by freeways, exactly. They're by freeways or on and off ramps or in underpasses. And Caltrans's response is just much more bureaucratic and much slower. So they'll say, well, we need to have specialized crews, like hazmat crews come out, which you don't even necessarily know if you need that until you evaluate it. You know, it might be three people in a tent. You don't need a hazmat crew for that. They say, we want the highway patrol to be there, but highway patrol's understaffed and they have to go through their process to get authorization. So there are examples of it taking more than two months to get something even opened. And, you know, a city wants to deal with it in 48 hours, and Caltrans is taking two months. So my bill would have the Caltrans work with the cities and use their contractors, use their social service providers to help people move from the encampments and the Caltrans right away into other, to connect them with services so that they could move off. So essentially the responsibility will come to the city. So the city will kind of take charge of Caltrans in dealing with it, right? Yes, exactly. Well, it forces the right and the left hand to work together better. So it basically sets up a framework where there has to be somebody who's in charge, who's responsible for making decisions, timelines to make those decisions, and also getting all the different pieces of the puzzle together so that a response can mount quickly. Because essentially cities are just more nimble than Caltrans. And what's ironic about this is that the governor has really focused on street homelessness and he points the finger back at cities and say that they've received a lot of money and that they're not doing a good enough job meeting outcomes. But then Caltrans is actually a state agency. It's under the governor's purview. It's an executive branch agency. So the idea that the governor has executive orders that say we want to do better and you all need to do better, but then his own agency isn't doing better is a problem. I think it's worth noting that Caltrans doesn't see its first priority as being homeless management, right? It's a roads- It makes sense because- So in some ways the fact that it's not staffed to deal with this or that it wants someone else to deal with it, I mean, but meanwhile, I'm sure you've driven on the freeway and seen encampments and thought, how are we allowing people to live here? It's dangerous, it's polluted. It is obviously not a living environment. We can't have this be the best option for people. And also the blame goes to the city because if you're in San Diego and you're driving in San Diego, you don't think this is Caltrans. Exactly. It's just San Diego, right? Exactly, exactly. And my second bill, it says that if a city builds a shelter, then the counties are obligated to provide 50% of the operating cost. And the reason for that is that the social services are managed by counties. Counties get money to do drug and alcohol addiction- From state or from the federal? From state and federal. But cities are not running the large social services programs that counties are. That's really what their purview is. So we need to get people who are inside of shelters to be connected to the services. And we also, because there's so much money that goes through counties, we need to make sure that they are actually dealing with the most acute problem. So saying, you know, cities can't run a whole homeless response out of their general fund. They're just, they don't have the money to do that. Many cities have pivoted to spend large amounts of the tax revenue on homelessness, but it's really not sustainable and it's not able to be expanded. And so if you, from my perspective, if you focus on the most acute problem, which is people sleeping unsheltered tonight outside, we need to move them inside, then we need to find different places where we can fund this kind of thing. And the counties are where a lot of the money is. So that's my second fairly major bill. And it's supported by the League of California Cities, by big city mayors and individual mayors, because we, you know, we just need to have more, a more cohesive and coordinated response. Our sponsor today is Shen Yun. There's been some negative press on Shen Yun recently. Shen Yun's mission is to revive ancient and traditional Chinese culture. Shen Yun performance started by a group of Falun Gong practitioners in New York. Falun Gong is a spiritual and religious group, which believes in living by truth, compassion and tolerance, putting others first. The Chinese Communist Party, CCP, has been persecuting it since July of 1999 in China. Since Shen Yun started, CCP has been targeting it in the US and across the globe by playing different kinds of schemes to cancel the shows or impact the performance. The current negative reporting originated from some Chinese social media accounts. And we know that CCP has given a new directive to go after Shen Yun and Falun Gong in the US by turning the public opinion against them. If you hear something negative on Shen Yun, make sure to do your own research and your own due diligence. Despite all of CCP's campaigns against Shen Yun, the show has managed to grow significantly across the world. I highly recommend you go see it. I've been going to it for the last 14 years as they change the performances every year. They're coming back to California. Make sure you go see it. When it comes to the shelters, we have 200,000 shelter beds, is that correct? I mean, we have a lot of shelter beds, but... Are they not getting used or how does that work? I think some of them are designated for specific types. Like for example, I actually have a third homeless-related bill. There's a homeless shelter in the city of Carlsbad where half of it is being unused because it was supposed to be for migrant farm workers. And so for agriculture workers who are staying not the whole year, so they're not working full-time because of the seasons of the crops. But as Southern California has grown more homes and less food, you have less need to have agriculture workers. There's not a lot of farming in Carlsbad, right? Right, well, yeah, there's some, but there's less. And I went and toured their shelter and it's crazy to have one wing be totally empty, sitting there empty. And then the other wing has all these people in it. And you think, why can't they walk across the hall and stay over here? And it's because to build that in the first place, there was money that was earmarked specifically for agricultural workers. So I have a bill that eliminates this restriction and says that it can be open to anybody. And so if there are agriculture workers, they would be able to have the first dibs on those beds. But if not, then just have it be available as a shelter. So there are certain types like that where there's like, they're for veterans or they're for LGBTQ or they're for families. Or there are different subgroups, of course, because you don't want necessarily to have people who are struggling with drug and alcohol addiction in with young families, young children and moms and things. So there are different types of beds. But my belief is that our core problem is that no one owns the problem. There's nobody who sees it as their job to actually get to functional zero. And what I have been advocating for, this is my third year in the state Senate, and I really came to the legislature thinking, I want us to own the problem, have the state say, we are gonna get to functional zero. If we have just under 200,000 homeless people living on the streets, and this is a number that you said at the beginning from the point in time count, right, which counts people every year. And it's certainly an undercount, but recognizing that that is a number that we could actually provide housing for. But we are so, we've backed ourselves against a wall with the way we see our role and what we can do and what we can't do and the way we do things. And I think we've become really calcified. And there is, I believe there's a reality to the homeless industrial complex idea, that there are lots of, there's a lot of services happening. There are a lot of jobs happening. There are a lot of good things that are happening. But is the goal of actually getting to functional zero is what is not happening. So, and I've gone out with some of these social service providers who they have the biggest hearts and they're trying so hard. But when you go up in a park outside a library and you hand someone a flyer, and they're saying, do you have any housing yet? And you say, no, but I have a Costco snack and a water bottle. It's like, that doesn't help them, right? They have a housing problem. They don't need a Costco snack and a flyer. But what you hear is a lot of narrative around like, well, we need to build trust and they need to be ready for housing and all these kinds of other things, which are undoubtedly true and part of the picture. And there are certainly housing resistant people, like, and this is particularly true, apparently in San Francisco, where large percentages of people turn it down. They wanna be having drugs and. Well, and also part of it too, is that we need a system that is a low administrative burden. So like, if you say to someone, you have to have all these forms of ID and you have to qualify for services and you have to fill out a lot of paperwork and you have to follow, you have to make appointments on the phone and then you have to show up for appointments at this time. I'm sure all of the people watching this have experienced the frustration of just doing that with your own medical care. Let alone struggling with addiction and not having a place to live and not having a place to shower or go to the bathroom. I mean, just recognizing how difficult it is to manage paperwork. If we focused on allowing people to be inside and then we work on these questions of where are they living in six months or where are they living in six years, we work on those things. But the most urgent question is finding a place for people to live inside tonight. And that would also disrupt this culture of it's okay to camp outside. Like, from my perspective, it's not okay. It's not okay for them and it's not okay for everybody else that wants to use their park, to use their streets, to drive along the freeways and not see people living all over the place. And also, there's a massive environmental effect to living in riverbeds and canyons that I think is underappreciated. The amount of waste and trash that's going into our riverbeds. And exactly. It's this, you know, we are allowing these essentially shantytowns to exist in the state of California. And it's this massive have and have not experience of an underclass, of people who are not housed and are having to fend for themselves. And so, but when you start digging into this and what can we change and why is it like this, you just realize this interconnected web of complexity. And at the end of the day, I go back to, we have to own the problem. Whose job is it to get to functional zero? And at the moment, it's no one's. There is a person who oversees the department underneath the governor's office whose responsibility is homelessness. Right now, it's linked up with all these other jobs. So one of the things that has been proposed, which I very much support in this year, is to pull that out, to have housing and homelessness stand alone. So there's one person who's actually in charge of that department. And, you know, at least that starts us on a goal. And like, if you look at other areas of our state policy, like getting emissions reductions for carbon, you know, we have goals. We're trying to get to a certain amount of carbon and it's parts per million and it's by a certain year and there's an action plan. We may or may not get there, but at least we have that clearly laid out. But it's like, right now, you know, we don't have anything like that. We have more than 500 cities and counties in the state of California. Each one should have to provide for its point in time count number. You know, that was a bill I introduced the first year that didn't make it. But it's like, you know, you said almost 200,000 homeless people. They're divided across the state according to different counties. Why doesn't each county or each city have to provide homeless serving housing to that point in time count number? I mean, that's like an accountability reality that we could be doing, but we don't. So right now, essentially what you're saying, do you think it's become normalized? Yes, absolutely. We're okay, this is what it is. And I think we do a lot of hand-wringing and we do a lot of talking and we say that this is a top problem. I believe that in the state Senate, there are 40 people in the state Senate, at least a quarter of them see homelessness as the top issue. But when you start to like look at how many bills do we have around homelessness, we don't have one committee whose main goal is homelessness. There's housing. I was on housing. There are very few homelessness bills that come through that. We don't have very much energy around homelessness. And I say this as an indictment because I care deeply about this and I don't think we're doing enough. So I'm just one Senator and I beat my own drum and I wave my own flag and I bring this up. But at the end of the day, it really does take, it takes a commitment from leadership. It takes us saying, this is your job and I want you to get there. I want you to put together a plan and I don't want it to be a plan that is- 20 years from now, we're gonna build 1,000 units. Right, exactly. And right now, see, when I started this conversation by saying is that there are a lot of things happening. So like, for example, the voters passed Prop 1, which puts more money into the behavioral health services. We have CareCourt, which is supposed to say that if you are not able to care for yourself, like you have schizophrenia, that you can be compelled into treatment. You know, this is got a very slow start, unfortunately. We also have- And it's not mandatory, right? From what we covered on the show, like you can, people can get out of it, right? Right. I mean, if people go in and out with schizophrenia of like when they're in a lucid time when they have the decision-making authority for themselves and they're not in a state, if they say, yes, I want, I consent to this care treatment plan. And then they, you know, then they go into the cycle and then they're having problems. They can be forced into it, but they can also walk away. And the question is, if they walk away, what happens? I think, and I'm a coauthor on a bill, saying that they should be forced into a conservatorship. You know, that they should, there should be this- Because if somebody is having psychotic episodes in the middle of the street and- Yeah, exactly. And I mean, just this morning when I was driving in Sacramento to the Capitol, you know, I saw somebody with, you know, full frontal male nudity, right there within a block of the Capitol. And he, it's like, and I had the same thought I have all the time, which is your heart goes out to somebody, it's like, this poor person is literally suffering and dying in front of us. And we're just driving by on the streets, like, what is our problem? And then thinking, and I'm a state senator, you know, I'm going to this Capitol, this majestic building where we're the fifth largest economy and we're trying to solve the biggest problems. And I can't even help him. I don't know who to call. I don't, you know, it's, what's the city doing? What, you know, and you just have this whole, so there's a sense of helplessness, there's a sense of anger, there's a sense of sadness and compassion of what he's experiencing. But at the end of the day, I just think, why are we not doing better on this major problem? And we have so many problems. You know, when you think about the federal, the environment, things that are coming down from Washington, you think about climate change, you think about the fires in LA, we have all these problems, but we have these endemic problems like homelessness that go on year after year. And when we have this massive surplus, we're not, you know, we're not prioritizing doing that, solving that. The other piece I think that we really need to talk honestly about is social housing or public housing. Because if you think about, why is this housing not being built? You know, housing, just low cost housing, or housing of all types is built by the private market. And we don't have a system, we have a broken housing supply system. So even though we've liberalized all these housing laws, we're actually not in a position where we're going to be building a lot more housing, particularly for people who are in the lower third of the income bracket. Most of the housing that's getting built is usually from what we have seen is luxury. But also there is an element of affordable, but then the affordable ones is like 70% of the median income, which is still very high. Exactly. It's not really affordable if you really think about it. Exactly. Or there are some that are deeply, deeply affordable, but there are so few of them. And even in all of the affordability categories, it's like 10 or 15% of total housing that's built, because that's the inclusionary percentage on projects. But if you recognize in our state of 40 million people, almost 40% are on Medi-Cal, and that Medi-Cal is essentially for people who are poor. So it's like almost 40% of our state is Medi-Cal eligible on Medi-Cal, but then only 10 to 15% of housing is affordable, deed restricted affordable. So we're not, even with our housing policies, we're not producing anywhere near the number. And also, so to me, it seems like if the state government actually directly built housing, dealt with, we have siting problems at every level, because people don't want homeless shelters, they don't want homeless serving housing, they don't want low income housing. Lots of communities don't wanna build that kind of housing. But if we had, if the state more directly said, we own property or we are going to buy property and we are going to build housing and we are going to provide for people who are currently living outside. And like we used to have single room occupancy hotel rooms for $17, you know, you could stay inside tonight. And, but we don't have that. You know, those of all- We used to have those redevelopment agencies. Do you know about those? We did, yeah. And how did they work? Did they work by the cities or was it by the state? Yeah, redevelopment unfortunately was eliminated in one of the budget, you know, down years. And that was a time real estate prices were so low. Yeah, and I mean, when you, when I've talked to people who were responsible at that time, they basically say, we were just trying to keep the lights on. Like we needed to have that tax revenue come back into the state. And the way that that was working was, it was a revenue stream for cities that they don't have anymore. And so, you know, redevelopment is really not happening because that tax increment would go back to the cities. And so you have to figure out how you fund it. You have to figure out who does it, whose job is it. And I don't, and because the housing and the market-based economy and the social services piece, and, you know, looking at housing as medical care, like if somebody, how can someone care for their health if they are living on the street? You know, it's like, you know, an expansion of healthcare to include housing assistance. And it's another area where things seem to be moving. But then everything is on influx because of the federal government. I mean, you know, we could have such a massive pullback on our Medi-Cal and Medicaid from the federal government that we're really in a period that it is extremely unstable. What do a neurosurgeon, a country artist, and a television and radio host have in common? They all saw the writing on the wall. Big banks sharing your financial information with big government. Join them as owners in Old Glory Bank, the pro-America online bank that protects your privacy, security, and liberty. Invest today at own.oldglorybank.com. Catherine, when was it that you realized that somehow the system is, it's gotten used to having the homeless on the street? I mean, it's interesting because, you know, Daryl Steinberg, who's the former mayor of Sacramento, and before that, he was the pro tem in the Senate. When I was the mayor of the city of Encinitas, I heard him on the radio, and he was the president of the Senate. And his interview, he was saying, it's unacceptable that we've normalized this, we're gonna change this. And I met with him last week in his office in Sacramento. You know, he's now out of office completely. And he has ideas, and he's, you know, still trying to fight the fight. But at the end of it all, problem identification is a lot easier than solutions. And, you know, when you have a lot of people, and you have a lot of different interests, and you have a status quo, it's just very hard to make progress. And so, you know, I had a lot of hope at that time. I was a relatively new mayor, and I heard somebody who was speaking the truth that I believed and saw. But I haven't been able to, I haven't seen the change, even in my own county, or in my own city, recognizing how hard it is, and then trying to look at a systems level, to say, if we can't solve this, like, when I was the mayor of my city, the thing we did to help people who are homeless was just open a safe parking program. And that was really important. It was tremendously controversial. It helps people and hurts no one. It's had no problems. But there was so much outpouring of opposition for it. There was a corresponding outpouring of support for it. But to recognize that, do we need to fight at the local level for every individual 25 spot parking lot? Like, that's not how you're gonna solve a problem, right? It's like, we have to have a higher level. We have to have county, we have to have state, we have to have federal government. You know, the federal government could have a really impactful role here if they wanted to. In this administration, I don't think that's gonna happen. But it's tough, you know, it's tough. Where do you localize the responsibility and the accountability? What lever of power do you have where you are that you can make that difference? You know, and then just trying to get there. I mean, I remain committed to wanting to get there. I look out at the landscape and don't, this is why I started this interview, by saying I don't think that we're gonna get there in the short term. I don't see that all these many things that are happening are going to make the difference. I know the governor continues to really, really come down on cities. Like, he's saying, like, cities are not doing their job. They've been given a lot of money and they're not doing their job. I think the answer is more complex. Like, for example, with Caltrans not doing their job. And that is something that if you focus on operations and implementation, you could have better partnerships. So Kathleen, we have had different guests on the show and different perspectives on homelessness. Some people say that there's a lot of drug addiction and some people lose everything, then they become addicts when they're in the streets. And some people could become addicts and then lose everything and then end up in the streets. But there is this harm reduction model where there's this debate of whether should we provide alcohol and drugs to people as we get them off the street or should we not? What are your thoughts on that? Do you think this is part of the complexity? Yeah, I mean, you failed to mention that people become drug addicts because they're living on the street. Yeah, that's another, in the beginning I mentioned that. Yeah, I said a group of people become, after they become homeless, because it's hard to be on the street. So they end up drinking alcohol and they use drugs. Well, and also, you want to stay awake because you might have all your stuff stolen. You want to maintain the alertness and also it's available and you're trying to numb the reality of like, it's hard to sleep and it's hard to be awake. And you're in a tough situation, so this is an escape for people to. Right, and I mean, ultimately, drug and alcohol addiction is a crisis of hopelessness. It really is, I think we underestimate how detrimental it is to live on the streets. I mean, just to human health, to mental health. There's, really, it should be an unacceptable foundation. I mean, people just should not be living on the streets. There's just, it's not good for anybody under any circumstance. But I don't believe that we should be providing drug and alcohol to people who are living on the streets as part of their transition. I mean, I think people need to be compelled into treatment, mental health treatment and drug and alcohol addiction treatment if they won't go on their own. So I think we've swung too far in the direction of saying, your human rights prohibit us as a society from helping you. I think that that argument has swung too far. I think that what we're witnessing is people who are killing themselves in front of us while we watch. And it's not through, you know, we're tolerating this. We're saying that we can't help you if you don't want the help. And I really think we need to do better by people. And it's so interesting to me too, to look at multiple different crises. You know, we have the silver tsunami of people who are older and when they are in positions like they have Alzheimer's or dementia or they can't care for themselves or they're living in a persistent vegetative state nearly, you know, they're basically, their quality of life is terrible. But we keep them alive. You know, we keep them housed. We spend a lot of money to do that. We spend the money to do that. Yeah, exactly. And we don't, you know, we keep them alive in these states, but then somebody, you know, in the park next to us, we just say, well, this is your problem. It, I mean, it's kind of crazy. Yeah. And you know, there is this concept, I don't know if you've heard of these guys called Sunbreak Ranch. You know, they want to do something in San Diego. They want to have a big homeless shelter. What they want to do is they want to create a shelter where they have all the services there and they want to have 5,000 people be able to come there with different kinds of services, essentially building something really fast where they can house the people. But what are your thoughts on that? Do you think we need something like that where we have a lot of housing available or shelters available so that people can get off the street? Or do you think that we don't have the will to get the people off the street? Well, so what I wouldn't support, which almost nobody supports, is having like concentration camps, right? So the idea that we would move people against their will, far away from their society, and people go homeless largely in the communities where they live for the reasons they live there, right? So they went to school there, their community's there, it's a faith community, it's a work community, it's they like to smell the ocean breezes. You know, it's all the things that draw people to where they live. And so the idea of shipping them off, that goes too far. The idea of having a place where you can say to someone, hey, you can't live here, but we have this opportunity over here and you should check it out. I listened to a long podcast on something in Texas that's been set up like that. In San Antonio, is that? I think, yeah. They want to do that model, but they want to bring it in Miramar. Like they want to bring it more of a... Well, Miramar is a federal, I mean, that's a military base. So the federal government would have to be involved. But the one in Texas was, it's private philanthropic money. So it's being funded by, there was an effort to have it funded through the city. And there were council members on board, but then when it got to the council vote, you know, they balked. They basically said, because there were too many people, their constituents saying, we don't want this, we can't have this. So they went to the basically outskirts of the city. They bought it, privately purchased it and are running it. And so it's an enormous amount of money to run those kinds of things. Private philanthropic money could be a really important piece of the puzzle if there's the will. And I think in that case, it came from, you know, almost a religious commitment to helping people. And I appreciate that, you know, and there's, we have a lot of money, right? In this- The money is there because we are spending billions of dollars just from the state, right? Yeah, I mean, we're spending it, but it's spent in a lot of different ways. And you start thinking about what, I don't see a wholesale reallocation from where it's currently going to other, to this idea. If this idea came from some type of private money, I don't see that it would be built with public money. Because the way that public money, the public money, like I said, goes to counties, goes to cities, goes to nonprofits who meet certain metrics, right? It doesn't go to somebody to go on the outskirts of a city and buy acres and acres and set up a camp. So those metrics, do you think those metrics have become a bottleneck for dealing with this problem? Because every agency has some goals to meet and then they are doing their thing, but nobody's really, from what you said, nobody's really looking at the whole thing to see. Yeah, I think it would be really painful to do, but I think we should reprioritize. Like I said, with this bill I have, where counties would be forced to fund half of shelters, the operations of shelters, that I think it would be painful because money is going where it's going. And there are always good reasons for that. But to say, what is our top priority? If our top priority is street homelessness and moving people inside as quickly as possible, then right now we have a whole thing where we don't want to fund housing that is, it's basically like, we want it to be permanent housing. We don't want it to be just temporary housing. So there's a lot more money that goes into this permanent housing, but then it doesn't go, the dollar doesn't go far enough. It's not providing enough housing. But doesn't it cost a lot more to do that? It costs an enormous amount. It's like $750,000 a door to build a housing. Like it's crazy high, but it's also- But the person on the street, you could house them with $100 a night or $50 a night. Right, I mean, even if you bought every Motel 6 and converted each room into, this is somewhat what happened during COVID, this room key project. And that was a good, I thought, okay, well, this is good. I like to see energy and innovation. Like, okay, this is new. This is providing options for people. And some people might recover, right? And then they don't need the $750,000 home, right? Right. Well, and it's interesting because during COVID, when I was serving as the mayor, we participated in a program that the Continuum of Care provided some of the funding for, where we were able to provide hotel rooms for people who were living outside. And I was really disheartened by the amount of criticism from the people using it, because they said, yeah, I got a hotel voucher, but no one came around and managed my food. No one managed my medications. No one managed my transportation. No one managed my loneliness. And my response to that was like, we're doing more than any other city here in North County. We're actually providing you a hotel voucher, and we're not trying to solve every problem you have. We're trying to solve your housing problem. So the fact that these other things, and there was a news article that came out that was kind of like this expose of like, people who receive these housing vouchers unhappy with services. And it's like, the expectation that it should be all these things, partly, all of it creates the spiral of like not wanting to do anything. Like I think there are many cities who are literally doing almost nothing. They won't say that, because they'll say we have homeless action plans and we wanna do better and we care. But like, look at their actual budgets. Look at their programs. Look at the grants they're applying for. Like, what are they actually doing? There are many cities that are doing almost nothing. And so, this idea that like, you're not solving every problem for someone. I mean, to me, we need to prioritize housing, helping people get on the road to recovery, connecting them with services like drug and alcohol addiction and mental health services, and the schizophrenia and the really severe types of illness. So that like I saw this morning, the full frontal male nudity, that we're not seeing that on the street, that that's not part of just living in Sacramento is seeing people walking around who are in that state. And driving and you see encampments under the freeway where there's a fire started. It's like, you know, talk about danger and all the things. It's like, we just should not have that. I think that should be completely unacceptable. Now, Catherine, what can Californians do about this? You know, we heard, we thought things would get cleaned up after the Grand Pass ruling happened. You know, now cities can clean encampments. From what you're saying, it doesn't look like a lot could happen. Well, it doesn't look like a lot is happening. It looks like, you know, we've solved big problems. You know, we can do this. I think it does take an alignment. It takes tough choices. It takes leadership. And it, of course, takes money. We're probably not gonna do, we're not gonna be able to solve it with less money. I mean, this idea that we'll just be able to, you know, cut costs and it will somehow work out. I don't think that will happen. But ultimately, you know, the politics changes. You see a shift in, like, even the city of San Francisco electing a different mayor because enough people are fed up with it. Yeah, they don't want open drug use. They don't, you know, they don't. And they want the problem dealt with. And I think, I do think that that will continue, we'll continue to see that. And it depends on how much we're willing to tolerate. And what about Californians? What should they do? A lot of people want this resolved. And a lot of people really don't know what to do. Right. You know, when you see the homeless person or somebody that's having mental, psychotic episodes in front of us in a store, we don't know what to do. Right. You know, and we don't know how to help. Right. And a lot of people are already numb to it. It's better not to get engaged. What can Californians do? You know, I think that it matters what you communicate to your local elected officials and to state level and federal officials. How much we prioritize and pressure this. You know, change does come from the bottom. You know, it's, we need to have the upswelling of a commitment to say, this is not what we want. We want it to be better. And we want you to deal with the problem. We want to see leadership. And if you won't do it, we're gonna choose someone else who will. You know, you see, you do see a lot of political races where homelessness is a top issue. And I think we need to continue to see that. It can't just slide down the priorities and not continue to be an issue. So I think that's really important. Of course, the grassroots stuff is also important. You know, there are a lot of really good social services organizations that are doing really important work. And people are volunteering and they're donating, collecting food, donating food, working in soup kitchens. You know, all the different, the large panoply of volunteering opportunities, all of that stuff really does matter too because it is helping people. And ultimately, if you can help one person, and you hear these kinds of stories of even helping that person in your family, helping the person who you see repeatedly on the street corner, that all matters too. Because each person is a life that needs to be helped. So, you know, we make a difference at the micro level and then making a difference at the macro level, which really comes through the political process. You know, I was talking to the president of the Senate today on the floor of the Senate about the subcommittee on homelessness that's a different member is proposing. And I would be a member of that committee and I was putting in a good word to form that committee so that we can shine a light, create more momentum, you know, elevate it basically. So I'll continue to fight for this because I feel like it really matters. It's just not what we need and want in California. We want to do better. And I think we can. Keep us posted on your progress. And it was great to have you catching Blake Speier, California State Senator. Thank you for having me. It was a delight to be on your show. Do you think the homeless funding in California is going to the right projects? Let us know by emailing me at siamakacaliforniasenator.com or comment. We read all of your emails and comments. We'll see you next time.