California's Law to Fix Unsafe Homeless Shelters Ignored by Cities and Counties

Now that the Supreme Court has granted cities more power to ban sleeping outside, homeless Californians face a crucial decision: Try to get into a shelter, or risk going to jail.

Those able to find a shelter bed will step into a world rife with reports of violence, theft, health hazards — and a lack of accountability. Public records obtained by CalMatters show that most cities and counties have seemingly ignored a recent state law that aimed to reform dangerous conditions in shelters.

In 2021, following earlier reports of maggots, flooding and sexual harassment in shelters, the state Legislature created a new system requiring local governments to inspect the facilities after complaints and file annual reports on shelter conditions, including plans to fix safety and building code violations.

CalMatters found that just five of California’s 58 counties — Lake, Los Angeles, Monterey, Orange and Yuba — have filed shelter reports. Only 4 of the state’s 478 cities filed reports: Fairfield, Petaluma, Santa Rosa and Woodland, according to records from the agency in charge of implementing the law, the California Department of Housing and Community Development.

“It is shocking, number one, that there is so little reporting, considering that is part of the legislation,” said the law’s author, Assemblymember Sharon Quirk-Silva, a Democrat representing parts of Orange and L.A. counties. “We are asking for the basics here.”

In light of CalMatters’ findings, she said she has requested a meeting with officials at the state housing agency. Quirk-Silva said she will consider audits or other measures as needed.

“Maybe we need to add more teeth,” she said. “There certainly could be a possibility that we will follow up with another piece of legislation.”

Police call logs, shelter incident reports and other records obtained by CalMatters provide a hint of what’s missing as a result of the failure to report: a child falling out of an unreinforced window in San Mateo County and being hospitalized; multiple allegations of sexual harassment in Contra Costa County; food shortages in Placer County; and deaths, mold and vermin in many places across the state.

California has spent at least $1.5 billion on shelters and related solutions since 2018, legislative reports show, on top of millions invested by cities, counties and the federal government. The facilities are designed to be a temporary stop on the road to regaining housing but increasingly function as a bridge to nowhere; the state added new emergency shelter beds at roughly five times the rate of permanent housing with supportive services from 2018 to 2023, gaining 27,544 shelter beds, federal data shows.

What happens in those shelters is largely a black box. No state agency keeps an updated list of how many shelters are operating or where, officials told CalMatters. There is no state licensing process for shelters. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development tracks numbers of emergency shelter beds and how long people live in them, but no information about resident deaths, health or safety.

While not every city or county in California has a homeless shelter, state housing officials estimated a total of around 1,300 shelters in 2021. Municipalities continue to invest in them as a more immediate alternative to street homelessness, even as experts stress that other options — such as direct rent subsidies or housing with on-site services — are often more effective at combating the root issue.

“It’s a bad idea. At the same time, so many unhoused people are living in these congregate shelters,” said Eve Garrow, a senior policy analyst and advocate for the ACLU of Southern California. “We want to make sure those spaces are safe and clean for as long as people need them, but we also want to move away from that model.”

The 2021 state law was supposed to help enforce minimum building and safety standards for shelters by creating a new state oversight system. When people staying at shelters or their advocates file complaints, the law requires cities or counties to inspect the facilities and report any violations to the state to reconsider future funding. The catch: cities and counties only have to report to the state if they determine that a violation is severe enough.

“Each city and county has a very unique way of processing complaints,” said Mitchel Baker, assistant deputy director of the Department of Housing and Community Development’s codes and standards division. “What may be perceived as complaints or violations may not ultimately result in the issuance of a notice of violation or corrective order.”

As California and the rest of the country barrel into a new legal era for mass homelessness, promises of safe shelter will be key to determining how many people can avoid more frequent tickets or jail. Many public officials, meanwhile, cast the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass ruling as a necessary clarification after years of conflict over when cities should be allowed to dismantle tents, insisting that they will continue to offer alternatives.

“This decision removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement after the ruling. “The state will continue to work with compassion to provide individuals experiencing homelessness with the resources they need.”

What those resources are is often hard to know, since many shelters are closed to visitors and so few places have filed state reports on conditions. However, people who have lived in shelters paint a more dire picture.

Residents of one Huntington Beach shelter recently complained to health officials about mold, never-ending cases of pneumonia and neighbors walking around with infected, open sores. Homeless people and their families have filed lawsuits in several cities over shelter sexual assaults and wrongful deaths. In San Diego, Sharon Descans has been bouncing between shelters and a borrowed van after being evicted from a newer kind of publicly-funded tent city, where she said she weathered unpaid labor, multiple neighbors’ deaths and flashes of chaos.

“People are pulling swords on each other and hitting each other with two-by-fours,” Descans said. “All I wanted from the day I got there is to get out.”

Old problems, new failures

Up until the 1980s, many of the poorest people in California and other states could still afford rented rooms or cheap hotels. Then came a tidal wave of gentrification, wage stagnation, federal cuts to housing and cash aid, plus shocks like the AIDS and drug epidemics. In less than three decades, the state went from 37,000 dedicated beds for mental health patients to just 2,500 by 1983, according to historians at the National Academies of Sciences.

Vast numbers of people “drifted onto the streets,” the historians wrote, as promised investments in community resources proved inadequate. The “modern era of homelessness” had begun.

Large emergency shelters with bunk beds and communal showers emerged as a stop-gap despite comparisons to jail cells or military barracks. The shelter triage approach spread as California housing construction slowed and homelessness exploded, up 40% in the past five years alone, to more than 181,000 people.

Shelters boomed thanks in large part to court rulings that forbid authorities from cracking down on homeless people solely for being homeless. In Martin v Boise, courts decided that the city violated the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment by ticketing people for sleeping outside when there wasn’t “adequate” shelter available.

“What has happened is cities and counties have quite explicitly raced to build more shelters in order to criminalize more people,” Garrow said. “Shelters become kind of an arm of this criminal legal system.”

Quirk-Silva proposed the 2021 shelter law after a 2019 ACLU report by Garrow documented bedbug infestations, overflowing sewage and sexual harassment by shelter workers. The findings collided with Quirk-Silva’s experience talking with people on the street near her Fullerton neighborhood about why they weren’t in shelters. Her own brother died at age 50 after struggling with housing instability, mental health and alcohol abuse.

Shelters were growing fast, Quirk-Silva realized, and people were staying longer. California shelter residents now stay a median of about five months, or 155 days, the most recent federal data from 2023 shows — a 30% increase since 2019.

Garrow supported the 2021 law’s effort to create minimum standards for shelters. She has seen a few problematic shelters closed down in Orange County, she said, including an old transit station in Santa Ana not meant for human habitation, which previously flooded.

Still, Garrow wasn’t surprised to hear about the small number of cities and counties following through on the law, which she said several amendments weakened. One removed a requirement for local officials to regularly conduct unannounced shelter inspections. Another struck a rule to add signs with information about how to file complaints at shelters.

“I would attribute the low number of complaints not to the fact that shelters are now clean and sanitary and abiding by a new law,” Garrow said. “But to the fact that people aren’t aware.”

Under the law, cities and counties that find violations in their shelters are supposed to report any conditions that are “dangerous, hazardous, imminently detrimental to life or health, or otherwise render the homeless shelter unfit for human habitation.” However, even places filing state shelter reports omit serious potential safety issues.

L.A. County, for example, has filed lists of its several dozen shelters and one-page inventories of violations related to rats, roaches, hot water outages and garbage. Not mentioned were issues like a 2021 conviction of a former shelter security guard on multiple sexual assault charges. Or reports of shelter deaths, physical attacks and other incidents that appear in police call logs requested by CalMatters.

Shelters after SCOTUS

On a recent Friday in San Diego’s crown jewel of a central park, Balboa Park, Sharon Descans laid down on a concrete bench under a palm tree to ease the pain in her joints after a year of constant motion. The former college swimmer said she became homeless for the first time last year, after she got sick with COVID-19, lost two property management jobs, fell behind on rent and got evicted.

What followed was a tour she never wanted of last-ditch housing in a city at the forefront of statewide efforts to vanquish street encampments.

Even before the Supreme Court decision, San Diego officials were moving people off the street to large publicly funded tent cities, called “safe sleeping” sites.

At a site called O Lot, Descans and many neighbors lived in Eskimo-brand ice fishing huts that multiple residents said were prone to leaking during rain. Her anxiety spiked at the makeshift shelter, she said, since she didn’t have a door to lock and witnessed widespread drug use and unpredictable outbursts. One neighbor died of cancer alone in his tent, Descans said, after what seemed like days without anyone checking on him.

None of that has been captured in state reports. San Diego is one of the many California locales that has not submitted any reports after the 2021 shelter law, according to state records, despite housing more than a dozen shelters and some 10,600 homeless residents.

(Even if San Diego had filed the reports, state and local spokespeople said it’s not certain they would’ve captured operations at O Lot. Though many homeless people have temporarily lived at the tent site, nonprofit operator Dreams For Change stressed that it is not technically a shelter under federal definitions.)

When asked whether there was any process in place for complaints about homeless shelters in San Diego County, a spokesperson said only that the county does not directly operate any shelters. Under the state law, cities and counties are still responsible for monitoring complaints and reporting violations at shelters in their area with other owners or operators.

A spokesman for the city of San Diego said it has received five complaints since the shelter law was passed and that “city staff are working on” evaluating why a state report had not been filed.

“At all city-funded shelters, including the Safe Sleeping and Safe Parking programs, there is a comprehensive complaint process where potential issues are quickly and thoroughly resolved,” spokesperson Matt Hoffman said in a statement. “Every complaint is followed up on and, if needed, action is promptly taken.”

At O Lot, Descans tried to keep her head down. She made friends with another mom whose son had also wrestled at a nearby high school. The pair heard they could earn money to work their way out of the tents by cleaning bathrooms and doing laundry for the nonprofit Dreams for Change. Descans said she was never paid around $1,000 for 55 hours of cleaning work, which she documented in photos and text message complaints to a site supervisor.

In June, Descans was “exited” from the shelter — nonprofit-speak for evicted — after forms said she had a verbal altercation with staff and allowed an unpermitted visit from her 17-year-old son, who lives with other family.

“I just feel like nobody cares,” Descans said. “It’s like cover your ass at any expense — who even cares about these homeless people?”

A Dreams for Change spokesperson said the nonprofit cannot comment on individual cases but has a process for formally hiring and paying residents who wish to work. The nonprofit added that it is one of several contractors that operate safe sleeping sites near Balboa Park.

About 80 households have secured permanent housing after living at Dreams for Change’s portion of O Lot, spokesperson Kelly Spoon said in a statement. She confirmed three deaths at the site and added, “Dealing with a diverse population, occasional altercations may arise, but physical altercations are extremely rare.”

Another current resident of the safe sleeping site, who asked not to be identified due to fear of retaliation, said he was also concerned about a lack of sufficient meals, deaths, sexual assaults reported by female neighbors, and a nagging lack of information from caseworkers about housing options.

“The animals almost get better treatment than the people,” he said. “You keep shitting on people, you’re going to get shit results.”

Shawn Swearigen also lived in a tent at O Lot before moving to a subsidized apartment last month. The grandson of a cattle rancher from Imperial County worked in construction for years until family deaths and the 2008 housing crash landed him on the street.

The tent in Balboa Park “wasn’t bad,” he said, though it wasn’t immune from theft and mental health crises that he has found are two constants of homelessness. Swearigen valued having his own space, as opposed to being “dormed up” in a bunk bed like when he first became homeless and stayed at a large shelter. It was so claustrophobic and counter-productive, he said that he spent the next decade trying to stay out of sight, often camping in the woods.

“It was kind of like a lack of options,” Swearigen said. “I really didn’t want to be a burden on people.”

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