The editorial board operates independently from the U-T newsroom but holds itself to similar ethical standards. We base our editorials and endorsements on reporting, interviews and rigorous debate, and strive for accuracy, fairness and civility in our section. What do you think">Let us know.
The frustration over homelessness in California just keeps building — among the housed and the unhoused alike. This is no surprise. For a decade, state and local government efforts to address the problem and related concerns about mental illness and addiction have exploded in cost and scope but generated relatively little progress. Some 170,000 Californians — more than the combined populations of El Cajon and Poway — are unsheltered.
Given this backdrop, it is no surprise that Gov. Gavin Newsom, state lawmakers and many mayors (in particular San Diego’s Todd Gloria) have pushed for major changes in how homelessness is addressed. One kicked in Oct. 2, when San Diego County was among seven counties in the state to launch the CARE Court program, which goes statewide next year. Created by a 2022 law championed by Newsom, it allows family, close friends, first responders and mental health workers to ask courts to require individuals with untreated schizophrenia spectrum or other psychotic disorders to undergo court-ordered treatment. On Tuesday, the governor signed a law that’s likely to be even more tranformative. It weakens a landmark 1967 state law that regulated and limited how long individuals could be forced to receive treatment against their will if they were determined to be unable to provide for their own personal safety or medical care due to mental illness or extreme substance abuse.
In a recent interview on “60 Minutes,” it was Newsom’s turn to flash some frustration after making his case for compulsory care to reduce the homeless crisis. “Change has its enemies. I get it. But one thing you cannot argue for, with all due respect to all the critics out there, is the status quo. You can’t,” he said. “And in the absence of alternatives, what the hell are we gonna do to address this crisis?”
The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board is hopeful that these bold moves pan out. The misery of many unsheltered individuals and families is obvious. The reduced quality of life caused by the problem is on plain view in much of the Downtown area and many other communities in California. But two crucial points cannot be ignored as the state undertakes the CARE Court experiment and adopts weaker standards on compulsory treatment.
The first has been repeatedly made by civil liberties and disabled rights advocates. They say compelling individuals to accept treatment should not be a readily taken step dependent on evidence as minimal as cursory interactions between a paramedic and a distressed individual. Adding weight to this argument is what happened before the 1967 law — the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act. As many as 37,000 individuals were detained at 12 state prisons, some for many years at a time, with relatively few protections and horror stories about detention orders being used in vindictive fashion. The evidence of abuses was strong enough that in a state where voters moved sharply to the right the previous November — electing Ronald Reagan in a landslide over incumbent Gov. Pat Brown, among many Republican gains — the law won broad bipartisan and Reagan’s signature. The potential for a new chapter of such abuses is plain.
But the second point hasn’t been made nearly enough. And that is an airtight case can be made that California’s homelessness nightmare isn’t primarily driven by mental illness or addiction. Instead, a February study by the Legislative Analyst’s Office was only the latest to depict the recent surge in homelessness as being driven by the increasingly acute lack of affordable housing. This is why mental health researcher and author Kelechi Ubozoh believes that homelessness in California is unlikely to be significantly reduced unless efforts to do so begin with a focus on poverty. Bringing down the cost of housing is another area that’s gotten massive state attention with little results over the past decade. Housing costs are primarily why 13 percent of state residents are classified as impoverished by the Census Bureau — the highest rate of any state. Court orders, alas, won’t help many of these Californians avoid the streets when they can’t pay the rent.
