Matt Mahan

Typically what happens if you actually look at it as a life cycle issue, is someone who's already vulnerable for some reason, could be of their own choosing, could be circumstances, but job loss, health issues, addiction, mental illness, domestic violence, there's a range of really awful things that happen to people and that people sometimes do to themselves.

And in these circumstances, if the rent is $3,000 a month, you are just one medical bill layoff away from really ending up in your car very quickly.

And people, working people in California especially, don't have a lot of savings.

They don't have something they can fall back on.

So the macro cost structure of California, the highest housing costs, second highest energy costs with the highest gas prices, which disproportionately hurts working people,

an educational system that is preparing far too few of our children for the jobs of the future.

We can go through that list, but that is creating these conditions of sort of vulnerability or fragility that means that people living on the edge are much more likely to end up in their car.

But I would add that we have a massive public policy failure.

Not only did we break the housing production market, which is the macro challenge, but we haven't built shelter and treatment beds.

So for folks for whom an addiction or mental health issue is the thing that has them on the edge, we have far fewer beds than other states.

And then when people do become homeless, it ought to be brief and it should not be outdoors.

And yet we lead the nation in unsheltered homelessness.

Over 40% of the people living outside in tents in the entire country live in California, which is only about 12% of the country's population.

We haven't built shelter.

We haven't built treatment.

We're not doing what we need to do to rapidly rehouse people, connect them to a case manager, give them tools to turn their lives around and hold them accountable for turning their lives around.

Yes.

In short, I think you have to be able to involuntarily hold people for addiction treatment, mental health care.

If someone is repeatedly

refusing help, if they are harming the broader community, which is often the case, whether that's vandalism, retail theft, it's been a battle here in our downtown where windows are constantly being broken by people who clearly are suffering from serious addiction and mental health issues.