A new countywide tally shows that fewer people were recently living out of tents or cars in the city of San Diego. That population also went down, if only slightly, in three South County cities, six municipalities to the north and multiple places inland.
But when it came to East County’s largest city?
“Frankly, nobody else had an increase like we did,” El Cajon Councilmember Steve Goble said this week at a public hearing.
El Cajon’s results from the point-in-time count, showing that unsheltered homelessness jumped from 283 people last year to more than 340 in January, has left local leaders frustrated, some service providers confused and the organization overseeing the tally double-checking its numbers.
Homelessness is certainly a major problem, said Julie Hayden, CEO of the East County Transitional Living Center, the area’s main shelter. Yet she hadn’t noticed a surge in people living outside. “I don’t see any drastic up or down,” she said in an interview.
El Cajon leaders have offered several theories as to why their total rose so significantly.
In an email to the head of the Regional Task Force on Homelessness, the nonprofit that oversees the count, City Manager Graham Mitchell made the case that some land included in El Cajon’s tally fell outside municipal boundaries. “Those Census Tract areas could easily for 38 individuals outside the City limits,” Mitchell wrote.
He has a point. A spokesperson for the task force, Gary Warth, acknowledged that census tracts used in the count do not always line up perfectly with city boundaries. Yet he added that it’s long been like that, including in other places around the county. Nearby La Mesa, for example, saw its unsheltered homeless population largely hold steady (there were 53 individuals found last year, compared to 52 in January), even though those numbers might similarly include people from neighboring jurisdictions, according to a representative for the city manger.
El Cajon leaders have additionally wondered if anyone was counted twice. The 70-plus people tallied along Second Street in particular, near Interstate 8, seemed impossibly high, the city manager said in the email. We “cannot wrap our heads around these figures, because we did not see them,” wrote Mitchell, who participated in the count.
The task force doubts that there was any double-counting, since teams use a mapping app to mark each person’s location, but the head of the nonprofit has offered to sit down with city officials to dig into the numbers.
The annual census is certainly flawed. It only captures one day, is dependent on volunteers and can be influenced by factors like bad weather, which may push people living outside to splurge on a motel.
Nonetheless, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires that counties conduct the count in order to be eligible for federal aid, and the tally has become an oft-cited, if imperfect, barometer of how the region is doing. San Diego County overall saw homelessness drop for the first time in years.
El Cajon’s numbers further stand out because the city’s not an outlier when it comes to its approach to the crisis.
El Cajon leaders have criticized California’s Housing First policies, which prioritize getting people into homes before other problems are addressed, and pushed police to aggressively clear encampments, yet the city simultaneously hosts a number of service organizations, including Home Start and The Salvation Army. Much of that description would also fit Escondido, in North County, which saw its unsheltered homeless population plummet from more than 400 to 307.
“The takeaway for me is: We’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Rebecca Branstetter, coordinator for the East County Homeless Task Force.
The City Council on Tuesday discussed a number of next steps, including a review of all aid organizations in the area, to try and measure their effectiveness. Several council separately expressed an openness to spend $1 million or more on increasing encampments sweeps.
The city manager promised to offer up specific plans at a future meeting.
Furthermore, leaders were interested in having staffers conduct their own count of El Cajon’s homeless population, perhaps once every three months. That would allow the city to develop its own survey questions concerning, among other topics, how long each person had been in El Cajon.
The overall results may not be dramatically different from what the task force found. A while back, Chula Vista decided to conduct its own tallies, and in September the South County city’s Homeless Outreach Team counted 510 homeless people. A few months earlier, the task force reported 503.
Staff writer Tammy Murga contributed to this report.
