Homelessness in Chula Vista

 This is the agenda item from the Chula Vista City Council Meeting on 6 October 2023.

Calling the event a workshop seemed to put a kind of benevolence on the proceeding. That was wiped away by much of the city's staffers when it became clear that part of the motivation to hold the event was for the city to demonstrate all of the efforts that it has put into doing something, anything about the problem.  Clearly to me, it was a tour de force of a municipality doing all that it imagined that it could to assuage those who have roofs over their heads to of the cognitive dissonance that homelessness generates short of telling the ugly truth that it's constituents lack a combination of the character or motivation to build sufficient quantities of housing for all of their neighbors.

Due to much of the latter, there was some low-key, very soft reduction of homeless people to abstractions by conflating those who are homeless due to economic impacts with those who abuse mind-altering chemicals and mental illness. There was scant mention of the scant housing alternatives that the city can offer those who are without.

It is the last point that matters most. Chula Vista, like all of California, needs hundreds - perhaps a few thousand - units for neighbors without shelter. That would be the solution - a lot of public housing. Chula Vista won't discuss it because that is not in the budget. Resurfacing streets wasn't in the city budget until the federal government handed out grants to repave streets after the start of the pandemic. Bigger, more expensive issues would cost much more.