Unhoused Long Beach: A series of conversations on homelessness | Daniel Brezenoff
21 minute readUnhoused Long Beach is a series of conversations on homelessness with city officials, folks experiencing homelessness, service providers, advocates, and experts. Our hope is that by the end of the series, we’ve gathered a collection of facts and perspectives that helps readers better understand a complex, urgent, and sometimes polarizing issue that our city—and state—currently faces. In our inaugural conversation we spoke to Daniel Brezenoff, a senior adviser on housing and homelessness to the mayor and the First District Administrator.
Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia has called addressing homelessness “one of our top priorities.” In 2013, the year before Garcia took office, the total number of unhoused folks was 2,847. This year’s figure, including sheltered and unsheltered, was 1,894—a decrease of roughly 33 percent.
Not many can speak to Garcia’s track record on homelessness quite as directly as Daniel Brezenoff. Along with being a close advisor to the mayor, dating back to when Garcia was a First District Councilmember, he’s also been a social worker for more than 20 years. In addition to his continued advisory role, Brezenoff was recently tapped to manage the First District office until a special election is held in November to replace Lena Gonzalez, who vacated the seat to join the State Senate last month.
His resume also includes a stint as a a clinical supervisor and program manager at Mental Health America.
When asked about Brezenoff’s credentials on the issue of homelessness, René M. Castro, Director of Community Engagement at Century Villages at Cabrillo, gave him a hearty endorsement based on his “deep policy experience in the Mayor’s office” and his background as a “direct practitioner and administrator for a number of years with vulnerable and homeless populations.” Villages at Cabrillo, often touted as a prime example of mixed supportive housing, serves over 1,500 people and offers units ranging from emergency shelter to long-term affordable housing in Long Beach’s Westside.
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Brezenoff is in his element when talking about homelessness, weaving together the language of a city hall insider, social worker, and activist (he headed a grassroots campaign to overturn the electoral college vote in 2016 and ran for congress in 2007 as a Green Party candidate). He often uses analogies and real-life anecdotes instead of dense jargon. He’s also been a staunch defender of the city’s handling of homlessness.
“I think the mayor’s done a really good job of bringing economic activity into Long Beach and then bringing stakeholders to the table to get community support around [homelessness],” he said.
FORTHE Media got a chance to sit down and talk to him about how the Garcia administration is attempting solve homelessness in Long Beach, a recent homeless count that found a slight uptick but also a dramatic amount of first-time homelessness, and how he navigates the common myths and stigmas associated with folks experiencing homelessness.
The following answers were provided during an in-person interview and two follow-up phone calls. Questions and responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Can you tell us about your current role as First Council District Administrator? You can't propose or vote on legislation, so what are your responsibilities?
It's constituent services. It's keeping the district safe and clean. It's making sure the residents know there's someone up there who's going to listen to them and help them navigate the proper city resources.
And I'm still doing my role on the other side of the floor: housing and homelessness for the mayor's office.
What got you into social work?
Well, that could take up the rest of the interview.
I was raised by socially-conscious parents, to some degree activists, I guess, particularly when I was younger. My dad was a clinical psychologist.
Social work was just a natural profession. I started off as a teacher but when I got to North Carolina, I wasn't certified to teach. There's this paradox in the human services where the less experience in education you have, the more challenging the job you'll get…
So when I got down there, even though I was certified to teach in New York, they wouldn't let me teach in public schools in North Carolina, so [I] had to go through a process. But in the meantime, I could work with the special needs kids. And so that's what they let me do. And I was terrified of that, actually. I just wanted to stand up and talk about American history or whatever. But then once I met these kids, I got really into it, and I met all the social workers.
I really felt like I had a call to the profession. Once I got into it, I found out the social justice element and all the different possibilities for social work in the micro and macro and in between, and then I just knew I was home.
So Long Beach’s 2019 Homeless Count was recently published. First off, can you talk about the methodology that was used?
They go out with a huge team of volunteers in groups. Many of those volunteers [are] also professionals in this area, or [in a] related area, or public safety folks. But not all of them. They've got information with them and there's a series of questions and information that they're trying to gather. They go in the morning [and] split up the city into areas. They go very early, at the time [when] presumably most people would be sleeping or are at their sleeping place. And they cover everywhere in the city that could feasibly be a significant place [for] people living outside. And they count.
If they can, [they’ll say,] “Hey, we'd like to talk to you,” [to] anyone who will talk to them [in order] to gather some data about their story. And also give them resources. That's something a lot of other jurisdictions don't do. The extensive interviewing that we try to do. But if they won't talk to you, they still will be counted if they're clearly living outside. And that includes people living in their car.
People have posted on social media that unhoused folks living in cars were not counted. Is that true?
I don't know where that comes from. I keep asking people, “Where are you hearing that?” And no one wants to tell me. [They say,] “Oh, that's just what I heard.”
It is false. People in cars are counted. Now, is every single person in a car counted? No, of course not. Because you’re gonna miss some people. For whatever reason, they were up wandering. Maybe they left the area right before [volunteers] got there and then they didn't get [counted in] the next area. People slip through. Maybe they're sleeping in a car and it doesn't have possessions in it. And it's in a residential neighborhood, you don't even notice they’re in the car.
Is the methodology comparable to the methodology used by Los Angeles County in its homeless count? Their most recent numbers indicated a 12 percent increase in the homeless population.
I can't speak to the details of their methodology. I think they're similar but there are some differences.
In any jurisdiction, you can't get every single person. I think it's about looking at trends. It's about comparing to neighboring cities. And there's a margin of error.
That 2 percent [increase in Long Beach from last year] is within the margin of error. So that means it could have been no increase, but it also means it could have been a little bit of an increase. It gives you some idea.
One of the most dramatic findings is that 52 percent of the homeless population is homeless for the first time. What is defined as a first-time homeless episode?
I believe for those people, it would mean that they spent one night [homeless] and they had not gone back into housing after that one night. Because then it would be a new episode, right? One night [in] someplace that's not meant for human habitation.
What does that 52 percent tell you?
It means rent pressure and housing insecurity, economic insecurity, maybe leases not being renewed because people want to flip the building because the real estate market is hot. People [are] losing their job and they didn't have any savings. A medical thing—all those things that throw people into homelessness, we really got to look at and address.
It's a little bit less than half who have really been on the street for a long time and match the usual image of what it means to be homeless. Those 52 percent probably would confound our stereotypes. Some of those people are young people who were getting some services that are available to you if you're a minor, or if you're under 25. Or who may have been in and out of psychiatric hospitals when they were young, and then able to get into housing maybe with their family, maybe not. But now when you're in the system long enough, maybe you burn a few bridges, maybe your family can't hang anymore, some of those resources aren't available, and so boom, you're on the street for the first time.
Changing focus, you mentioned housing insecurity as being a factor in homelessnes. One solution many housing advocates have pushed for is rent stabilization. What’s Mayor Garcia’s position on state-wide rent stabilization measures, like last year’s failed repeal of Costa-Hawkins or AB 1482, currently in the Senate, which will make it illegal to raise rents more than 7 percent state-wide?
I'm not sure I know whether he took a position. But he's been on the record as not thinking that rent control, per se, is a good solution for Long Beach. Rent control meaning, a hard cap on rents, you can't go above a [certain] percentage increase per year. What they have in New York City, San Francisco. Each place does it a little differently. But he's always said he doesn't think that's the solution. He was supportive of this tenant relocation policy, and I think that's a good thing. I'm a renter. And I feel like that's helpful. That makes me breathe a little easier.
What specific policies has the Garcia administration implemented towards the goal of ending homelessness?
I think it's been about policies and it's about resources too. We've been able to double the Quality of Life team presence. We have a lot more outreach workers out on the streets, the fire department [is] getting trained in mental health first aid. And the police get a lot more training than they used to as well in areas like mental health, working with people who are experiencing homelessness.
I think, the big policies that either happened or are being talked about this year ... The first one is the tenant relocation assistance, which kicks in Aug. 1. I think [this] will disincentivize some of the most egregious rent increases. And then also give some support to tenants who have to move to help make sure they stay in housing. And then we're also in the middle of an extensive community process around inclusionary zoning. So that's something that the mayor expressed interest in his State of the City speech, and he asked the council to look at a policy before the end of the summer. We're pretty close to on-track to meet that meet that timeline, we're looking at the end of Summer, beginning of fall, there should be a policy in front of the council for them to deliberate.
Can you explain what inclusionary zoning is?
Inclusionary zoning means, basically, that whenever you have new construction in the city, developers are gonna have to either include a certain amount of affordable units, or they may have a choice, in some cases, to just put that money into a Housing Trust Fund that the city could use to finance affordable units. So we think this would be a really good way to make sure we're seeing affordable housing get built, and relieve some of the rent pressure.
Is there anything else the city is hoping to do?
We also have expressed support for and had some hand in [initiating] the legislation that Senator Tom Umberg is carrying, which is Senate Bill 450. It would make it easier to convert certain properties like hotels and motels into affordable housing, waives some of the regulatory requirements that have made these projects not only financially, extremely challenging, but also provides a lot of opportunities for litigation.
I think we can also look at the Land Use Element and the Downtown Plan that were adopted over the last few years. [The Land Use Element] was a highly public process, and it was somewhat controversial, because there was some disagreement about just what are the appropriate density standards in various parts of town? I don't know that anybody thought it was perfect and I think everybody probably had some complaints. But sometimes that means you did it right. When nobody quite got what they wanted and has some complaints. That might be what you call a compromise. And I think that's what we got with Land Use Element, I think it was a pretty good compromise. It allows enough density that at this point, it's really not regulatory environment and zoning issues that are in the way. It's really capital that's in the way. It's just having the money to build the units.
One of the signature policies of the previous administration, that you just mentioned, and one that Garcia was involved heavily in as a First District councilman, was the Downtown Plan. What considerations at the time were taken for unhoused individuals living in downtown when implementing this plan?
A lot of that would be on the public record. And you could go look at that. I think the main idea of the plan was to increase density and increase the speed of development. And that's a good way to combat rising rent because you increase supply.
But for unhoused individuals specifically?
That would seem to me to do beyond the scope of what that document is. That's a planning and development document.
That got addressed in the prior 10-year plan, which now I think is superseded by the Everyone Home Task Force report. I think that's kind of beyond the scope of what the plan was.
Asked another way, seven years out, what have been the community benefits of the downtown plan? Not just the benefits for large-scale investors.
Anytime there's development there are fees associated with that [development] that are going to go back to the community. So city services and infrastructure improvements [are] going to be partly funded by the fees associated with development. I also think when you bring more people into downtown, businesses are going to have more customers. You know, I think that's good. Expand your tax base, that’s good.
You also mentioned Senator Umberg’s Motel Conversion legislation, SB 450, which the city sponsored. Can you tell us more about it?
It would waive the California Environmental Quality Act when you take a motel and convert it into transitional housing.
The issue is if you did the tenant improvements or rehabilitation or repurposing of those sites, CEQA would kick in. They're just not set up to qualify for certain kinds of housing that we would want it to qualify [for].
So there would be money available for the services and supports, they would just need to be modified a little bit. I couldn't tell you all the details of that but in some ways, the interiors of the rooms [are] not ready for official transitional housing, they need some modifications. Those modifications are very doable. But the problem is, when you do that level of work in California, it's going to kick in CEQA. And then you have to do all these things and it becomes prohibitively expensive unless you can get a really high return on investment, which of course, transitional housing is not going to get.
If you're going to come in, and, you know, take out a little townhome [and] build a four story luxury apartment, no, then you’re still going to do CEQA. That's a profit-making enterprise. We [still] want folks to bring the buildings up to more modern standards of sustainability. But when we're doing transitional housing, it just becomes an insurmountable financial burden. So if CEQA could get waived, then this would immediately free up these places that are a potential housing answer.
So if this passes, residents can expect some motels in Long Beach to be converted into transitional and/or supportive housing?
I think so. I mean, we certainly look at it and see what's possible. Of course, the owners have a say in this. They would need to find it in there interest. We’d need their cooperation.
We're hopeful that some of them will find some way that's it’s a win-win. They get something from it, the city gets something, the people who need a place to live gets something, and it benefits the community. That's the idea.
In January, the city council signed off on building a year-round municipal shelter, expected to open in 2020. How much of a difference do you think the facility will make in the lives of unhoused people?
I think it's going to make an impact. I think it's going to be a piece of the puzzle; [it's] not going to be the solution on its own. I called it a shelter, and it will have an emergency shelter aspect to it, but it's also bridge housing. It's transitional housing. There's going to be long-term supportive housing on that site. That’s the plan right now. And I think that'll help. You know, what are they saying? 126 beds. It's a piece.
But we need more.
Earlier this year you were appointed to be the Mayor’s Deputy for Housing and Homelessness. You’ve said part of your job is to help different communities in the city better understand these issues. What do you say to someone who says, “The problem with homeless people is that they don’t want to work or are drug addicts?”
It's a long conversation. The first thing I want to do is talk to that person on the phone, or even one-on-one because I think, certainly on social media or trying to do it through talking points in the mass media ... I just don't know how effective that is.
The first thing I say to people is, “I hear what you’re saying. I know this is a frustrating problem. We really do have a crisis. I want you to know, it's very important to this mayor. It's the number one issue he talks about to us all the time. We're building housing, and I want to tell you about all of that.”
I'll also say, “I think some of the things that you're saying aren't really quite true. And if it's okay, I'd like to just share a little of my experience. I’ve been working very closely with folks who are homeless for 20 years. Can I share some of that?”
Most people will listen a little bit. And then, I just kind of start to give them little pieces of information that are digestible. The thing is that most people, I think deep down, they know that they don't know because it's not like they went down to the river and talked to folks. It's not like they worked at Mental Health America for five years.
Is it true that there's some people out there who just don't want to work and they're living on the dole? Is it true that drug addiction keeps people on the street? Is a barrier to getting in housing? Yes, sure. That's a piece of the puzzle for some people, sometimes. But what we're really talking about is the cost of housing. We're talking about the fact that people don't have savings to cushion them anymore in this country.
What were your impressions of the so-called homeless patrols that occurred in Belmont Shore in November?
I can't say I was too surprised. I was not happy. I was troubled. I've been an activist my whole life and you have to have a certain level of acceptance of the worst of humanity to be an activist. And at the same time you also have a certain level of hope and expectation for the best. So you know, you're never surprised, but you're always sort of “Oh! this again. Yeah, really?” Those guys scared me a little bit because I didn't know what they were really intending to do.
They posted pictures of homeless people on social media. Made pretty negative comments, some even approaching threats...
It was really concerning, but I think it ended up, actually in some weird way, being a good thing on some level, because people reached out to those folks. Right? And I think actually gave them an education. People are … they’re not informed.
We often develop impressions based on our experience, and don't necessarily look a lot deeper than that. Unfortunately, the folks on the street that people experience wouldn't be who I would want to elect as the representative of people experiencing homelessness usually. Because the truth is, most of the folks that are on the street are really trying to stay off the radar and keep themselves safe. Get back into housing. A lot of them actually take much better care of themselves than you would think. They would walk down the street and you would not know [they were] homeless.
A lot of what bothers people about homelessness is the things that they associate with homelessness. So if they see someone who's not doing the things that bother them, they don’t associate that person with homelessness. Anybody who's just walking down the street, if they're clean, most people [wouldn’t] think they're homeless. But there are many people walking around who are clean and they’re homeless. Because they manage, they make a point, and it's hard. People see those folks and it doesn't contribute to them having a more nuanced view of homelessness, because they assume that person is not homeless.
Some homeless advocates have criticized cities for enforcing ordinances that disproportionately affect those experiencing homelessness. Examples include: loitering, panhandling, living in vehicles. What is the mayor’s position regarding what some would call “criminalizing homelessness”?
We’re bound by state laws and court decisions that say that you don’t enforce laws that are only going to impact someone because they are homeless, unless you can offer them shelter. So sometimes we are not able to enforce that and it means that it's crucial for us to create the shelter.
I don't think anybody has a right to not see anybody homeless but I do think people have a right to have quiet enjoyment of their place that they're paying to rent rather than have somebody use their front step as a bathroom, or have people using drugs right outside their window. Their kids are seeing it. I understand that people don't want those things.
To me, those are issues of civility and being a good neighbor and not so much [tied] to being homeless. Because there are people who are homeless that behave themselves quite well and there are people who live in homes that do not behave themselves [and] interfere with the quiet enjoyment of their neighbors.
So I mean, we get the impact, the mayor gets that. When it comes to these violations that are really just an outcome of the background (you have no place to sleep) what we want to do is get those people connected to services by not writing them a ticket or having them spend the night in jail. It helps nobody. And it's more expensive than just trying to connect them with services. Enforcement has a place but it's not the answer.
kevin@forthe.org
@reporterkflores
