Unhoused Long Beach: A series of conversations on homelessness | Daniel Brezenoff

21 minute read

Unhoused 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. 

Tomisin Oluwole
Face the Music, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
24 x 36 inches

Click here to check out our interview with Tomisin Oluwole, a literary and visual artist based in Long Beach.

Instead of gunking up our site with ads, we use this space to display and promote the work of local artists.

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.

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[1] Militarily demobilized. Since WWII—which was both the death knell of European colonial empires as well as the starting shot of the American neocolonial era—Europe has had notoriously scant standing armies, and has been able to consistently slash government military spending domestically and as a percentage of their contributions to international diplomatic bodies such as the UN. This is because nowadays European nations very rarely find themselves in situations where they need to independently send their militaries abroad in order to secure trade routes, foreign resources, or privileges within markets overseas; the U.S. has been fulfilling that hard-power obligation for them for over half a century. The social results of Western Europe’s decreased militarization are striking, especially when contrasted with the U.S.: there is not a single country in Western Europe without universal healthcare, labor rights and welfare systems are strong, value is placed on corporate and financial regulation, environmental policy is lightyears ahead, and, not least of all, there is a robust governmental approach to curbing digital surveillance and reining in tech monopolies. Japan enjoys a similar arrangement with the U.S. in which it, too, is militarily demobilized yet is given full access to, and prominence in, the global economy. In the last decade there has been a reversing trend of remilitarization in some of these nations. That trend was hastened during the last four years as a result of Trump’s ultranationalist politics, but is likely to continue even after his departure in large part due to the growing bipolar geopolitical climate of competition between superpowers.

The “owner” bit of home-“owner” appears in scare quotes throughout the text for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

Nothing signals trouble quite like consensus.

More on them later.

And, anyways, what exactly remains “obvious” in an era “post-truth”?

I take as my starting position that even the “obvious” must be won.

It’s like Lenin said, you know…

Whether directly, or through a chain of investments, or through the wider speculative market in real estate.

I use “banks” in this piece as a stand-in for several sources of income that derive partly through the mortgaging of property and/or investment in institutions that have the power to mortgage property.

That is just its “ideology.”

The Ricardian “law of rent” explains that any location with an advantage over another location, can accrue an economic value, called “rent,” to the owner.

This happens without the owner needing to pitch in to create the advantage.

If the owner does pitch in, then the value accrued from that advantage cannot be called “rent.”

“Rent,” in economic terms, is only, precisely, the value accrued from that portion of the advantage for which the owner is not responsible. That is what we mean when we say, “Rent is theft.”

This does not mean places with lower property taxes ipso facto have higher property prices—and that is because the property tax is only one of the contributing factors. You could have zero taxes on land in Antarctica, for instance, and it would still sell for $0. This is why the introduction to the analogy controls for such variables.

This is the logical conclusion of believing two premises:

(1) All humans have an equal right to the Earth.
(2) Vaginal birth is a lottery system

Prop 13 is rent control for home-“owners.” You can learn more about its history and impact here.

“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare. Act 4, Scene 5

This is why the lobbyists who spend the most money to support the mortgage interest deduction are bankers, mortgagers, and realtors.

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