By Olin Ericksen
Staff Writer

Last of two parts

January 18 -- With at least two-thirds of the seaside city's nearly 3,000 estimated homeless struggling with mental illness or substance abuse, Santa Monica 's strained homeless service system is in need of an overhaul, according to a report issued by the City.

Service providers are making do with the resources available, but better data collection and coordination among the different parts of the vast network are needed if the system is to work better as a whole, the Urban Institute report concluded.

And while they don't mention it at first, the homeless are coming for Santa Monica’s extensive service system, known as the "Continuum of Care," which the Urban Institute ranked as among the most specialized and in-depth in the country.

"It is fair to say that the community’s homeless assistance programs are high performers compared to the little that is available nationally that shows the performance of similar programs," researchers wrote in a 169 page report released this month.

Of the 17 homeless assistance programs that receive City funding, 14 met or exceeded the goals set by program directors and the City, according to the report. The report did not identify the three programs that failed to meet those goals.

The study ranked the performance of the different programs, including those at the Clare Foundation, Chrysalis, New Directions, OPCC (former Ocean Park Community Center), St. Joseph's Center, Step-Up on Second and Upward Bound House.

Among the report’s findings were the following:

• Transitional shelter programs place about a third of their "clients" into permanent housing, "a very good performance,"
  
• Transitional housing programs move 70 to 90 percent of their clients to permanent housing, compared to between 70 and 80 percent for programs nationwide, and
  
• Permanent supportive housing programs are "very successful" in helping clients retain housing, with average lengths of stay at nearly five years, compared to 1.5 years nationally.

Urban Institute consultants and City staff are preparing to return to the council with recommendations from the report, as well as more details on the programs that did not perform up to par.

"I think our main goal was to report on the system as a whole… and we did not do an in-depth, program by program evaluation," said Laudan Aron-Turnham, who co-authored the report produced by the private, non-partisan research group based in Washington D.C.

"That said, we were able to uncover a lot of things, some positive things as well as obviously some of the programs that weren't meeting their stated goals," she said.

In evaluating the programs, Aron-Turnham cautioned, "there are a lot of other factors that need to be considered," including some beyond the agencies' control.

Still, as individual parts of a larger system, service providers are largely meeting their objectives, Aron-Turnham said.

"Compared to the limited information out there, they are doing okay," she said.

Santa Monica is getting a bang for its buck when it comes to homeless services, according to both consultants and staff.

For every one dollar of the $1.54 million spent by the City, the agencies on average raised $12.63 from other sources, according to funding figures for the 2005-06 fiscal year, which runs from July 1 to June 30.

"In this sense too, Santa Monica is getting a good deal more than it pays for its investment in homeless,” the report found.

“The programs could hardly produce healthy results that programs achieve without the considerable additional resources that the programs raise to meet their clients' needs."

Consultants also pointed out that the $1.54 million spent by the City on homeless programs is only a fraction of the overall funding Santa Monica receives. Los Angeles County gave the City $5.4 million, California gave $1.2 million, the federal government gave $6.1 million and the largest private donors gave $6.7 million.

"Nevertheless, the Santa Monica dollars are very valuable to programs, as they may be used flexibly to support program activities and fill the gaps by more rigidly allocated sources," the report said.

While consultants gave high marks to parts of the system, the verdict on how service providers work together as a team and a system remains mixed.

Data System Needs Upgrade

With OPCC, Santa Monica's first local service provider, tracing its roots back to 1963, helping those down on their luck has been a long tradition in Santa Monica, spanning decades.

While Washington delayed taking any action to fight homelessness until the formation of the Federal Emergency Management Act in 1983, several providers have grown up in "Skid Row by the Sea" mostly on their own.

And while some cities have looked the other way – failing to implement any homeless strategy – Santa Monica has become rich with such providers, both inside the city and on its outskirts, consultants said.

Yet, how to integrate those providers, pool and crosscheck their information, and coordinate the services they offer has long been a struggle, consultants said. Still, service providers have done a relatively good job working together.

"They use the Westside Coalition to help make decisions about where their next effort is going to be so that they are not duplicating," said Martha Burt, director of the Social Services Research Program for the Urban Institute.

"They also do try to refer within each other, rather than reproducing services,” she said. “I think they do well on that."

However, there are areas where the parts of the system can work better, she said.

"I think what they don't do yet is embedded in some of our recommendations about the data systems, which is they don't have a way – the City or providers – to have some kind of universal access understanding," Burt said.

The current database system, Clientrack, does not do a good enough job of tracking information and needs to be replaced, consultants said.

Other areas, such as Reno, Nevada and Long Beach, have nowhere near the number of services available, but they are able to keep better track of the information, because there is only one center for their limited resources, Burt said.

"The fact, though, is that you have four or five (service providers) that already are here to serve one or more of those purposes of access, drop-in, connections to services, ongoing case management, and you are not going to wipe all those out in order to create one place where it all comes together," she said.

Santa Monica, Burt suggested, should upgrade the database to serve as a "virtual" point of entry in the local, and perhaps regional, homeless service system.

"You would be much better off using a virtual one-stop, where it's a data system that everybody could access," she said. "A lot of things can be helped along with a better data system.”

While Burt did not suggest what make or model the City should use, the report said it should be an "integrated, cross-site, real-time intake/assessment/case management data system.”

"It has a number of functions," Burt explained. "It's a way for more people to get into services, it's a way for the entire system to know who is and who isn't attached to services and where they were attached. It's a way to see real time, who's using what resources.

"That's a ways from happening," Burt said. "But it's very much a part of the recommendation."

In addition to high tech solutions to increase teamwork, consultants suggested a low-tech solution that's been around since King Arthur, but not just for service providers.

An Age-old Solution

With a community roundtable, not only will service providers inside and outside the city be able to sit down as a subcommittee to coordinate their goals, it will make them more accountable, consultants said.

"There will be a lot more transperancy and a lot more mutual accountability amongst the providers," Aron-Turnham said. "These issues we hear now about the different philosophical approaches can kind of be examined.

“You can have any philosophy you want, as long as you are performing with the resources you have to do it."

Yet the idea of a roundtable – which consultants view as the report's most important recommendation – should not be restricted to service providers.

"Everybody in the community will need to be involved," Burt said.

"The plan that the forum produces needs to be a living document, not something that happens and then is set in stone," said Aron-Turnham.

"The structure, should be a living, responsible, flexible, on-going, do what you need to do and disband after that with subcommittees, while other ones can be growing up over here."

Yet launching such a forum could be problematic.

"Probably the City will have to staff the roundtable, nothing like the roundtable happens by itself," Burt said.

Besides replacing ClientTrack and forming an ongoing roundtable, the Urban Institute has other recommendations. And some may be more controversial than forming a citywide forum.

Revisiting Laws

After reviewing the City’s laws, consultants suggested several revisions, including launching a more fleshed-out ordinance against panhandling, along with a public campaign to halt giving to homeless street solicitors.

It is unclear how this recommendation would be received by the City, which has already been named "one of the meanest cities" in the nation, due to an increase in ordinances aimed at curbing homeless activities.

Other recommendations in the report include creating a citywide homeless budget, working on countywide issues and increasing public education.

Consultants also said the City needs to form more "good-neighbor agreements," pacts between a service provider and neighborhood residents to address such issues as property maintenance and appearance, neighborhood codes of conduct and community safety.

"The neighbors have to work on this as well as the providers," said Burt. "There are communities in this country that for absolutely every single homeless program at any level there are those good neighbor agreements that have been worked out."

These and scores of other suggestions, large and small, could become the foundation for Santa Monica’s homeless polices for years to come.