BY ELAINE GOODMAN
Daily Post Correspondent
Homelessness issues in Palo Alto are coming to a head, and compassion alone isn’t enough to solve the problem, City Council members say.
The comments came during council’s annual retreat to set priorities for the coming year. The retreat was at Mitchell Park Community Center.
Councilman Pat Burt attributed safety issues downtown to a minority of homeless people who are not interested in accepting help.
“We have just too many instances and too much of a concern by businesses (and) prospective retailers who are turned off by this, of not only theft and drug dealing and drug use, but occasional violence, abusive conduct, unsafe actions (of) fire safety, public health issues,” Burt said.
Homeless encampments have been popping up in downtown parking garages, and an encampment on the fifth floor of the Webster/Cowper garage was the site of a fire in July 2021.
In August, a homeless man was arrested on suspicion of killing another homeless man by hitting him on the head with a wrench while the victim was asleep in a downtown parking garage.
Burt said the city needs to strike a balance between providing programs to help the homeless and “caring about the sense of safety for residents, visitors and businesses.”
“I feel that we’ve gone too far in turning a blind eye or thinking that merely compassion or lack of tough love is benefiting the people that we would hope to benefit,” Burt said.
Councilmember Julie Lythcott-Haims also weighed in on “how unhoused people and their presence may be negatively impacting business and quality of residential life.”
Issue coming to a head
“This is an issue that will come to a head soon in our community, you can feel it,” Lythcott-Haims said.
“It’s going to require some real reckoning and solution-oriented thinking,” she added. “And that’s going to be hard, but it is imperative that we have this conversation and we do it well.”
Neither Burt nor Lythcott-Haims got into specifics about potential solutions.
The discussion of homelessness came after council approved a set of priorities for this year. The priorities are essentially the same as those adopted last year, with some minor wording changes.
Four priorities
• Implementing housing strategies for social and economic balance
• Climate action and adaptation, and natural environment protection
• Economic development and retail vibrancy
• Public safety, wellness and belonging
The priorities are broad themes that may encompass many topics, council members noted.
“Just because we don’t have the word ‘transportation’ in our priorities, we’re (still) going to find ways to do these transportation things within the existing priorities,” Mayor Ed Lauing said.
After approving the priorities, council members moved on to objectives, which are actions that could be taken during the coming year to achieve the priorities. Council is planning to fine-tune the long list of objectives next month.
One urgent objective council members cited is for the city to further develop plans for a Cubberley Community Center. The city plans to ask voters to approve a bond measure in 2026 to pay for the project.
Wildfire safety
Many of the objectives were focused on public safety. Wildfire safety was top-of-mind for council members, especially as wildfires this month have scorched much of the Los Angeles area.
Burt said council should have a study session on wildfires. Lauing said he wants to make sure the fire department has enough staff to address threats, including wildfires. A new fire engine also might be needed.
In the police department, a three-member traffic enforcement team is not fully staffed, according to Lauing, who said he’d like to see a crackdown on speeders on Embarcadero Road.
Lythcott-Haims said she’d like to see a return of the police department’s Psychiatric Emergency Response Team, or PERT, in which a police officer and a therapist work together to respond to calls involving mental health crises. The team might also work with homeless people, encouraging them to get the help they need.
PERT hasn’t been in operation because the therapist who worked in the program left the job in October 2022. The city has struggled to find a replacement. Lythcott-Haims said she’d like to see PERT available around the clock and with two teams rather than just one.
Lythcott-Haims said flood protection remains a top concern, especially for residents of the Newell Road and Pope-Chaucer areas.
“There is the perception that this issue does not have the attention it deserves,” she said.
To help council decide on its 2025 priorities, the city conducted a resident survey in December that received 431 responses.
Residents’ priority list
Residents were asked to rank council’s 2024 priorities in order of importance. The overall results from the survey were:
1. Community health, safety, wellness and belonging
2. Housing for social and economic balance
3. Economic development and transition
4. Climate change and natural environment — Protection and adaptation
Survey respondents were also asked to list their own priorities for the city. Some said the city should stop spending so much money on consultants. Many mentioned the need for more affordable housing.
Others said downtown and California Avenue need revitalizing and beautifying. One respondent said Palo Alto residents are going to downtowns in other cities, such as Los Altos and Mountain View, for dining, shopping, and fun.
“Work on making Palo Alto’s shopping districts more like Los Altos, which has a lively vibe and doesn’t look like it’s dying,” another respondent said.
The city is having trouble finding a replacement therapist for the PERT program? No surprise there. There’s no way to build affordable housing in Palo Alto short of the city building it and subsidizing it with tax dollars. Land values and construction costs are too high. The homelessness problem is intractable. There’s nothing you can do about it except try to manage it, so manage it.
Affordable housing is difficult to fund. Non-profit developers typically use some combination of local funds (impacts fees, in lieu fees, and our new business tax), regional, state, and federal funding, along with philanthropic contributions.
Palo Alto and Gilroy currently have the highest proportion of deed restricted affordable housing in the county. Adding to that, and thanks to Joe Simitian’s leadership and partnering at the county level, we have three outstanding projects under construction and nearing completion; an 88-unit transitional housing project with full support services for the unhoused, a 50-unit project for disabled adults, and 110-unit teachers project. In addition, we have six other projects in the pipeline.
This is a big deal and our biggest pipeline in decades. Yet, all of them combined will produce only about one-third of our state RHNA mandates.
Pat, with all due respect, the issue isn’t housing. Wish it was that simple. The people on the streets, the ones who are causing disturbances, are those who refuse housing when it’s offered. Maybe they don’t want to live in a shelter where they can’t drink or do drugs. Maybe they’re too spaced out on drugs to care where they live, and they’re fine sleeping in their own feces. Maybe their mental illness prevents them from making good decisions. Whatever the reason, they’re not leaving the streets. The expansion of conservatorship laws (SB 1045) has yet to take effect in Santa Clara County in any meaningful way. Maybe it will work? But so far, it’s just a program written on paper. The Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass is a good start, but, again, it hasn’t been implemented locally. City Councils like yours have been afraid to instruct their police departments to follow Grants Pass because you don’t want the homeless advocates will fill your chambers and call you names. You don’t want to be labeled as anti-Progressive. So talking about housing is nice because it helps normal people who are capable of fending for themselves. But that’s not the part of the street community that’s causing problems.
Too bad Joe Simitian isn’t representing us and that ego-tripping candidates with little or no experience had to torpedo his campaign. Speaking of which, when is CC going to finally censure JLH and/or at least get her off the Human Relations Committee? Do we really need to have antisemitic bigots on that Committee?
Why does CC never make fiscal responsibility a priority instead of hiring so many consultants with no local knowledge? How about accountability? Just look at PA’s record where we have several fire houses without fire engines!
Does PA really think it can single-handedly make a dent in climate change? Does it think that destroying businesses to encourage biking is a plus? It’s like when PA proudly declared itself a nuclear-free zone.
And then there’s our ridiculous utility rates where our Smart Meters are years behind nearby Los Altos so we get NO warning when we’re running up $1,000+ water bills a month! I guess overcharging us $24.000,000 a year isn’t enough to fund $43,000,000 in wider sidewalks for a filthy downtown, $500,000 for a consultant to teach school assemblies on bike safety since there’s not a single staffer who can do it or even search for a bike safety video …
Too bad OUR safety takes a back seat to all the do-nothing virtue signalling. No wonder they like consultants who recommend sleeping pods instead of giving us something like the Asian / Ethnic Food markets we’ve been requesting for decades and that are thrive elsewhere.
To keep basing PA priorities on flawed surveys with such pathetically low response rates — this time 431 responses — is as absurd as the limited survey choices when most people are complaining about the lack of police patrols, the lack of outreach when people get blindsided by projects in their front yard, the absurdly high utility rates and constant rate hikes, the filth downtown, the “Palo Alto process” where, for example, Cal Ave still doesn’t have signs pointing to park years later but we do have a laughable “streetscape” survey that only listed costly improvements.
That our “leaders” chose to make spending $43,000,000 on wider sidewalks while complaining that the $3M needed to equip and staff the firehouse with fire TRUCKS is a problem because the city’s into deficit spending is absurdly insulting but DOES show the priority problems here.
The city’s great at preaching and virtue signaling but as for action, forget it. They leave a known bigot who calls everyone else racist / antisemitic on the Human Relations Commission.