Irvine Doesn’t Turn Its Back

It’s difficult to imagine that an affluent community like Irvine can have a homeless problem, but it does.

Irvine has few homeless people wandering from place to place looking for a meal or bed for the night, or waiting for a welfare check. What it does have is students who have run out of loan subsistence funds, battered women, or families with children who face a domestic crisis, a financial setback, an accident or the loss of a job that means they can’t pay the rent or make a mortgage payment and are just as surely forced onto the street as any of California’s homeless.

Like any of the estimated 4,000 homeless people in Orange County, they need shelter, and someone who cares. Without help now, many could become as hopeless as they are homeless. According to Jean Forbath, who heads the Share Our Selves volunteer agency, about 30% of the county’s hard-core homeless come from the middle class.

It would be easy for Irvine to turn its back on those needy residents and wait for Washington or Sacramento to do something. But the City Council, wisely and humanely, refuses to do that.

Last year the city allocated $182,000 in a community block grant to Irvine Temporary Housing. The private agency has been housing five families at a time in furnished city apartments in locations that are not publicized as a means of protecting the privacy of the tenants. To be eligible, tenants must have minor children, be employable and contribute toward the rent. It is part of the council policy of accepting what it believes is its “fair share responsibility.” To the council, “fair share” means that with 5% of the county’s population it should be providing about 200 temporary beds.

The city isn’t meeting that quota--not yet. But it is doing more than most other city councils, and plans to do more in the future.

With as many as 30 Irvine families homeless every night, the program doesn’t even come close to filling the need. But it’s a move in the right direction. If other city councils followed suit and began accepting their “fair share responsibility,” there would be considerably fewer families wandering the county looking for a place to sleep tonight.