Issues for Chico

The current city council conservative majority has utterly failed in their approach to homelessness, choosing to take a law enforcement approach that doesn't actually solve anything. We have endless police overtime, cops who are exhausted and discouraged, and a downtown that's a shell of what it was when the current majority took office a few years ago. They've wasted millions of your dollars on ineffective, impotent, useless ‘enforcement’ that makes us NO safer. And homelessness is as bad as ever.

To properly meet the needs of all the citizens of Chico, we must create more smaller shelter sites, with;

• better access to social services,

• improved sanitation and hygiene,

• less criminality and substance use,

Each unhoused person we can successfully reintegrate into society can yield an economic return of approximately $2,000 per year in additional tax revenue, in addition to cost savings from unneeded police overtime.

So many great local organizations are already doing the work to help move people from homelessness to housing: Chico Housing Action Team with Everhart Village for people with severe mental illness, True North with the Torres Shelter, and the Jesus Center and their Pallet shelter site. They need more support for the work they're doing.

But we know we don't have enough shelter beds in Chico for all the homeless people who live here. We have hundreds of people who are homeless but by the city's own website, there are fewer than fifty available shelter beds. We need to help those organizations expand their work so they can move more people off the streets, and we can help other organizations that have been blocked by this city council from creating solutions that would help reduce homelessness.