San Bernardino Homeless Rise

The beautiful county of San Bernardino has tons to offer for its residents, in the sense of living your lifestyle and your preferred environment.

With deserts, suburbs, ranches, and of course the cities within the county. However, the cities are becoming less of a place for a nice lifestyle and more of a ground for the growing homeless population in San Bernardino.

Survey Results and Statistics

The first thing about fixing an issue is to understand the scale of it. It's obvious when you look at the streets that there is an issue but after going into the numbers it's undeniable that change is needed.

In the 2020 SBC (San Bernardino County) Report it was disclosed that in 2019 2607 people were homeless in the county.

The report then goes to show that the figure went up almost 20% the next year with 3125 people reported to be homeless.

The growth stopped after then in 2021 and 2022 with only a 6.6% increase in the count. However, the count is growing once again. Growing a staggering 25.9% in the years 2022 to 2023.  

They found that many were unable to work due to being mentally or physically disabled to the point they could not care for themselves or maintain a job. Some do have a monthly income. But according to Cassandra Searcy the Deputy Director of Housing and Homelessness.

Those with an income can't find a house due to the affordable houses being purchased by big corporations keeping them from living in cheap housing.  

Someone making enough money for rent can still not afford this housing because rent may be affordable but the corporations want renters to earn 3 times the amount of rent. So even those with jobs struggle to stay on their feet.

And most of those on the streets are known as chronically homeless, meaning they are used to being on the streets.

Covid’s Effect

One of the surprising things about the figures is the lack of effect done by covid on the homeless increase.

With the situation in Los Angeles getting a 20,000 increase over the years of the pandemic you would expect a similar effect on another current California housing crisis.  

But the data shows that between the pandemic the growth was at the lowest rate in the last 5 years at only 6% in those two years.

Picking up the Pieces

Now what has the county done to combat this, the first thing was sending out the surveys to get the data they needed. After getting the data they went further into why these people find themselves on the streets.

Then they focus on rehabilitating those people into hopefully finding a living. They started this by having the homeless sheltered so they can focus on getting help. The county right now has 1219 people sheltered, a decent number but not the figure wanted from a pool of 4000 plus.

Overall work needs to be done to clean up the crisis but more shelters are built with new affordable houses for people to work for with the right support system.