The 2025 Annual Homeless Update to the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors offers more than just numbers.
It provides a mirror — a mirror in which the county, with all its scenic beauty and economic contradictions, must reckon with what it is becoming.
The good news is there: a reduced rate of growth in overall homelessness, and more than 1,300 individuals moving into permanent housing.
But the underlying story is more complex, more sobering and, frankly, more urgent than celebratory.
The most striking trend is the sharp increase in vehicular homelessness. The number of people living in cars, vans and RVs has jumped to 962 this year — up from 710 last year.
In raw numbers, nearly one in every four unhoused residents is now living in a vehicle.
Why does this matter? Because cars are often the last barrier between survival and total destitution.
Living in your car is rarely a choice. It’s what people do before they end up on the streets.
And the surge in this category is a canary in the coal mine, warning us of an economy that is failing more of its people more rapidly than our systems can respond.
The report rightly identifies structural factors: the cost of housing, the state of health care, income inequality and fragmented services.
These are not new revelations. What’s different now is the sheer scale and velocity of the problem — made worse by the impending evaporation of COVID-era funds.
For the last few years, federal and state relief temporarily cushioned the blow. Interim housing programs like Hope Village and La Posada gave us a glimpse of what humane sheltering can look like when funding aligns with vision.
But as those resources fade, we are forced to ask: what kind of long-term commitment are we truly willing to make?
There are, predictably, voices cautioning against unrealistic goals. Supervisors Bob Nelson and Steve Lavagnino warned that “ending homelessness” may be too ambitious, that economic conditions and personal behaviors lie outside the reach of local governance.
“The increase in vehicular homelessness is not just a housing statistic. It is a story of downward mobility, a narrative of unraveling.”
Nelson even suggested that perhaps not everyone can — or should — expect to live in Santa Barbara County.
“Even if you grew up here,” he said, “you don’t necessarily have a right to stay here.”
That statement deserves pause. At one level, it reflects a brutal economic realism: Santa Barbara County is one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, and market forces do not play favorites.
But at another level, it lays bare a chilling moral logic. If you can’t afford to live here, maybe you shouldn’t. Even if this is your home.
This kind of reasoning implies that belonging is contingent on economic productivity. It shifts the burden of a housing crisis from a structural failure of public policy onto the individual choices — or supposed shortcomings — of residents.
It erodes any shared sense of community responsibility and replaces it with a market-based sorting mechanism. In effect, it says: let the invisible hand decide who gets to stay.
The language of meritocracy wrapped in budgetary pragmatism is seductive, but it must be resisted.
It is precisely this logic that has hollowed out working-class neighborhoods, displaced long-term residents, and turned once-diverse communities into luxury enclaves.
When we begin to rationalize the disappearance of the poor by citing economic inevitability, we are not solving homelessness — we are sanitizing it.
To be fair, local officials face monumental challenges. They cannot unilaterally control the global economy or state-level housing policy.
But there are still choices to be made, priorities to be set. The call for a more robust “Prevention, Diversion and Rapid Rehousing” (PDR) strategy is a step in the right direction.
So, too, is the emphasis on permanent housing solutions rather than endless emergency responses.
But unless we address the deeper ideological fault lines — about who deserves to live here, who gets care and what a community owes its members — then we will merely manage homelessness, not reduce it.
This report shows that people are still falling into homelessness faster than we can pull them out. Fewer first-time users of services is a good sign, but the system remains clogged.
And the looming loss of funding threatens to undercut even the modest progress we’ve made. We cannot let programs like Hope Village become temporary experiments. They must become templates.
Santa Barbara County must also reckon with its broader contradictions. This is a place where multimillion-dollar oceanview properties exist a mile from makeshift encampments.
Where tourism thrives on a postcard version of paradise that many residents can no longer afford.
Where farmworkers and service workers keep the local economy humming, only to sleep in their cars at night because there’s no affordable housing anywhere nearby.
The increase in vehicular homelessness is not just a housing statistic. It is a story of downward mobility, a narrative of unraveling.
It tells us who is slipping through the cracks: the cashier at the grocery store, the janitor at the high school, the man fixing your plumbing, the woman caring for your aging parent.
People who are doing everything “right” and still falling behind.
We need more than just funding. We need political courage. We need a housing strategy that doesn’t just build units, but reimagines land use, zoning and ownership.
We need public health and behavioral health systems that meet people where they are, not after they’ve hit rock bottom.
We need to treat housing not as a reward for economic success, but as a human right and a prerequisite for everything else — stability, employment, education, wellness, dignity.
Ultimately, the 2025 Homeless Update is not just a report about “them” — the homeless. It’s about us.
It is a reflection of our collective values and policy choices. It tells us where we are investing, where we are withdrawing and whom we are willing to leave behind.
It reminds us that homelessness is not a personal failure but a policy outcome. And if we’re serious about changing the outcome, we must change the policies — and the assumptions that underwrite them.
Santa Barbara County has the resources, the ingenuity and the moral imperative to do better. But first, we must decide what kind of community we truly want to be.