LONG BEACH, Calif. — Long Beach is spending big on homelessness and affordable housing, both in terms of the proposed 2024 city budget and the millions in loans recently announced by the development services department.
But progress isn’t coming fast enough for some.
Disaster preparedness workers are stepping up to help Long Beach’s homelessness emergency.
An office job is pretty ordinary, but it marks an extraordinary shift for community liaison supervisor Alice Castellanos, who helped Long Beach through a pandemic from the frontlines.
She now leads a team that’s combing through the Section 8 housing choice voucher waitlist with nearly 15,000 people holding on for this rental assistance. They want to contact each one and update the rolls.
“Even as a professional in public health for so long, I never felt like an emergency responder," she said. "You say the word emergency responder you’re thinking fire, you’re thinking police, right? That’s what I always used to think."
They don’t want to unnecessarily boot anyone off the waitlist, so they call, email and send letters to check in. Longtime Long Beach resident Mark Evans got one of those letters recently.
“I was like shocked in a way because it had been such a long time," he said. "It was nice that it was going to be put in process."
How long exactly he’s been wait-listed for a voucher is hard to remember, since Evans applied so long ago. After an eviction and homelessness, he entered a transitional sober living facility. For close to 20 years, he’s lived and worked there as a handyman while staying hopeful.
“I feel like I’ll get my life back a little bit and I want that. I want a space that’s mine and that I can easily enjoy my life a little bit more,” said Evans.
Evans is excited — but also worried — about the apartment hunting process.
As deputy executive director of the Housing Authority of Long Beach Alison King sums it up, “those families who are pulled are still struggling in finding housing providers who will take the voucher so we really need those providers to step up.”
Working in public health emergency management has shown Castellanos a valuable lesson.
“No one in a community or in a city is going to get through this without their community, without their neighbors, so that’s what I do here,” she said.
The Housing Authority wants to remind anyone waiting for a voucher: Make sure your contact information is correct. If they can’t reach you, then it will be impossible to administer aid.