Residents say Orange County’s biggest challenge is an interrelated, two-headed beast – homelessness and a severe shortage of affordable housing.
What’s more, those connected problems are so severe that they’ve become life-changing for many locals, forcing younger people to start their adult lives away from the county where they grew up and nudging some less affluent older people into financially precarious retirements.
And, by wide majorities, locals of all ages and political stripes support the idea of paying for public bonds if they’re aimed at improving the twin housing issues.
Those are some of the key findings from a new poll on life in Orange County led by researchers at UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology, and from follow-up interviews with some of the 818 people queried in that survey.
The UCI-OC poll, conducted in early May, is part of a renewed effort by UCI to measure local opinions about social issues and then leverage the university’s role as a community resource to help fix some of those problems. Complete results of the survey will be presented Thursday, Aug. 17, during a private gathering at UC Irvine that will include county and city elected officials, non-profit leaders, and some key members of the business community. United Way Orange County will co-sponsor that event.
While the top-line findings in the poll aren’t new – homelessness and affordable housing have been seen as local challenges for decades – the intensity of opinion about those problems is surprising, according to UCI officials.
Also, the idea of gathering public, private and non-profit leaders to address the connected issues of homelessness and affordable housing hasn’t been tried recently.
School leaders said they hope the poll eventually will result in change, not just discussions, and that a year from now there will be fewer people living without shelter and more housing that lower-income people can rent or buy.
“Our job is to generate unimpeachable research and then use our place in the community to help convene people to talk about, and act upon, that data,” said Jon Gould, dean of UCI’s School of Social Ecology. Gould pushed to create the survey and will lead the effort for follow-up action.
For some who responded to UCI’s poll, action on affordable housing can’t come soon enough.
Lyla Clark, an 18-year-old from San Clemente who is about to start her sophomore year as a psychology major at Long Island University, said rent is high enough in Orange County that she’ll consider living elsewhere when she finishes college.
“Everything here is so expensive, starting with housing,” Clark said. “It would be hard to have a house and a car and things like that if I live in the county, probably, no matter what kind of job I get.”
The survey suggested Clark’s isn’t the only life that might be relocated by the county’s housing costs.
While respondents identified a host of issues – everything from traffic (47%), taxes (45%) and crime (41%), to “a lack of well-paying jobs” (36%) and “the quality of K-12 education” (26%) – as “very serious,” none came close to the twin problems of homelessness and affordable housing. Roughly 7 in 10 O.C. residents (71%) described homelessness as a “very serious” problem, while roughly the same number (69%) said the same about the county’s lack of affordable housing.
And, when pressed to identify the “most serious” problem, more than 1 in 3 (37%) said affordable housing, and more than 1 in 4 (26%) said it is homelessness. The issue that ranked third, crime, was mentioned by just 9%.
At least some survey respondents said none of that is surprising.
“I don’t have data in front of me, but if you look at economic models from around the country, of major metro areas (like Orange County), you’ll see that housing expenses as a percentage of people’s income is probably at an all-time high,” said John Kosecoff, a former hedge fund manager who lives in Laguna Woods.
“So, no, the idea that people are particularly concerned about this, right now, doesn’t shock me. We’re at a precipice of this becoming a disaster.”
Kosecoff added that for a growing number of retirees who don’t own a home, and who don’t have growing income, the lack of affordable housing is a physical and emotional threat.
“People want their dignity. So, even if it means they’re skipping meals, they’ll do what they can to maintain what the world perceives as a middle-class life,” he said.
“But I think we’re close to seeing that become impossible for a lot of people.”
The poll found that while the economy has been strong in recent years in terms of employment and, recently, wage growth, a lot of Orange County residents are struggling with housing costs. More than half of renters (52%) said they had concerns in the past year about paying their rent, while 20% of homeowners said the same about making their mortgages.
Another factor that might be boosting public concern about housing affordability is proximity. While so-called “point-in-time” head counts have shown a long-term, overall decline in Orange County’s unhoused population (a drop of about 17% from 2019 through early 2022), those same counts have seen a spike in the numbers of people living on streets and in parks in otherwise higher-income communities, such as Newport Beach and Irvine.
That, too, is reflected in the UCI poll. Most county residents (55%) know someone who is or has been unhoused, and a huge majority (85%) see someone who is unhoused at least once a week.
“It’s become more apparent to people, even in opulent areas,” said Laguna Woods resident Kosecoff.
“That’ll make it more imperative, I’d think, for officials to solve this,” he added.
On the solutions front, the survey found a majority of locals – again, of all ages and political stripes – agree on taking any number of routes to helping people find and stay in homes.
Between 65% and 88% of O.C. residents say they favor more mental health services, more temporary shelters, more long-term housing, hiring more social workers and giving rent vouchers to key recipients if it would reduce homelessness and increase affordable housing.
And, broadly, a huge majority of O.C. residents, (85%), say they’d be willing to pay more in taxes to finance a bond to reduce homelessness. That includes majorities of women (90%) and men (78%), and of registered Democrats (94%), Republicans (80%) and independents (78%).
Gould, who took his job at UCI early last year after a stint at Arizona State University and, before that, two decades in Washington, D.C., in a variety of public and private posts related to law and social sciences, said he was “surprised, pleasantly,” at such widespread agreement on identifying and fixing a shared problem.
“One of the things we’re doing is finding out what one of the few truly (politically) purple counties in America looks like. This is a place where the left, right and center have to get along because they live with each other,” Gould said.
“By taking action, it’s an opportunity to show the country that, generally, this works.”
