Rigonomics:

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

This is a saying often used by business gurus Peter Drucker and W. Edward Deming. Last week I heard it from Larry Haynes, executive director of Mercy House, a nonprofit organization committed to ending homelessness in Orange County.

“If my goal is to end homelessness in Costa Mesa, I need to know how many there are. It is that simple,” Haynes told me, while discussing Mercy House’s point-in-time count of the number of homeless people in Costa Mesa. Full disclosure: I have been a board member of Mercy House for several years.

The count was a joint project between Mercy House and Vanguard University. Haynes, a Costa Mesa resident who is an adjunct professor at Vanguard, teamed up with associate professor Ed Clarke to lead a team of 75 Vanguard students to do a single, unduplicated count of homeless individuals and families in the city. The team divided the city into 16 areas. On Wednesday night, Haynes, Clarke and the students fanned out to count the city’s homeless population during a three-hour period. The preliminary data show that Costa Mesa has 126 homeless people. They intend to do a count every year in order to measure the progress and effectiveness of Mercy House’s efforts to end homelessness in Costa Mesa.

A chronically homeless person is defined as someone who has been homeless for more than one year, or who has had four or more homeless episodes in the past three years. Many chronically homeless people suffer from mental Illness, alcohol or drug addiction, as well as physical disabilities. This population is distinctly different from individuals and families who have become homeless because of jobs lost through the recession. The latter group can usually bounce back as the economy improves. That is not true for the former.

Mercy House works with the chronically homeless to connect them with mental health or other services they may need to get their lives back on track. According to Haynes, Mercy House’s methods for ending a person’s homeless situation require personal responsibility combined with communal compassion.

“Simply feeding a person with a mental illness, who self-medicates with drugs, doesn’t help,” Haynes says. “You still have a drug addict, and they are still homeless.” Giving them pancakes for breakfast does little for them, if they are still homeless at lunch.”

There has been a lot of debate in our community about how to handle the homeless population in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach. Though many residents in the community feel compassion for the plight of these individuals, a number of them are concerned that the methods to help them may, in fact, be magnets that draw more homeless people to the city.

Though we can all agree that society needs to have food banks and soup kitchens, locating such facilities close to single-family homes may cause more cumulative harm to all the neighboring residents than the good works it does for the poor.

It is clear to many of us that we must show compassion and support to our fellow man in their time of need. However, it must be done in a way that does not harm the surrounding community. Facilities that the homeless come to daily for meals can have a very negative effect on the neighborhood.

Try getting a young couple to buy a home in an area where the homeless are lining up for meals on a daily basis. These once-thriving neighborhoods of owner-occupied homes turn into rental neighborhoods. Once a neighborhood gets a majority of rental homes, it deteriorates rapidly. This has nothing to do with the quality of the residents. It is just the economic fact that rental homes do not get the same pride-of-ownership care that owner-occupied homes get. When was the last time you took a rental car to the car wash?

For any of us who have donated their time working in a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter, it is obvious that the intentions of those who work to help the poor and homeless are admirable. They should be commended for their saintly work. But, in the end, the goal of helping the poor and homeless should not be the perpetuation of a charity. It should be to solve the problem so that charity no longer is necessary.

Our community needs to work to solve the homeless situation by getting to the root causes. We also need to find ways to get food to the poor without destroying neighborhoods.

Helping people to help themselves is not conservative or liberal. It is the right thing to do.

JIM RIGHEIMER is a Costa Mesa planning commissioner, business owner and father of four. He can be reached at Jim@rigonomics.com.