Sharon Byrne Awarded for Her Work with Hands Across Montecito and the MA

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office awarded its Exceptional Civilian Award to Montecito Association Executive Director Sharon Byrne, citing her “extraordinary dedication to others and her collaborative work” with the Sheriff’s deputies, primarily in creating and managing the Hands Across Montecito project to address homelessness. The award described Ms. Byrne as “an accomplished neighborhood advocate who has dedicated her career to supporting the people and improving the communities in Santa Barbara County.” Sharon sat down with journalist and Hands Across Montecito Founding Board Member Eileen White Read to discuss why it appears to be so difficult to get unhoused people to leave the streets, and whether she believes new projects and policies will help reduce homelessness in our village and our county – particularly as soaring apartment rental prices have cut many working people out.

Q. Sharon, the Sheriff’s award is so well deserved, and it’s fitting that you are receiving it as we’re almost at the three-year anniversary of the Hands Across Montecito project – as well as five years at the Montecito Association. You have made such strides in persuading Caltrans and, more recently, Union Pacific, to help us clean out camps from the wooded areas between the freeway, and the railroad tracks, and the beach. But I remember we got started because you organized a meeting after several of us called to complain about vandalism in our gated beachside communities, electric bikes stolen from garages, and evidence of drugs and stolen bicycles that we found in the wooded areas along the tracks. We called you because we thought it was criminal gangs, and I remember being shocked at our first get-together when you used the words homeless and Montecito in the same sentence. You were already very on top of this issue.

A. What you didn’t know was that I had already connected your ‘crime wave’ to the homeless because I had been walking the railroad tracks with Luis Alvarado from the County’s Behavioral Wellness department and Lt. Butch Arnoldi. I knew there were homeless young people staying near the beach because I chaired the county’s Behavioral Wellness Commission. It was when you folks from Bonnymede and Montecito Shores and Sea Meadow came to me that I connected your location with foot crimes and with who was likely committing them. It wasn’t a pickup truck going past the guard at the gatehouse to get those bikes! We also found evidence of rampant drug use and a ‘chop shop’ of stolen bike parts. We even found an improvised skateboard park. And there was a massive crowd camping across from the cemetery, an absolute party scene. We found out the main character was in that spot because his parents had thrown him out of their family home. We persuaded his mother to take him back in. 

Q. From day one, I have been so impressed by the way you follow the homeless people we meet with your big spreadsheet with names and descriptions that you continually update with information about this and that person. Including all sorts of details like where they are from, what drugs they have been using, who they have partnered with, where they hang out during different parts of the days and weeks. 

A. It’s called a “named list.” You use that named list to start working with people and digging into what they need: What are we doing for Joe? He might need detox. But Marlene, she might just need a bus ticket to go home to her mom. It’s humanitarian to follow individual people, always asking what they need, what should we try this time that didn’t work previously. The named list also helps you evaluate yourself, figure out how well you are doing, and it allows us to share information with our partners like Citynet, government agencies, and so on. 

Q. I know you count about 35 people as having been served by the program each year, but I always wonder, how many of them have stayed off the streets?

A. Of the 35 that are we following now, I’m proud to say that three of them have been housed permanently. Another two we housed for two years, and they stayed in their housing but recently decided to go back on the streets. At least 25 have left Santa Barbara/Montecito for other nearby environs, and some of them migrated to other parts of the county. It’s a very transient population, they don’t have a home base, and many of the people we encounter aren’t from Santa Barbara. I’m thinking for example about these three young guys who were camping near the Bird Refuge; they were from San Francisco but somehow decided to come here for the summer, then they went back up there. 

Q. What about three elements of homelessness that make people hard to work with: drugs, crime, and mental illness?

A. There’s a lot of drugs, and there’s a lot of intra-homeless crime. They steal each other’s drugs. Last year, someone allegedly sexually assaulted another homeless guy’s girlfriend. For homeless women, fear of sexual assault turns out to be a big issue, and it’s one of the reasons why we have women experiencing homelessness coming down the railroad tracks from Santa Barbara into Montecito. There are fewer homeless people here, and they want to escape from aggressive men who might be in the big encampments downtown. Mental illness – well, you know we have a manifestation of that issue right here in Montecito ….

Q. You are referring of course to the individual who lives in front of Pointe Market on Coast Village Road. I see her almost every morning when I go to get my coffee and paper. I try to talk to this person, and I know the name, but I get the impression this person considers me a busybody associated with helping the homeless – a label with which the individual does not want to be associated.

A. There might be light at the end of the tunnel for this individual, who is suffering from an acute mental illness. Even in the three years we have been dealing with this individual, she has gone downhill physically and mentally, and we’ve been in contact several times with the distraught daughter and sister, who have witnessed a long slide into mental illness. In California you can’t force someone into treatment, so Governor Newsom pushed through the CARES Act, which allows first responders and social workers to refer a person showing signs of acute mental illness to the court system. It’s being rolled out county-by-county, and Santa Barbara is scheduled to adopt its legal framework regarding this law by 2024. I promise all Montecitans, we will be nudging this person into that system. When you think we have devoted so many resources to this one person, we could be helping 15 people. We have referred that individual to assisted outreach treatment, three times to adult protective services, and to the public defender who wants to help because this individual has an outstanding warrant for trespassing. 

Q. This would be a major accomplishment ‘lighting this one little candle’ for our village, and such a step forward for this senior citizen – about whom so many of us worry. But turning to the big picture, so often you and I have spoken about Santa Monica’s management of the homeless, and their large number of available shelter beds that give their homeless outreach teams a strong talking point to persuade people to get out of their tents and to come indoors. This is related to the now-infamous “Boise decision” by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which holds that unless a city or county has enough beds available for every unhoused person, the government cannot enforce no-camping, no-sitting, or no-lying ordinances. Do you see any movement toward getting more beds made available here in Santa Barbara, since our numbers of unhoused are not in the tens of thousands like L.A.?

A. That’s the goal. The county – and I still sit on the county’s Behavioral Wellness Commission – is trying to achieve this by partnering with Dignity Moves to build three more of the ‘tiny house’ communities as quickly as possible. We already have hundreds of shelter beds available throughout the county. I would say, if things go well with this new program, we might be able within two years to have enough places so that everyone can be offered a bed. And hopefully that will mean we can outlaw tent camping, and that will mean fewer fires being set, hopefully less crime among the homeless, and so on. It’s important to get people off the streets so that we can interview them, help distinguish between people who have chosen a lifestyle of living on the street and don’t ever want to come indoors, and the people who desperately need help. 

Q. The ‘tiny home’ concept seems to be working in other places too, such as two sites in L.A. County. But have you folks on the Be Well Commission considered what will happen after the three-year leases expire? Are the leases renewable?

A. I don’t know what will happen with the tiny homes in the long run, but I do think solutions like this are what we need to do. 

Q. I want to join you in being very hopeful that this vision will come to fruition. It does seem, though, that mitigating the goal of housing the unhoused is the ever-skyrocketing cost of housing in South Santa Barbara County. Montecito of course being the crown jewel in terms of housing prices – clearly people at this economic rung aren’t going to move to our village – but we keep seeing examples like in Isla Vista, the disappearance of relatively affordable apartments. 

A. I see housing in Santa Barbara County going in two very divergent directions. If what we are going to build is more and more expensive housing, we are going to displace more and more people. If rents are going to continue to rise and everything we construct is luxury, then there won’t be places where the formerly-housed can rent when they find a basic job and want a basic apartment. There was a fancy apartment complex called The Marc that came online in 2016, and I remember they started charging $2,700 for a one-bedroom. Then people who owned other apartments, not even nice apartments, then raised their rents to $2,500. And now prices are going higher and higher. We are continuing to build nothing but very expensive stuff, there’s going to be nothing for the people at the bottom of the rung to rent. And we have timeshares and vacation rentals taking more rental homes off the market. 

Q. What can we do?

A. The best thing our most generous Montecito villagers can do is to continue to support programs like Hands Across Montecito and our partners Citynet, Dignity Moves, Heal the Ocean, New Beginnings and any of the other nonprofits that are working so diligently to serve the larger community by reaching out to those who haven’t had access to the American Dream.