FROM SANTA BARBARA — It may be picturesque, but this upscale village of red-tile roofs and stunning seascapes is sending a huge number of lost souls to the county morgue. Bodies show up on the beach, in parks, along railroad tracks and in the heart of the business district, steps from four-star restaurants and boutique hotels.
Sometimes it's murder. Usually it's a case of used-up bodies giving out under the swaying palms.
"We just had another one," Santa Barbara County social worker Ken Williams told me Thursday morning. "He was probably in his 50s and played steel guitar on State Street by the museum. They found his body yesterday."
That was No. 18 for the year, said Williams, the same number of homeless deaths the city saw in all of 2008.
Santa Monica, with roughly the same population as Santa Barbara, averaged about 14 homeless deaths a year between 2000 and 2007. Los Angeles averaged 170 a year over that same period, which sounds like a lot. But it's a far lower rate per capita than the one Santa Barbara has had the last two years.
Williams, a Vietnam vet with a gray ponytail and gentle manner, takes each and every homeless death in Santa Barbara to heart, entering the names of the deceased in a journal. Williams has been doing outreach for 30 years, so he usually knew the victims and tried to get help for them before it was too late.
For months, Williams has sent me updates on the body count, trying to raise the level of alarm over what has been a relatively quiet phenomenon with no known cause. Maybe it's just a blip. Maybe it's that more people are on the streets because of the economy or because they were driven out of surrounding communities.
John Buttny, who runs Bringing Our Community Home, said the city of Santa Barbara has made some progress in getting homeless people into service programs rather than jail. But he and Williams both say there's a shortage of resources, and they've seen more women and children on the streets of late. All but one of the several hotels that used to offer lodging to the indigent have been shut down or gone upscale, and there's not nearly enough in place for those with chronic mental illness.
But those frustrations don't seem to defeat Williams.
"He's one of those people who keep doing," said Chuck Blitz, a friend of Williams who donates to local social causes and has turned his living room wall into a memorial, inscribing the names of Santa Barbara's homeless victims on white bricks. "There are other people who are as pure, but they don't have Ken's empathy."
