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- [Announcer] And now, Rob on the Road: Exploring Northern California.

- I'm thrilled to have Cherie Dimmerling join us now.

She is with the Fair Housing Council of Greater Sacramento.

It's great to see you, Cherie.

- Thank you for having me, Rob, really appreciate it.

- Thrilled to have you here.

What an important topic, as you realized when you came to this area.

First of all, tell us about the Fair Housing Council.

Exactly what makes it so important?

- Well, the Fair Housing Council is really focused on prevention.

It is targeted to eliminating housing obstructions for those that are renting or for home seekers.

And I was drawn to open a fair housing council here in Sacramento because I have a background in fair housing, I moved to Sacramento a couple years ago, and was pretty shocked to see that we did not have a fair housing council that was providing a service here to the people in Sacramento.

So I decided to do that myself.

- Where are the funds coming from?

- It's a federal program.

So this program came about during the Reagan administration, and I think this is why it's such a winner with both Republicans and Democrats.

It's not extra money, it's money that's been set aside at the federal government for investigation of fair housing complaints.

If you're substantially equivalent, in the eyes of the government, in your municipality, they pay you to investigate these issues.

If you're not equivalent, then they have to go to the closest municipality, or in our case, it's the state, to do the investigations.

And so, we're missing out on that money.

- I gotcha.

Let me ask you this.

We hear so much about millions and millions of dollars coming to our area for all types of ways to help with homelessness.

- That's right.

- Where's that coming from?

These are separate pots?

- There's different pots.

So you've got pots at the federal level, which at this moment in time we're all very concerned about, except for the FHAP grant.

A lot of the money coming from HUD is going to be cut.

Even grants that were already approved are getting cut.

Money that people were already counting on in their budgets is being cut.

Now, this particular program, the FHAP Program, the Fair Housing Assistance Program, has not been cut yet, and I don't think it can be, because it has to be approved by Congress.

- The cut would have to be approved by Congress?

- Yes.

- So let's dive into this specific area of fair housing and what you have uncovered and what you are working on.

What is your daily mission?

What is it that you know that you can have an impact on when it comes to the crisis we're having in California, and how are you approaching it?

- So the crisis we're having here is a two-pronged PRI crisis, right?

Prevention is the key.

Keeping them from becoming homeless is the key.

Because it is so much less expensive to keep people in their existing housing than it is to try to bring them back once they're already homeless.

So for our tax dollars, the key is to prevent it from happening.

Now that being said, we can't ignore the fact that we have probably close to 10,000 people that are currently homeless right now in our area.

We have to work with that group as well as the prevention aspect.

- Would you say there are as many facing homelessness that are already living on the streets?

- In my mind, at least that many, and I'll tell you why.

In Sacramento County, we have 12,900, almost 13,000 people that are eligible for housing choice vouchers, the vouchers that we used to call Section 8 back in the day.

So from what we understand, that's where the cuts are gonna be at HUD.

Imagine you have an apartment and you have three or four kids that are living with you and you have a housing choice voucher, and your rent is $2,000 a month, and 500 of that is being paid by you, and 1,500 is being paid by this housing choice voucher.

If that voucher goes away, where does that family go?

- Hmm.

That's a big deal.

- And that is a program that's being cut.

We know that.

So what are we going to do with the possible influx of these groups becoming homeless?

We've gotta get in front of this problem.

Right now, it feels to me, as an outsider coming in here, that they're behind the eight ball.

They're not in front of it saying, here's what we gotta do proactively.

It's, oh, what can we do with the ones that are already on the street, which is equally as important, but you've gotta look at both.

- Okay.

Let's look at, right now, what you know can be done proactively for people who may be watching this or have a friend watching this, who are this close to experiencing possibly the loss of their home or experiencing homelessness?

You know some ways that we've discussed, particularly for people who are in vulnerable situations that do not know it, domestic violence.

And when I say don't know it, I mean that there are other rights when it comes to someone involved in domestic violence, as well as tenant rights.

Am I correct?

- Yes.

I'll give you an example of exactly what you're talking about there.

In early December, I got a call from a woman that had just become homeless, and she was...

This is during our raining season.

It was pouring outside.

She was in a tent.

She had been the victim of domestic violence, and her, her husband, and her child had been thrown out.

They were thrown out because of the amount of complaints against the husband because of the domestic violence.

She did not know that you cannot toss out the victim of domestic violence.

So when they were thrown out, she left too.

I don't know what happened to the partner or the husband.

But I do know when I met her, she was living under the underpass, a Caltrans area, in a tent that had flooded.

All right.

So I get the call.

They needed a new tent because there was a hole in it that had filled with water.

I zipped out there with a dry tent and some other things to help them out.

And by the next day, the six-year-old daughter was already in the hospital with pneumonia.

So the fact that she did not know that as a victim of domestic violence that she can't be tossed out tells me that we are not educating people on their rights.

Now, at some point.

Now, I will tell you, it's a sad story.

So the child ended up being in the hospital for a week and then was taken by CPS.

So just from a tax cost perspective, even if you're not somebody that cares about their fellow humans, right, from a taxpayer perspective, the amount of money that is going to cost us versus educating them to know their rights, giving them a right to council, which is another program that we don't have here, that many other cities do.

We aren't really focused on the prevention, and we need to be focused on the prevention piece, because it is so much less expensive to keep people in their homes, with rental assistance, with an attorney so they know their rights, with education.

- When we were talking about this prior to this day, you were sharing me that, okay, if someone is not pulled at the heartstrings to help with the homeless crisis, then let's try the business route.

- Exactly right.

- Talk to me about how you would walk into a group, with opposing views possibly, or probably, if it's a group of people, and how would you win them over, how would you win them over by explaining the business angle and the cost of not stepping up to the plate?

- So, as you know, and we've discussed, I've spent a lot of my career in the business community.

I've started companies, I've been a CEO, president, vice president, operations manager, so business is really my background.

And I really started focusing on accountability and statistical analysis when I started my career at GE in my 20s.

So that is, I think, something that's brought to our Fair Housing Council that's different than a lot of other organizations that are strictly trying to get people to do things because it's the right thing to do, because you've got plenty of people that say, we spend $24 billion on this problem right now and we have nothing to show for it.

Why would we continue giving money or putting money into these programs?

And they're not wrong.

They're not wrong.

We can show them that the money that we're spending, we're spending incorrectly.

And we don't need to spend more money.

We need to use that money directly to keep people in their homes and get people rehoused.

We don't need a task force to tell us we have 10,000 people that are homeless.

We don't need another meeting to discuss a meeting to get an agenda together to know what the problems are.

We already know.

So the analysis is done, it is clear.

There is a much less expensive way that's much more humane, by keeping them in their homes and getting them rehoused quickly.

- How do you do that?

How exactly do you do that?

You come at this with the C-suite level experience, the business acumen that you have, the breadth and depth of business work and expertise.

So how do you do that?

How do you convince the spending to be spent wisely and to get it in the right spot?

- Well, I'm a firm believer, if people have all the data to analyze and have all the information, they make the right decision.

I'll give you an example.

I wasn't able to get the data for Sacramento County, but I can tell you, in LA County, they spent $91 million last year on sweeps, just on sweeps.

- On homeless sweeps?

- On homeless sweeps.

Now, what does that do?

It moves them from the area that they're in.

And we know from a statistical perspective, within three days, they're typically back.

- It also takes all of their supplies.

- That's another problem, right?

So that $91 million doesn't even take into account that they've lost their ID, that they've lost their medications, that they've lost their connection to their service providers.

So we spent $91 million taking all their things and moving them, and then we as taxpayers pay again to get 'em those medications again, to get them their ID again.

So inevitably, what are sweeps doing?

It's a complete waste of money.

The better bet would be to put these people into safe ground sites.

And trust me, they would rather be in a safe ground site.

They work.

Now, a lot of people have kind of a negative idea about safe ground sites.

- You walked right into it yourself.

- Yes.

- Into a safe ground.

You put yourself in there to find out what it was.

So I want to make you aware, watching.

Cherie went in daily to a safe ground to experience what it is that's making it work and not work.

Sorry to interrupt, but continue.

I feel it's important for people to know that.

- Oh yeah, absolutely.

So we had a large safe ground site.

A million articles have been written about it.

Everybody knows what I'm talking about.

And it worked very well until it didn't.

That safe ground site was not a experiment that went awry.

It was an experiment, and we learned what worked and what didn't.

If you've never been homeless, here's something that people don't understand.

When you have no place that you're sleeping at night and you don't know where you're gonna be, you spend all your time trying to find a place to put your things and trying to find food.

- And safety.

You don't sleep.

- And safety.

People that don't have experience working with the homeless wonder, well, why are they sleeping during the day?

They sleep during the day because if they sleep at night, that's when women become sexually abused, that is when their things get stolen, that's when the robberies happen and that sort of thing, at night.

So a lot of the homeless population stays awake all night and then they sleep during the day.

So if you've never experienced that lack of safety, you don't know why they're exhibiting some of these behaviors.

The other thing is, safety really is the number one thing you have to have before you can do anything else.

If you don't feel safe and you don't have a place to go at night to sleep, nothing else matters.

There's really nothing else you can do.

You can't have a job if you don't have an address.

So that's what we learned at the safe ground site that was north of the city.

A lot of those people got jobs.

16 of those people that were there outta the 55 moved themselves out of that encampment, moved themselves out of the encampment and got a place.

Because once you have a place to sleep comfortably at night, then you can start exhibiting these other behaviors that integrate you back into what we consider to be society.

There was a lot of complaints about it.

There were complaints that, sure, we've got 50 or so people in there, but we're attracting a lot of people outside of the camp as well.

Well, there's a reason for that.

At the camp, there was anywhere between 50 and 55 people at any one time, mostly women, by the way, and mostly disabled.

There was a waiting list of over 600 people that knew about it, that wanted to be there.

Now, think about this, Rob.

There was no electric and no water and we still had over 600 people that wanted to be there because of the safety aspect, because of the safety aspect.

That was costing us about six grand a year, a year, for that porta-potties and dumpsters.

That was all that was there that was being paid for.

Everything else was donations from houses of worship, the community at large, and that sort of thing.

So to me, that was a resounding success.

- Yeah.

It sounds like it was a success from your experience because of what you experienced and saw there consistently.

And if I'm not mistaken, what got in the way or shut it down were people who were actually coming in and taking advantage of people who were living there.

Am I right?

With drugs and et cetera?

- Yes.

Whenever you do an experiment, you're gonna find things that work and find things that didn't work as well as you were hoping, and then change those for the next go round.

And I think their success also became their downfall, in the fact that, with the people that got jobs and started working, because they could with an address now, them having money attracted a bad element, and that bad element started coming around selling drugs.

There was somebody that OD'ed there.

And the issue was, the people that were there could not enforce their own rules around these people that should not have been there, because they lived amongst them.

So we know what worked and what didn't.

But we also know we had 55 people that were happy to be there, and it was costing us almost nothing.

- Who's us?

- Taxpayers.

- Okay.

$500 a month, you're saying, for 55 people?

- Yeah.

Really, nothing.

A shelter bed.

A bed in a shelter is costing us $100,000 a year.

So the focus needs to be back on safe ground sites, done correctly, safe ground with accountability and with services.

- So that is something I just want to ask, because I've always wondered why with such a large business community, you come at this with a business background and expertise, and land, why the two cannot meet, or can they, the business community - I think they can.

- coming together with maybe land that some of them own.

I know there are rules and regulations, and being near services is important.

But can you see the two coming together?

Can you see the business community, because that's your goal, right, is to attack this through the business community?

- Absolutely right.

The business community is where I'm comfortable.

I'm a business person at heart that cares about my community, and I do believe they can come together.

Lots of people, especially when I started volunteering here, would say to me, I really wanna help, but I don't even know where to start.

So I think that's the problem.

They see this huge, huge issue and think, oh, I don't even know where to start with this thing.

I was telling people two summers ago, you wanna know where to start?

Put cases of water in your car.

When you see someone out, give 'em a bottled water.

They will be very, very thankful.

And believe me, they're always thankful to get a bottle of water.

Just that one thing.

When I reach out to the community and say, Hey, I've got three more people now that just got swept.

They don't have a tent.

They're young women.

I'm telling you, the community always, always donates to help the people in need.

They just, they need to know how to do it.

And instead of, like I said before, and you can tell that I was an entrepreneur as well, talking about this, studying this, having meetings, and agendas, and task force, it's not helping us, it's not getting the services to the people that need it.

So just like with LA that we were talking about with the $91 million in sweeps, what could we have done with $91 million?

From a business perspective, here's what's different that I see with these government programs.

There doesn't seem to be accountability, and a lot of people feel that way.

We've spent all this money, where has it gone?

I mean, if you divide up what we spent versus the homeless in this state, it's $166,000 a person.

- [Rob] We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars.

- Yes.

And we're talking about billions of dollars when it comes to just what we've spent in the last five years on homelessness.

That's not working.

So from a business perspective, as I look at this, I say, huh, you've done this for five years, you spent $24 billion, and you have nothing to show for it.

In the business world, we'd say, that's not working, we're going a different direction.

And that's where we're at right now.

We need a different direction, something that's not gonna keep dipping into the pockets of taxpayers, that's going to keep people in their homes and re-home those that want it, for less money than we're spending now.

- So how do you fill the void, how do you fill the space between those saying, I want to help, and where the funds could come from and the solutions could come from?

How do you, specifically you, Cherie Dimmerling, fill that void?

Or what are you doing to try to fill that void to bring those two together, and what do you think the solution is?

- I know the solution is not continuing to do what we've been doing, because it's not working.

And not only has the problem gotten worse, and we've thrown tons of money at it, but we know that if these cuts happen to the HUD budget, we are going to see a deluge of people out on the street, on top of what we already have.

We gotta be prepared for that.

And what I'm doing is talking to people like you, I've been talking to some of the business community.

I know, done correctly, we can fix this problem.

It is fixable, just not the way we've been doing it.

- What is inside of you, Cherie, that you feel must be shared before this time is over?

Is there something on your heart that you feel must be related for other people along their journey?

- So in closing, I think...

I wanna make sure that I'm reading this off correctly.

But there was a saying, I believe it was Desmond Tutu, and he said, "There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river and go upstream to find out why they're falling in."

- That's good.

That's really good.

And that's exactly what you're doing.

That is in your name, with the Fair Housing Council.

You're trying to find out exactly what's going wrong and how people can prevent from falling in, which is exactly why you're doing what you do.

You have a big task ahead of you.

But I believe in you.

I know you can do it.

And I salute the fact that you came to Sacramento and saw something that wasn't here and made it launch, and made it start.

And so, kudos to you for launching the Fair Housing Council of Greater Sacramento.

'Cause I gotta tell you, if we can keep people in their homes, and done so rightly, there is nothing wrong about that.

- I agree.

- Thank you so much, Cherie Dimmerling with the Fair Housing Council of Greater Sacramento.

It was great to talk to you and to delve into so many different topics, that some are under your umbrella and some are not, but because of your biggest background with business, I just had to ask.

Thank you for all of your insight.

- Thank you for shedding some light on this issue.

- Absolutely.

It's important.

- Yes.

Thanks, Rob.

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(rousing music) - [Announcer] Murphy Austin Adams Schoenfeld LLP, focusing on business law and commercial litigation, is proud to support Rob on the Road: Region Rising.

More information available MurphyAustin.com.