Dane White was clearly annoyed.
The mayor of Escondido had just listened to several critiques of a new citywide homelessness policy, and when it was his turn to speak he leaned into a microphone.
“One of the questions I’m most often asked is, ‘who are we working with that has lived experience?'” he said at a council meeting earlier this year. “It’s an interesting question, because I have lived experience.”
“But because my experience goes against the dominant narrative in the state of California, it’s often rejected.”
As homelessness rises throughout San Diego County, White is among at least four elected leaders who say they’ve lived the crisis.
Together they represent cities with some of the largest homeless populations in the region, and each may soon have additional power if the U.S. Supreme Court gives local officials more leeway to clear encampments. The justices heard arguments for that case earlier this month.
In interviews, White, San Diego City Council President Sean Elo-Rivera and El Cajon City Councilmembers Michelle Metschel and Phil Ortiz unpacked how their backgrounds inform their governance. Elo-Rivera is the lone Democrat, while the other three are Republicans.
Everyone agreed that shelter and one-on-one support were crucial to getting people off the street, yet opinions diverged over the risks and rewards of expanding the safety net.
“Every homeless person’s situation is as unique as they are,” Ortiz said. “There might be broad brushes, but it’s so complicated because people are complicated.”
‘A premise I reject’
Elo-Rivera didn’t feel homeless as a kid. He was more worried about the family breaking apart.
In the mid-1990s, when Elo-Rivera was in middle school, his mom’s health deteriorated. Elo-Rivera’s dad began spending time away from his job at a car dealership to care for her.
Income dropped. The rent didn’t.
One day, Elo-Rivera watched a moving truck pull up by their house in Huntington Beach to cart off belongings, a beloved Ken Griffey Jr. baseball card included.
The family moved into a hotel. His classmates didn’t know, nor did his teachers, although they may have noticed the shaky attendance.
“It was economics, at the end of the day, that caused that,” said Elo-Rivera, 41. “There’s a premise that I reject, which is ‘people who have health struggles,'” including mental health or addiction diagnoses, are eventually “‘not going to have a house.'”
Much of his work on the San Diego City Council can be seen as an effort to keep others from going through the same thing: He’s voted to make it harder for landlords to evict tenants, endorsed programs that help low-income residents pay rent and opposed, unsuccessfully, San Diego’s camping ban.
His mom did eventually get the care she needed and the family found another home out of state.
“Knowing what it would have meant for our family to not have to move — forget about becoming homeless — it helps me understand how beneficial” stable housing can be, he said.
‘We didn’t know if she was gonna make it’
Metschel, a 66-year-old El Cajon council member, also saw housing vanish as a child.
In the early 1970s, she was living in Idaho when her mom landed a singing contract in Reno, Nev. The siblings packed into a station wagon and drove south. Metschel was 14.
No contract was waiting.
Metschel doesn’t know whether they were lied to or if someone else got the job. Regardless, to make ends meet, her mom started stripping. She also sold speed.
Metschel was soon sleeping on the station wagon’s front bench — this was in the days car seats were connected — while her brother lay on the back seat. Two other siblings squeezed in the way back.
Later, during a road trip, they broke down in Kettleman City, in Central California, and Metschel said her mom left to find help. That left the kids waiting alone at a gas station. For two weeks.
“We didn’t know if she was gonna make it,” Metschel said.
Even during one period in an apartment, Metschel said she found herself relying on an apparent pimp known as Johnny Love to defend against men trying to pick her up. Other times she had to search for her mom in a nearby p*rn theater. (Her mom has since died and she’s estranged from the surviving siblings.)
All of this has made her more empathetic to some groups and less with others.
Metschel does see value in programs that cover rent and motel stays. As a single mother, she received welfare and a Section 8 housing voucher. But she wants more discretion as to how aid is distributed.
“Families, youth, veterans, seniors, disabled should come first,” she said, “before a newly released felon, sex offender, drug dealer, chronic drug user.”
She’s particularly hesitant to offer support when someone doesn’t appear willing to make personal changes. “My mother always thought she was a victim” and “never took responsibility for her actions,” Metschel said. She vowed to not do the same.
As a council member, Metschel has supported efforts to boost oversight of homelessness organizations and hotels that accept vouchers. Service groups have been required to get new permits, motels were warned to limit 911 calls and multiple businesses have been ordered to increase security.
This work was done in tandem with one of her colleagues on the council, Phil Ortiz.
‘Relief is an understatement’
Ortiz, 38, knew the deadline was approaching.
In 2007, he had one semester left at San Diego State University. The lease he shared with friends was ending around April and new loans wouldn’t kick in until fall, leaving several months in between with little money and no place to stay.
He hadn’t budgeted for housing, yet as summer approached Ortiz kept eating out and continued attending parties.
At first, those parties kept him under a roof. He’d guard an open couch, crash on top and cut out in the morning. But he could tell he was testing friends’ patience.
“There’s a lot of shame,” he said, “so you just act like everything’s fine.”
Finally, one night he parked his Chevy Blazer in a suburban neighborhood, lowered a seat and closed his eyes.
That became his bed for weeks. Ortiz kept a lifeguard job at a campus pool, giving him access to showers, although he sometimes had to choose between buying gas or food, and the poor sleep made it difficult to prepare for classes.
When asked what the start of the next semester felt like, when he could again afford a place, Ortiz paused and exhaled. “Relief is an understatement,” he said. “But it was all self-inflicted.”
Ortiz eventually asked for financial advice from a business owner he knew through church. The man had him document every corner of his finances. “It was the most embarrassing thing I’d ever gone through,” he said.
But Ortiz believes he could have easily ended up homeless again without overhauling his decision-making.
As a result, he’s mainly critical of California’s Housing First approach to homelessness, which prioritizes getting people off the street and under a roof, when that effort turns into “Housing Only.”
“People need help being lifted up out of their emotional, their mental and their spiritual poverty,” he said. “Then they can lift themselves up out of their physical poverty.”
At the same time, Ortiz wrestles with a related question: When is it OK to force treatment on somebody who doesn’t appear interested?
‘You are going to die’
Dane White, 34, isn’t sure where the angst came from.
Growing up in Escondido, he rebelled against his parents. He ran away from a boarding school in Missouri. A grandfather in Utah took him in and then kicked him out.
“I don’t really think he thought I was as bad as my parents made me out to be,” White said. “He quickly found out it was true.”
White said he was first offered marijuana in an Escondido High School bathroom, which led to a host of other drugs he prefers not to name. For years, he bounced back and forth between North County and Utah with no steady home.
There were resulting run-ins with law enforcement, including multiple arrests throughout 2008 in Panguitch, Utah. Records from the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office detail charges for liquor consumption, “possession of tobacco by minor,” simple assault and “disorderly conduct.”
Two years later, a state court logged new charges for “attempted criminal trespass” and “possession or consumption of alcohol by minor.”
His sentence was put on hold in favor of probation, restitution and a promise to complete a drug and alcohol treatment program. White wasn’t sure he’d follow through, but his mom offered up a futon in San Diego County and he returned to California. The drug use continued.
Then one day he came dangerously close to a fatal overdose. “I heard a voice, clear as day, say, ‘You are going to die.'”
Court records show he did ultimately attend treatment. He also prayed for hope and felt God provided him with a new group of friends.
“People need to be given chances,” he said. “The enabling comes in when the use is allowed to continue.”
Since becoming Escondido’s mayor more than a year ago, White’s tenure has been marked by a public dispute with Interfaith Community Services, a prominent homelessness organization. Local officials have directed funding away from one Interfaith shelter and voted to explore a moratorium on services around downtown, part of a broader policy shift that puts more emphasis on sobriety.
White thinks the state has become too lenient when it comes to the effects of drug use and wants to crack down on anyone who hurts other residents or businesses.
But as for narcotics in general?
“Drugs should all be decriminalized,” White said. “Making drugs illegal seems to only amplify the black market.”
Similarly, while he doesn’t like when organizations hand out needles and pipes on the street, an approach known as harm reduction, he believes there may be a place for controlled drug use in a well-staffed facility.
In the meantime, White wants to open a 150-bed shelter in Escondido by next summer and hopes to partially cover the costs by legalizing and taxing cannabis sales. He and other officials have publicly said they want the spots to primarily go to locals, although it’s an open question as to how that will be defined.
“I don’t care how long you’ve been here,” White said. “If you’re here, and you’re in one of those target priority areas, and we want to clean up that area and offer you a bed, you’re gonna get one.”
