Jeff Shaffer doesn’t want to be the city’s homeless czar and doesn’t think any one person should or could be. No one, he said, can juggle the enormity of so much nuanced information in one brain. Likewise, Santa Barbara’s City Council has made a point not to appoint one — or to even create a new homeless commission, as Councilmember Jason Dominguez unsuccessfully pushed for on November 26. Even so, Shaffer could very well find himself the city’s de facto homeless czar.
For the past 15 years, Shaffer has been working quietly and effectively on various boots-on-the-ground homeless outreach efforts with little fanfare. In that time, he’s earned the trust of key players in Santa Barbara’s sprawling universe of government bureaucracies and nonprofits that attempt to deal with the issue of homelessness as both their vocation and avocation. To an unusual extent, he’s also built trust with key business interest groups, some of which have lobbied loudly for increased enforcement as the answer.
In the past few months, Shaffer — quiet, serious, and intense — has dusted off the nonprofit he created back in 2005, the Santa Barbara Alliance for Community Transformation, or SBACT. Earlier this summer, SBACT got $150,000 — $100,000 from the City Council and the rest from the Santa Barbara Foundation — to broker some sort of workable understanding between City Hall, homeless shelter providers, homeless service organizations — about 27 entities in all — and neighborhood residents and activists who in the past 12 months have fiercely resisted two proposals to create permanent supportive housing projects for chronically homeless individuals.