Residents say Orange County’s biggest challenge is an interrelated, two-headed beast – homelessness and a severe shortage of affordable housing.
What’s more, those connected problems are so severe that they’ve become life-changing for many locals, forcing younger people to start their adult lives away from the county where they grew up and nudging some less affluent older people into financially precarious retirements.
And, by wide majorities, locals of all ages and political stripes support the idea of paying for public bonds if they’re aimed at improving the twin housing issues.
Those are some of the key findings from a new poll on life in Orange County led by researchers at UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology, and from follow-up interviews with some of the 818 people queried in that survey.
The UCI-OC poll, conducted in early May, is part of a renewed effort by UCI to measure local opinions about social issues and then leverage the university’s role as a community resource to help fix some of those problems. Complete results of the survey will be presented Thursday, Aug. 17, during a private gathering at UC Irvine that will include county and city elected officials, non-profit leaders, and some key members of the business community. United Way Orange County will co-sponsor that event.
While the top-line findings in the poll aren’t new – homelessness and affordable housing have been seen as local challenges for decades – the intensity of opinion about those problems is surprising, according to UCI officials.
Also, the idea of gathering public, private and non-profit leaders to address the connected issues of homelessness and affordable housing hasn’t been tried recently.
School leaders said they hope the poll eventually will result in change, not just discussions, and that a year from now there will be fewer people living without shelter and more housing that lower-income people can rent or buy.
“Our job is to generate…
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