Is Mayor Dee Dee Cavanaugh Planning to Make Simi Valley into Southern California's Premier Destination For Homeless Seeking for Transitional Housing?
For years, Simi Valley residents have packed public meetings to fight state mandates for high-density apartment towers in their neighborhoods (Simi Valley Acorn). Now Simi Valley residents may get something few of them asked for at all: not more apartments, but a transitional-housing model that national data show sends nearly one in five people back to homelessness within two years (National Alliance to End Homelessness) — built within a mile of their children's schools, and cleared for study by Mayor Dee Dee Cavanaugh, who once sat on the sponsor's board, moved to extend its city funding, and never recused herself from either vote.
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By Adam Loew, The Simi Valley Ledger
SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — When Mayor Dee Dee Cavanaugh and the City Council she leads went looking for places to house people coming off the streets, they did not look far from the city's classrooms — and Cavanaugh, who once sat on the board of the nonprofit now in line to run the project, did not steer them away. On July 28, 2026, the council and Cavanaugh cleared four city parcels for a feasibility study to place transitional homeless housing, and all four sit within a mile of a school. The smallest is a vacant 0.35-acre lot at Pacific Avenue and Fifth Street. It is a five-minute walk from the gates of Sinaloa Middle School.
The vote lets the nonprofit Samaritan Center study the four city-owned properties as possible transitional-housing sites. The council approved only a feasibility study, not an actual project. That distinction matters, but it settles nothing about a bigger question: how close should a homeless-housing facility sit to a school? Simi Valley is a Ventura County suburb of about 125,000 people (U.S. Census Bureau; Simi Valley Acorn).
Councilmember Elaine Litster cast the only vote against the plan. Colleagues Rocky Rhodes and Joseph Ayala called the study a necessary step. They pointed to unhoused residents who, after recent encampment cleanups, have been showing up at bus stops, on sidewalks and in commercial areas. According to news reports, the council's discussion did not spend much time on how close the sites are to schools (Simi Valley Acorn; Citizen Portal).
A Mayor Dee Dee Canvanagh Ties to the Samaritan Center Never Came Up at the City Council Meeting or During the Vote
Mayor Dee Dee Cavanaugh presided over the vote. She has a longer relationship with the Samaritan Center than the hearing revealed. Her official city biography lists "past service on the boards of Simi Valley Girls Softball, the Boys and Girls Club of Simi Valley, and the Samaritan Center" (City of Simi Valley). In October 2023, while serving as a council member, she personally moved to approve the Center's COVID-19 Community Recovery Grant report. That motion also rolled the Center's unspent grant money into a second year. The meeting minutes record no recusal. They say "DECLARATION OF CONFLICT: None" and make no mention of her board service (Simi Valley City Council minutes, Oct. 23, 2023).
None of this appears to break state disclosure law. That law targets financial interests, not unpaid board service from years ago, and no one has accused Cavanaugh of personally benefiting. But residents deserve to know about the relationship. The mayor now presiding over a vote to let the Center study four city parcels once sat on that nonprofit's board. She later moved to extend its city funding. That history matters when judging whether the city acted as a neutral referee.
Four School-Adjacent Sites For Homeless Transitional Housing Cleared on Mayor Cavanaugh's Watch
City staff drew up the list of parcels at the Samaritan Center's request. That request came after the council, in June, unanimously approved a feasibility study for transitional housing at the Center's own site at 280 Royal Ave. Every parcel that survived the July review sits within a short walk or drive of a school (Simi Valley Acorn):
One site is an almost 1-acre lot at 3802 Avenida Simi. It is valued at about $970,000 and sits roughly a half-mile from Township Elementary. Valley View Middle and Santa Susana High are both within a mile. Habitat for Humanity once considered the lot for affordable housing. City Manager Samantha Argabrite said the city's attempts to talk with Habitat about the property have gone nowhere (Simi Valley Acorn; city meeting record).
Two more sites sit two-thirds of a mile from Katherine Elementary and Simi Valley High. One is a 2.70-acre parcel at 5000 E. Los Angeles Ave., valued at about $3 million. The other is a 3.55-acre parcel at East Los Angeles Avenue and Hidden Ranch Road, valued at about $3.9 million. Litster pointed out that both sites sit inside the parking area for the Simi Valley Metrolink station (Simi Valley Acorn).
The fourth site, on Pacific Avenue, is the smallest and cheapest at $370,250. It sits in the historic Simi Colony district, within a mile of Arroyo and Madera elementary schools, Royal High and Sinaloa Middle School. A fifth possible site, a small park at Lubbock Drive and Tyler Court surrounded by homes, was dropped from consideration after Rhodes called it infeasible.
The Pitch Mayor Cavanaugh is Asking Simi Valley Residents to Trust
Supporters are selling a specific model. "This does not replace the Samaritan Center," Ayala said in July. He described supervised, service-linked housing where residents must qualify for a spot — not a shelter or a drop-in center (Simi Valley Acorn). Samaritan Center executive director Annika Sumby has described the plan the same way. She calls it "interim housing with wrap-around services to prepare clients to succeed in more permanent housing solutions" (California Lutheran University Center for Nonprofit Leadership).
Peer-reviewed research does link structured recovery housing to less substance use and fewer arrests, compared with unsupported housing (National Institutes of Health). But the same research urges caution about what counts as "success." Slightly more than half of people who enter sober-living homes report using again within six months. Relapse rates for alcohol run 40 to 60 percent in the first three months after treatment (Journal of Psychoactive Drugs). Lasting recovery comes slowly, when it comes at all. A review of two decades of studies found that only about 7 to 9 percent of people with a substance use disorder reach remission in any given year (Drug and Alcohol Dependence). Most people need several attempts before their risk of relapse drops to the level of the general population — and that can take roughly five years of staying sober (National Institutes of Health). The review's own authors admit the evidence is thin: just five rigorous studies and about 1,300 participants in total. They say it is "too soon to draw confident conclusions."
In other words, short-term sobriety inside a supervised program is easy to measure. The long-term recovery the project's backers are promising is rarer, slower and far less certain. And none of it answers the real question: what happens once a facility like this actually opens next to a school?
Transitional Housing Could Fill Simi Valley Streets With People Experiencing Homelessness
The federal government does not track a return-to-homelessness rate for transitional housing on its own. It tracks a broader, and by design more forgiving, measure. It measures how many people who leave a homeless program for permanent housing become homeless again. Nationally, about one in five do within two years — 19.8 percent in 2019, 17.8 percent in 2021 and 18.7 percent in 2023 (National Alliance to End Homelessness). A peer-reviewed study of 2021 data from 388 local systems found similar numbers: 9 percent were back within six months, 13 percent within a year, and 18 percent within two years. The study's own authors called even that count an "inexact proxy." It only tracks people who reappear in a federally funded program. It misses people who end up on a friend's couch or living in a car (American Journal of Public Health).
The measure also leaves out the people who fall through the cracks along the way. It only counts exits to permanent housing, and most exits are not that. In 2023, just 32.4 percent of people leaving emergency shelters, transitional housing and rapid re-housing programs nationwide went to a permanent home. That is down from 40.9 percent four years earlier. The rest went to other shelters, institutions, the street or unknown destinations (National Alliance to End Homelessness). Ventura County's system does better than that national average, but not by much. In 2024, 53 percent of people leaving its shelter, transitional and rapid re-housing programs exited to permanent housing. That means nearly half did not. And 4.4 percent of those who did exit to permanent housing were back within six months (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development). The county's own homelessness plan boiled the problem down to one line for 2022: 408 exits to permanent housing, against 1,208 people newly homeless and 137 people who returned to homelessness (Ventura County Homelessness Plan).
Transitional housing in particular has the weakest track record among the options. HUD ran the largest randomized study of its kind, called the Family Options Study. It found that transitional housing cost $32,557 per family stay — roughly double the cost of emergency shelter and five times the cost of rapid re-housing. Yet it produced "no better, and in some respects poorer, outcomes" than either option. Fewer than a third of the families assigned to transitional housing ever enrolled in it (National Alliance to End Homelessness). Some local systems do report far lower return rates among people who finish transitional programs than among people leaving shelters (Mecklenburg County Housing Data). But the people who finish a program are, almost by definition, the ones most likely to succeed anyway. The federal measure simply leaves out everyone who leaves before finding permanent housing (American Journal of Public Health). For a site five minutes from a middle school, that second group is the one that matters most: the residents who walk out early, and where they go next.
Homeless Encampments May Become the ADU's of Transitional Homeless Housing in Simi Valley
In Reseda, the problem never made it past the front gate. Neighbors of the Los Angeles Tiny Home Village watched tents and vehicles pile up on the sidewalk just outside. These were people drawn by the village's services but unwilling to follow its no-drugs, no-alcohol rules once inside. "These are people that are street people, that are on drugs and so forth and so on, and they just keep doing what they're doing," said Patricia Lynn Chapman, a village resident (ABC7 Los Angeles). Los Angeles City Councilman Bob Blumenfield put the stakes bluntly: "We're not going to let this become a magnet for encampments."
Simi Valley's model is different on paper. Whether it stays different in practice is exactly what the study is supposed to test. The city does not have to imagine what could go wrong. Simi Valley police and the Ventura County Sheriff's Office have already spent months trying to clear an encampment along the Arroyo Simi, near the Via Del Arroyo Mobile Home Park. That encampment has nothing to do with the Samaritan Center. But it is exactly the outcome a school-adjacent site would need to avoid (Citizen Portal).
What's Next
City officials stress that nothing is final yet. Any project would likely need at least half an acre of land — a bar the 0.35-acre Pacific Avenue lot may not clear. Police and Environmental Services staff have already flagged concerns about public safety, security and how well a project would fit its surroundings. Rhodes wants the city to widen the search to private land, too. Samaritan Center President Doug Landon said the study, which should take about six months, will let a developer weigh which site and which housing model — from tiny homes to conventional units — makes the most sense. Any actual project would come back for public review and a separate vote (Simi Valley Acorn; Simi Valley Acorn).
All of that is true. None of it should reassure anyone. A feasibility study is not a neutral exercise. It is the first step of a project the Samaritan Center already wants to build, on land the city has already agreed to put on the table. The council that approved it was led by Mayor Canvanagh, who once sat on the Samaritan Center board — a fact her own meeting record never mentioned. The four parcels it approved sit no farther than a mile from a school campus. And the evidence for the model being sold — supervised housing that turns short-term sobriety into lasting recovery — rests on just five rigorous studies. Even their own authors say it is too soon to draw confident conclusions.
None of these parcels sat idle with no future. One was once eyed for affordable housing before those talks went nowhere. Two more sit inside the parking footprint of the city's own Metrolink station. A fifth site the city considered was an actual neighborhood park at Lubbock Drive and Tyler Court, dropped only because Rhodes called it infeasible — proof that turning open land into something for families to use was on the table until it wasn't. Every acre the council now hands to a feasibility study is an acre Simi Valley taxpayers will not get back as a park, a ballfield, or open space for their own families to enjoy.
Simi Valley residents are being asked to trust the judgment of Mayor Dee Dee Cavanaugh, who has not explained why her ties to the Samaritan Center, and never disclosed her role on the Samaritan Center on any vote, why she voted anyway without disclosing her former role on the Samaritan Center Board, or why she would even consider allowing transitional housing five minutes from a Simi Valley Unified middle school. Nothing in the record so far has earned that trust. Simi Valley's Mayor should look out for their neighborhoods and their children's schools—not wave through a project for a nonprofit she once helped govern without ever raising that history at the meetings where it mattered. If the study comes back recommending a site next to a school, it will not be the Samaritan Center's failure alone. Mayor Cavangh will need to answer the Residents of Simi Valley why she would consider placing Homeless Transitional housing in the path of Simi Valley Unified School District Students.
The Simi Valley Ledger is an Official Publication of The Freedom Project © 2026
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