Rising costs for temporary housing have been a drag on Chautauqua County’s budget for the past few years.

This year is no exception. County legislators are moving another $1.2 million from the county’s surplus to help pay for the nearly 200 people currently in temporary housing. That comes after moving another $1.5 from the county’s surplus in September on top of the $4.5 million originally budgeted this year.

County officials are trying to be proactive, with plans to begin a new program called “Family Driven Case Management Services” to work with families to get them out of temporary housing. It is funded through the state and will allow the county to work with Chautauqua Opportunities Inc. on programs that include rapid rehousing and rental assistance.

It’s good to see a fresh approach, particularly one paid by the state. But we should be under no illusion that a new program will solve the homelessness problem. It may help, but it’s really house built on shifting sand. Case management services can help families solve some of the issues that led them to homelessness, but if there isn’t available housing they can afford the families are likely to find themselves asking for help again.

We’ve had bad luck in recent years increasing the amount of affordable housing in Jamestown. A proposal on the north side of Jamestown to build affordable housing failed to garner state support after struggling to get local support. Attempts to build affordable housing in the Falconer area after fires destroyed two buildings haven’t received state funding. The Gateway Lofts project for the former Chautauqua Hardware site has struggled to get off the ground for more than a half decade. As the housing supply decreased and inflation increased, housing costs skyrocketed – and the county has had to fill the gap.

The situation is untenable in the long run. Housing prices aren’t going to magically come back to earth unless something changes – and that change is getting more housing online. If we can’t figure out how to get private and public support for affordable housing, the county will be left spending your money on temporary housing year after year.

Legislator Dan Pavlock, R-Ellington, is right in our opinion when he said last week he doesn’t think increases in safety net spending have peaked. We don’t think they have either. We see, in the course of our reporting, the ever-rising need at food pantries, at the St. Susan Center, at Community Helping Hands and dozens of other nonprofits that work to fill the gap between people’s paychecks and the cost to scrape by each month. We’ve yet to hear service agencies say they’re helping fewer people than they did the year before. That means safety net spending in general is likely to keep going up for the foreseeable future.

But there is a path to decrease the county’s temporary housing costs. We’ve just got to find partners to help us down the path to more affordable housing in the south county.