Aaron Wadin, executive director of the UCAN mission on First Street in Jamestown, said something worth thinking about in Saturday’s edition of The Post-Journal.

“To use a sports analogy, if you are not a decent player, you play where the ball was,” he said. “If you are an average player, you play where the ball is. If you are a smart player, you play where the ball is going to be. I believe that as a community, we are hanging on to playing where the ball is, and we are soon going to be in danger of never playing where the ball will be. We have to pull funds, resources and the willingness to work together to help this growing issue. It will only increase.”

In essence, it’s time to start planning to deal with the region’s temporary housing crisis instead of reacting to it. Wadin is right, in our view. It’s time for a new plan.

Chautauqua County spent spent $1,362,639 in temporary housing — a total that doesn’t include the costs of Code Blue program shelter when temperatures are below freezing. That’s more than double what the county spent in 2021 and more than three times what the county spent in 2019.

The trend lines are going in the wrong direction.

This is a bigger issue than just complaints about use of Falconer’s Budget Inn for temporary housing. Remember, complaints about the Falconer property have been raised before, and the problems have only gotten worse since then.

We haven’t seen tents popping up in open spaces downtown this summer, but that doesn’t mean the homelessness problem has suddenly abated. As Wadin said in a guest essay in Saturday’s edition, countless neighborhoods and streets in Chautauqua County have people in residential homes committing the same crimes and providing the same nuisances as those who are the subject of complaints in Falconer. They just aren’t concentrated in one address.

Falconer residents’ complaints are indicative of a greater problem. What are we doing as a county to help people who find themselves temporarily homeless get back on their feet? How are we connecting them with resources to improve their lives while they’re in temporary housing? What jobs can we get these people into and, when they are employed, do we have housing they can afford?

We need a new plan, because simply paying for a hotel room isn’t working for anyone — except the hotel owners.