Berkeley out to aid homeless, but project’s costs are an issue
An ambitious plan to pull Berkeley’s burgeoning homeless population off the streets, first into sheltering mini-villages and then into permanent housing, got a big rollout by the city’s mayor Thursday — but one big question loomed.
How will the city pay for it, especially when President Trump and the Republican Congress are trying to cut funding to social welfare ventures all over the country?
“We’re going to look at everything we can,” from foundations, private donations and nonprofits to ballot-box fund-
ing,” Mayor Jesse Arreguin said at a press briefing on the Pathways Project, which he crafted with City Councilwoman Sophie Hahn. “This is a growing humanitarian crisis, and I think the people want their government to take strong action.”
For now, the costs are penciled in only as “significant,” and what Arreguin and Hahn have in mind before the plan goes to the City Council on April 4 is a lot of community discussion — and fishing around for buy-in from potential funders. The money required would probably crest into the millions, considering one element of it alone, a Navigation Center-style shelter, cost San Francisco $2 million to start up in 2015.
“This is a unique time in the crisis to capture the goodwill of the people,” Hahn said. “We’re a small town with a big voice and a big heart, and we can’t live with the status quo. It’s not acceptable for anyone. It’s time to act.”
With tent cities sprouting in Berkeley’s empty lots and freeway exchanges in the same alarming, high-profile way they have in Oakland and San Francisco, homelessness is being called Berkeley’s number one problem by the mayor and other leaders.
The last published street count in Berkeley, conducted in 2015, tallied 834 homeless people, up 23 percent over the previous count taken in 2009. Numbers from a January count are expected this summer — but regardless of that tally, which most expect to be higher than 2015’s, most city officials estimate there are as many as 1,200 people living outside now. The city has 135 shelter beds.
Key elements of the Pathways Project are drawn from widely praised techniques conceived in San Francisco.
The first of those is the creation of a navigation center, which Arreguin and Hahn are calling a STAIR Center. It’s basically a homeless shelter, but with services aimed at quickly housing people or reuniting them with family, and with so few restrictions that campers can bring in pets, partners and all their belongings. Also on site would be meals, counseling, storage, security, bathrooms and more — everything needed to help people stay stable for a couple of months while they are routed into a better situation.
Encouragingly for Berkeley, the $2 million startup funds for San Francisco’s version were donated, and Berkeley’s probably would be cheaper because it is conceived with the idea of using sturdy tents instead of all hard-walled structures, as in San Francisco. Arreguin said he would like the center up and running within six months, though he said the timeline for the entire project will have to be fleshed out by city planners.
The other technique lifted from San Francisco would be an outreach team to relocate tent campers into housing or shelter, taking several weeks with each camp. Like San Francisco’s Encampment Resolution Team, Berkeley’s crew would bring in portable toilets, trash cans and offers of everything from drug rehabilitation to bus rides home as they clear out each colony. They would then work with police and city officials to make sure another camp doesn’t regenerate in the same spot.
One of the most innovative elements of the plan is the intention to create a mini-village called a Bridge Living Community, based on “tiny home” models being pioneered in a few cities around the country — including Santa Rosa. It would consist of sturdy tents grouped together, with counselors on site, to function as transitional homes while people take as many as four months to settle into more permanent solutions. No other Bay Area community has tried using tents in this fashion, or used so many “tiny home” structures.
The last elements of the Pathways Project are “The 1,000 Person Plan,” aimed at preventing people from becoming homeless and creating or identifying permanent housing, and a “Community Engagement” program to enlist the public to volunteer labor, material and funds.
“Under the current president and national administration, it is unlikely that the needs of the homeless will be meaningfully addressed,” Arreguin and Hahn wrote in their plan. “We further acknowledge that even with Berkeley’s best efforts, through adoption and implementation of The Pathways Project, we are unlikely to fully resolve homelessness in our community.
“Despite these challenges, we believe it is a moral imperative for our community to do everything in our power to work towards resolving this crisis.”
Said Hahn on Thursday: “We have to be realistic. This is a very big undertaking for a city this size.” Berkeley’s population is 117,000.
Sally Hindman, a longtime homeless advocate who runs Youth Spirit Artworks for disadvantaged kids, said the plan holds a lot of promise. She and other advocates were consulted in its creation, and while she finds the souped-up shelter and tiny-home plans encouraging, she said she remains wary of the project’s intention to enforce anti-camping laws once a tent city has been cleared.
“We don’t want more antihomeless laws being passed here, because it’s clear that just sweeping the camps and putting up fencing not only doesn’t work, it’s stupid,” said Hindman, who also helps oversee the Street Spirit homelessness newspaper. “But that having been said, there need to be multiple approaches to these problems on our streets, and Jesse’s team is starting to get at that.
“They’re not there yet, but there’s been a focused approach to creating this plan that involves a lot of listening, and that is very good.”
Many homeless campers said they also liked some elements of the project. But cynicism ran thick, born of being chased nearly weekly from one camp site to another by street cleaners and police.
“If they get a good site for this village they’re talking about and let us proceed in a rational manner, it could be fine,” said Brett Schnaper, 55, who sleeps in Berkeley’s biggest tent city, 35 people who call their Adeline Street camp the “Snubbed by the Hub Poor People’s Tour.” The Hub is the city’s referral system for homeless services.
“The problem is if they want to do something heavy-handed, I’m not interested,” he said. “And I’m afraid that’s what it will be.” Schnaper said his camp has had to move 17 times since September.
At the western foot of University Avenue, Seabreeze food stand cashier Maly Choeun said she was eager for any plan that could end the procession of tent cities that have popped up across the street for years. The current encampment is a dirt-lot bike-repair operation.
“There is always a camp over there, always, and sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re not,” she said. “There’s no trouble so far with this current group, but sometimes the people camping there have stolen food. I feel sorry for them, but I don’t need the trouble.
“I don’t know what the solution is. I just know somebody has to find one.”
“If they get a good site for this village they’re talking about and let us proceed in a rational manner, it could be fine.” Brett Schnaper, who is among Berkeley’s homeless