Blaze refugees join the homeless ranks
In Sonoma County, survivors make do in tents, vehicles
Andreas Gunn reckons he had a pretty sweet life before Oct. 8. The 22-year-old was working a job he liked swabbing grease out of kitchens, lived with his uncle in the Santa Rosa subdivision of Coffey Park and was saving money for a car.
Then came the Tubbs Fire, which took his uncle’s house and more than 4,600 others. Gunn’s job disappeared in days as his uncle, who was also his employer, moved out of town.
Today, Gunn lives in the brokendown RV he blew all $1,400 of his savings on after the fire so he could have a roof. He parks it on the south edge of town in a featureless spread of business parks, alongside 30 or so other RVs mostly belonging to fire survivors. Down the road are tent camps that held about 60 people before the disaster but now harbor 250.
When the mercury dips low and rain pounds their leaking roof, Gunn and his girlfriend, who also lost her home in the North Bay fires, shiver under thin blankets and curse their fate.
“I’m just a normal guy, no drugs, like to work, had a real life before the fire,” Gunn said the other day, getting his rig ready to move a few feet down the street so it wouldn’t be towed. “Now? There’s no work, no place to rent. We’re stuck.”
In a disaster zone where more than 8,000 homes and other structures were reduced to ash, displacing tens of thousands of people from Sonoma, Napa and neighboring counties and turning a 2 percent rental vacancy rate to zero, the most desperate survivors are those now huddling under tent flaps or in vehicles.
Some, like Gunn, were surviving paycheck to paycheck before the fires. Others were among the region’s 2,000 or so people who were already living outside before the fires. After an initial flurry of goodwill and a few weeks in Red Cross shelters, most found themselves back in the elements.
“Our numbers have grown, I am sure of that — and we’ve got these new terms now, ‘homeless before
the fire’ and ‘homeless after the fire,’ ” said Jennielynn Holmes, director of shelter and housing for Catholic Charities, the leading homeless-aid organization in Sonoma County. “We already had this huge homeless and housing crisis before the fires, and we should be ashamed that there are people without adequate housing in a county this wealthy.
“We’ve got people from the fire who were underinsured for disaster, uninsured, undocumented, being evicted by landlords who now need the space — all kinds,” Holmes said. “And that’s not even counting those who were homeless to begin with. Rent has gone up 30 percent since the fire. We have a zero vacancy rate now. Where can everyone go?”
Santa Rosa police have periodically swept homeless camps this winter, accompanied by street counselors who try to get people to accept spots among the county’s 1,200 temporary shelter beds. And some do take the offer — but adding them to the usual demand has kept the shelters full.
The proof of the burgeoning crisis is in the weedy open lots where volunteers who conducted Sonoma County’s annual one-day homeless count last month said they found more people than they anticipated. The count report won’t be compiled until the spring.
The most visible example of the homeless crisis is a sea of blue-tarped tents behind a Dollar Tree store in the downscale Roseland neighborhood, on the south end of Santa Rosa, near where Gunn’s RV sits. About 130 people are squatting in a pair of camps there, one of them known as Last Chance — far more than the handful who first pitched their tents there in 2015. Another 100 people or so are scattered in the area.
Sonoma County’s first Navigation Center, patterned after San Francisco’s to direct people quickly into housing and other aid, opened in a vacant building next to the camp last month — though one key difference is that it offers no on-site shelter beds. So far, 40 people have come in and received full assessments for job, medical or housing needs, and another 15 have gone to shelters or apartments.
Catholic Charities offers incentives, including a $1,000 bonus, to landlords who agree to take low-income renters. “I am sure we’ll find some sort of option for everyone who wants to go inside, even if it means moving into temporary shelters while we look for more permanent housing,” Holmes said. “We have a lot of partners working on this together.”
Those who don’t leave have been notified by police that the camps will be cleared April 3, to make way for a housing complex. Unconvinced that there are enough roofs for everyone, some people are packing to disperse into the woods nearby.
“We need real places to live, and it’s not looking so good,” said tent dweller Tesla Meyer, 55. “The county and everyone trying to help mean well, but it’s all overbooked — not enough social workers, not enough housing.”
Meyer became homeless in July after she was evicted from her apartment in Cotati because her boyfriend went to jail on a probation violation. He was soon back out and working electrician jobs, and with that income the couple found a rental room in a house in Santa Rosa. They fled as it went up in flames in the Tubbs Fire.
Unable to find a new place, Meyer ended up in a camp under a Highway 101 overpass. When the police swept it in November, she landed at Last Chance.
She’s watched as homeless people filtered in alongside her from other cleared camps with names like Heroin Hill and Homeless Hill. “We all came here because there was nowhere else to go,” Meyer said. “If they kick us out of here, a lot of us will just have to find another spot.”
Santa Rosa police Sgt. John Wolf said the last thing his officers want to do is a sweep of the huge tent sprawl. But the county has planned a 175-unit apartment complex, much of it affordable housing, where the camp is. When eviction day comes, “if people flat-out decide they don’t want to leave, we will have to start enforcing the law,” he said.
“Our goal with this camp is not just move people down the street or to another part of town,” Wolf said. “Every effort is being made to get people into shelter beds.”
Locals have watched with a mix of alarm and compassion as the street population mushroomed at the south end of town.
“I’ve got more homeless guys coming in here and shoplifting stuff, and I don’t like it one bit,” said the clerk at a mini-market near the RV settlement, who asked not be named for fear of retaliation. “Maybe they’re hungry. But it costs the store money. There’s too many of them around now.”
A saleswoman at a phone store near Last Chance Village took a different tack.
“They’re mostly decent people,” said Wendy Monroy, who works at a Boost Mobile outlet. “Before the fire, we’d get people over here looking for a fight from that camp, but since the fire everyone seems to be more calm. I think it helps that they’re all together like that with new people and working on things.”
Back up the road where the scattered clumps of RVs sit, police make the rigs move every three days. But they never actually leave.
Gunn said that if he can’t find a job and an apartment soon, he may head to Southern California. But first he has to fix his transmission. It blew out, and now he has to have a friend tow him a few spaces down the road whenever he’s ordered to roll.
“It’s so isolating here on the street — we feel very alone,” he said. “We’re just kids. It’s a lot to handle.”